Qualla: Kingsmill, Virginia

Kingsmill, Virginia: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Kingsmill is one place name carrying four different developments: a planned residential community of more than a thousand homes, the Kingsmill Resort with its three golf courses on the James River, the Anheuser-Busch brewery, and the Busch Gardens Williamsburg theme park. They share a single 4,000-acre footprint along the north bank of the James, just east of Williamsburg, a few miles downriver from Jamestown. They share a single origin story too: a deal between Winthrop Rockefeller and Gussie Busch in the late 1960s that turned an old colonial plantation into one of the largest single development tracts on the Virginia Peninsula. The plantation that gave the area its name is mostly gone. Only the brick kitchen and the office still stand among the eighteenth-century dependencies.

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Kingsmill, Virginia: Kingsmill Plantation

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Richard Kingsmill, a prominent member of the Virginia Company, received one of the first 300-acre land grants in the southwest corner of what later became a much larger plantation. The land passed through Kingsmill's daughter Elizabeth - who married Colonel William Tayloe - and t...

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Kingsmill, Virginia: McClellan's Stride of a Giant

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Civil War rolled through these lands in 1862. Major General George B. McClellan's Peninsula Campaign forces - 121,500 men, 44 artillery batteries, 1,150 wagons, more than 15,000 horses - moved cautiously up the Peninsula from Fort Monroe. An English observer called it "the st...

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Kingsmill, Virginia: Fort Magruder and the Williamsburg Line

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Williamsburg Line was the third Confederate defensive line on the Peninsula. Designed under Benjamin S. Ewell, president of the College of William and Mary, it consisted of fourteen redoubts anchored between College Creek on the south and Queen's Creek on the north. Fort Magr...

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Kingsmill, Virginia: Rockefeller and Busch

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

By the early twentieth century, the Kingsmill Plantation lands had fallen into disuse. The hilly, wooded ground was poor for agriculture. John D. Rockefeller Jr. and his wife Abby Aldrich Rockefeller had acquired vast tracts in the area in the 1920s and 1930s while building Colon...

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Kingsmill, Virginia: What Kingsmill Means Now

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Kingsmill on the James planned community runs along the river, with its own marina, golf courses, and grocery store. Past residents have included two-time US Open champion Curtis Strange, former Reagan chief of staff Donald Regan, NFL coach Marv Levy - and John W. Hinckley Jr...

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