Qualla: Gloucester County, Virginia

Gloucester County, Virginia: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Matthew W. King, CC BY-SA 4.0. Sometime around AD 1200, on the north side of what English settlers would later call the York River, a dispersed village began to coalesce. By the late 16th century it had become the most important place in Tidewater Virginia. Werowocomoco - the word means a chief's lands rather than a single town in Algonquian - was the eastern capital of the Powhatan Confederacy, the union of roughly 30 tribes and 12,000 to 15,000 people that the paramount chief Powhatan ruled when the English landed at Jamestown. After Powhatan moved his capital inland around 1609, knowledge of the original site was lost for nearly four hundred years. It was only in 2003 that archaeologists working with the Mattaponi and Pamunkey tribes - the Powhatan's descendants - confirmed the village had stood on Purtan Bay. Gloucester County's history starts here, in a place that was important before the colonists arrived and that took four centuries to find its way back onto the map.

Image: Matthew W. King | CC BY-SA 4.0

Gloucester County, Virginia: The Powhatan Capital

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nyttend, Public domain. 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...

Image: Nyttend | Public domain

Gloucester County, Virginia: Tobacco, Tidewater, and Guinea

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Matthew W. King, CC BY-SA 4.0. 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 ...

Image: Matthew W. King | CC BY-SA 4.0

Gloucester County, Virginia: The Daffodils

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit O. David Redwine, CC BY-SA 3.0. 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 ...

Image: O. David Redwine | CC BY-SA 3.0

Gloucester County, Virginia: Walter Reed and Irene Morgan

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit U.S. District Court for the Newport News Division of the Eastern District of Virginia. 6/13/1938, Public domain. 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. ...

Image: U.S. District Court for the Newport News Division of the Eastern District of Virginia. 6/13/1938 | Public domain

Gloucester County, Virginia: Marine Science at the Point

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Andrew Wiseman, CC BY 3.0. 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...

Image: Andrew Wiseman | CC BY 3.0