Qualla: Denbigh Plantation Site

Denbigh Plantation Site: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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.

Read more: Denbigh Plantation Site on Qualla

Denbigh Plantation Site: Frances Greville's Four Husbands

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 c...

Read more: Denbigh Plantation Site on Qualla

Denbigh Plantation Site: The Burned House and the Governor's Son

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 ...

Read more: Denbigh Plantation Site on Qualla

Denbigh Plantation Site: Warwicktowne, A Port That Disappeared

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 inspect...

Read more: Denbigh Plantation Site on Qualla

Denbigh Plantation Site: The People Who Worked the Land

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 Afr...

Read more: Denbigh Plantation Site on Qualla

Denbigh Plantation Site: What Noel Hume Found

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 Ivo...

Read more: Denbigh Plantation Site on Qualla