Underneath a small park at 10 Blacksmythe Lane in Newport News, the foundations of two manor houses lie capped beneath modern grass. One belonged to Captain Samuel Mathews, an English colonist who married a thrice-widowed woman named Frances Greville and built one of the earliest substantial dwellings in Virginia around 1626. The other belonged to the Digges family, who acquired the property between 1698 and 1720 and ran it on the labor of enslaved Black Virginians for the better part of three generations. A vanished colonial port town called Warwicktowne sat just downstream. The earliest porcelain found in Virginia came out of this ground when Ivor Noel Hume excavated here in the 1960s.
The story starts with a woman almost no one remembers. Frances Greville arrived in Virginia in 1620 as one of four women aboard the ship Supply. She married Lieutenant Colonel Nathaniel West, who died in 1623 or 1624. Then she married the merchant Abraham Peirsey, who had first come to Virginia in 1616 aboard the Susan, and who died on January 16, 1628. Then she married Captain Samuel Mathews, who acquired the Denbigh property through that marriage. Greville herself died around 1633, leaving Mathews wealthy in Virginia land and connected enough to spend much of his later life in England, where he remarried a daughter of Sir Thomas Hinton. Mathews Manor - the half-timbered house with a projecting porch and center chimney that Peirsey may have started building and Mathews completed around 1626 - became one of the architectural touchstones of early Virginia.
Mathews Manor burned around 1650. His son Samuel Mathews Jr., who would serve as a Cromwellian Commonwealth governor of colonial Virginia from 1656 to 1660 during England's Interregnum, built a less substantial replacement nearby. His grandson John Mathews - born in 1659 - lived in that house as a child. By 1679 a guardian named William Cole was managing John's affairs; Cole had purchased nearby Boldrup Plantation in 1671 and would hold it until his death in 1694. His daughter Susannah married Dudley Digges, and Cole's own second wife was Anne Digges - both children of Edward Digges. Those interlocking marriages cemented the Cole-Digges family network that would shape Warwick County for the next century, and that would acquire Denbigh itself between 1698 and 1720.
In 1680 the Virginia House of Burgesses created a port town where the Warwick River met Deep Creek, on fifty acres purchased from Denbigh Plantation. By 1691 Warwicktowne had a courthouse, a jail, and several houses. By 1730 it was a small commercial center with a tobacco inspection warehouse, shipbuilding facilities, and a wharf. By 1752 there was a free school for poor children, supported by the county. Property owners included William Digges and Richard Young, who ran a tavern. Then the town slowly faded. By 1869 the area, by then a 300-acre farm, was sold to Hudson and Sallie Mench, who operated a sawmill for fifty years - and gave their name to the modern neighborhood, Menchville. By 1931 the former town site had become a municipal prison farm.
The Digges family ran Denbigh as a working plantation through the eighteenth century, advertising for overseers in 1783 and 1784 and offering between 600 and 800 acres near 'New-Port-News' for sale in 1785. The labor that made all of it possible came from enslaved African and African American Virginians whose names rarely entered the surviving advertisements and tax rolls. They worked the tobacco, they ran the dairy and the kitchen and the spring house, they cared for the Digges children. Cole Digges and William Digges served as Warwick County burgesses; William Digges Jr. served in a Virginia revolutionary convention and in the House of Delegates. None of them could have done any of that without the people they held in bondage. The Young family inherited Denbigh later, fled to a Salisbury, North Carolina hotel during the Civil War, and returned to begin selling off the land in chunks through the late 1800s.
Following World War II, Warwick County was reincorporated as Warwick City in 1952 and absorbed into the City of Newport News in 1958. Many of the former plantation fields became residential developments and industrial parks - but Colonial Williamsburg's renowned archaeologist Ivor Noel Hume excavated the Denbigh Plantation Site through the 1960s before development closed the door. He documented the foundations of both the Mathews and Digges houses, along with several 17th-century industrial sites. The earliest porcelain known in Virginia came out of this dig. The site joined the National Register of Historic Places in 1970. Today the foundations of both houses sit capped under a small park, an 18th-century dairy and early 19th-century kitchen still standing nearby - all of it preserved inside a Menchville neighborhood that grew up over the colonial port and the plantation that built it.
Denbigh Plantation Site sits at 37.0901 N, 76.5389 W in the Menchville neighborhood of Newport News, on a small park at 10 Blacksmythe Lane near the convergence of Deep Creek and the Warwick River. From 2,500 feet, look for the wooded peninsula formed where Deep Creek joins the Warwick River, with the James River visible 1 nm west. Newport News/Williamsburg International (KPHF) is 4 nm east-northeast. Felker Army Airfield (KFAF) at Fort Eustis is 5 nm northwest. Naval Weapons Station Yorktown restricted areas lie 7 nm north - check NOTAMs. Norfolk International Class C airspace begins 12 nm southeast.