Qualla: Westover Plantation

Westover Plantation: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bmzuckerman, CC BY 4.0. If you have ever watched the pilot episode of The West Wing and seen Leo McGarry's stately home, you have seen Westover Plantation. The same brick facade, the same chimneys, the same air of inherited certainty. AMC's Turn used it across four seasons. HBO put it in John Adams. Westover wears its photogenic dignity like an old coat. But the dignity was paid for in a currency that costume dramas rarely show in close-up: the labor of hundreds of enslaved Africans, generations of them, who grew the tobacco that built the bricks.

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Image: Bmzuckerman | CC BY 4.0

Westover Plantation: The Byrds Take the River Bend

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Stephen Lea, CC BY-SA 3.0. Westover's story does not begin with the Byrds. In 1665, Sir John Pawlett demised most of the property to Theodorick Bland for £170. Bland lived here until his death in 1671 and was buried in the chancel of the Westover Church he had helped build. His sons Theodorick and Richard ...

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Image: Stephen Lea | CC BY-SA 3.0

Westover Plantation: Tobacco and the People Who Grew It

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Stephen Lea, CC BY-SA 3.0. Like every plantation along this stretch of the James, Westover ran on tobacco. Tobacco is a labor-intensive crop, requiring constant attention from seedbed to barn, and the Byrds depended on hundreds of enslaved Africans to do that work. The original grounds included slave quart...

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Image: Stephen Lea | CC BY-SA 3.0

Westover Plantation: Civil War and a Wing on Fire

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit John Hesselius, Public domain. William Byrd III's widow died in 1814, and Westover passed out of the Byrd family. Three later owners shaped what remains today. Lawyer John Armistead Selden, connected by marriage to both the Selden and Lee families, kept meticulous diaries that are still mined by historians of ...

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Image: John Hesselius | Public domain

Westover Plantation: The Georgian Eye

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Stephen Lea, CC BY-SA 3.0. What makes Westover famous in the architecture textbooks is its balance: a perfectly proportioned Georgian central block with matching dependencies, brick walls laid in Flemish bond, a steeply pitched roof, twin chimneys at each end. The front door alone, set within an elaborate ...

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Image: Stephen Lea | CC BY-SA 3.0