Feast on Slices of Natural and Agricultural History at Chippokes Plantation State Park

Cypress trees grow on a beach along the James River.

Virginia DCNR

If you take the College Run Trail at Chippokes Plantation State Park, you will reach a stretch of the James River that still looks much as it did when the Jamestown settlers encountered the Native Americans here.

The river is trimmed by a slim, light-colored beach of coastal plain sands, remnants of the eras when oceans surged east and west over 10,000-year cycles of glacial advance and retreat.

If you are extremely lucky, you may come across a fossilized tooth of a megalodon, the giant relative of today's great white shark.

But probably without even trying, you will see scores of Chesapecten jeffersonius, a large, scalloped bivalve and Virginia's state fossil.

Along the James, the river that made the settlement of Virginia possible, osprey and bald eagles nest as they did 400 years ago when the Powhatan tributary chief, Chippok, lived here with his Quiyounghanock tribe.

Chief Chippok was among those who made survival possible for the English settlers five miles across the river at Jamestown during the period of the uneasy peace between the Indians and colonists in the early years of the Virginia colony.

But in 1619, the Virginia Company granted Chief Chippok's lands, where his tribe and ancestors had hunted, fished, and planted for many generations, to Capt. William Powell.

Thus began the slow transformation of this waterfront property into the plantation that claims to be the oldest continuously farmed piece of land in Virginia.

The 1,600-acre state park, about 15 miles upriver from Smithfield and across the river from Jamestown, is on a peninsula of land bounded by the James to the north and Lower Chippokes Creek to the southeast. At every turn, the park's landscapes evoke the past — defined by generations, centuries and millennia.

Corn, soybeans, cotton, peanuts and golden grains have been sowed here since 1619, starting with Powell, who died only four years later in an English raid on the Chickahominy tribe that followed the Indian uprising against Jamestown.

Powell's son, George, may have lived on the land, but because he had no heir, it reverted back to Gov. William Berkeley, and then went to Col. Phillip Ludwell in 1684. Ludwell continued to lease the land to be farmed, but chose not to live there.

In 1837, Albert Carroll Jones was the first to call Chippokes home since Captain Powell two centuries before him. He expanded the original River House on Quarter Lane, and built a second home, an Italianate manor house now called "Chippokes."

Victor Stewart, a prominent local forester, expanded the manor house in 1918. He and his wife, Evelyn, had a great interest in conservation. After his death, Evelyn deeded the plantation to the commonwealth of Virginia in 1967 with the stipulation that it continue to be farmed as it had for centuries before.

Today, farming and household tools and vehicles are showcased in covered exhibits called the Farm and Forestry Museum. Generations of equipment for tilling, sowing, reaping and baling shows the slow evolution of mechanization that accompanied the advent of the steam, and then gasoline, engines.

Kayaks or canoes may be launched on Lower Chippokes. Visitors can also reserve a spot on one of the interpretive canoe trips in the marsh offered by park staff during the warmer months of the year.

Chippokes has 37 historic structures, including both 19th century manor houses, an 18th century barn and numerous dependencies. The formal gardens behind the Chippokes Manor House are simple but elegant, with boxwoods and azaleas, crepe myrtle and perennials framing the stone graves of the Stewarts, whose legacy makes it possible for future generations to experience the past.

Every visitor to Chippokes will discover that this is a state park with many faces and many opportunities to witness the past and experience the present through new eyes.

This is an abridged article originally published in the Bay Journal.