The Werowocomoco site was a stratified community supported by women's cultivation of maize, beans, and squash, supplemented by the men's fishing and hunting. The surplus fed a dense population spread across several settlements. In late 1607, English captain John Smith was brought here as a captive. Whether Pocahontas truly intervened to save him from execution - as Smith claimed years later - has been debated by historians for two centuries. What is not debated is that Smith returned to Werowocomoco multiple times to trade with her father. The Powhatan wanted English copper, which their craftspeople worked into objets d'art. The English wanted food and political relationships. The negotiations failed. By 1609 Powhatan had moved his capital away, and within a few decades, smallpox and other European diseases had swept the Algonquian villages. The site was forgotten until Daniel Mouer identified it as a possibility in 1977, and the Werowocomoco Research Group - in collaboration with Mattaponi and Pamunkey representatives - confirmed it during digs from 2002 to 2003.

Gloucester County was formed from York County in 1651 and named for Henry Stuart, Duke of Gloucester, the third son of Charles I. The four original parishes - Abingdon, Kingston, Petsworth, and Ware - traced the colonial pattern of tobacco plantations along the rivers, sustained by the labor of enslaved Africans whom traders unloaded at the county's landings. The fishing village area at the county's lower end picked up the nickname Guinea, evidently because the enslaved people brought ashore there came from the Guinea coast of West Africa. A later folk story held that residents of Guinea Neck continued using gold guinea coins as currency from the Revolutionary War through the start of the Civil War - a small economic eccentricity that hints at how isolated and self-contained the watermen's communities of the Middle Peninsula remained. Thomas Jefferson wrote some of his earliest revolutionary essays at Rosewell Plantation, the home of his college friend John Page.

Settlers brought daffodil bulbs from England in the 17th century, and the soil and the maritime climate suited them. For 250 years, the bulbs naturalized - passed from neighbor to neighbor, multiplying in farm yards and field edges. By the 1930s and 1940s, daffodils had become a commercial industry, and Gloucester earned the nickname Daffodil Capital of America. The annual Daffodil Festival, held the first weekend in April, draws the whole county to Gloucester Courthouse. The flowers do something quietly subversive: they show that an economy can be built on something gentle, and that what gardeners do with bulbs for two centuries can outlast tobacco fortunes.

Two of Gloucester's natives changed America from far away. Dr. Walter Reed grew up in the county, then went on to lead the U.S. Army team that proved yellow fever was transmitted by mosquitoes - work that made the Panama Canal possible and saved untold lives in tropical regions. His name now stands on the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center outside Washington. Irene Morgan, an African-American woman who later lived in Gloucester, was arrested in 1944 for refusing to give up her seat on an interstate bus from Hayes, Virginia, to Baltimore. In 1946, eleven years before Rosa Parks, the Supreme Court ruled in Morgan v. Virginia that segregation on interstate buses was unconstitutional. Her case, argued by Thurgood Marshall, was the first significant civil rights victory at the federal level.

Gloucester Point sits on the south end of the county, across the York River from Yorktown, linked to the Virginia Peninsula by the George P. Coleman Memorial Bridge. The point is also the home of the Virginia Institute of Marine Science, the College of William and Mary's graduate school of marine sciences. VIMS researchers monitor the Chesapeake Bay, study fish stocks, and run the annual Marine Science Day that brings thousands to the waterfront. Just upstream, Tyndall's Point Park preserves earthworks from a 1660s English fort, a Revolutionary War battery, and Confederate Civil War defenses - three layers of military history on one small headland. Add the Werowocomoco research site upstream, and Gloucester County concentrates four centuries of Virginia history into the curve of a single river.