Old texts and Bacon’s Castle: a walk through Virginia history
You will find Bacon’s Castle amid the flat tobacco and peanut fields in Surry County, Virginia, across the James River from Jamestown, if not quite a “castle” then certainly a very fine Jacobean mansion and the oldest brick dwelling in America. When I first visited this part of the Tidewater in 1958, I was ten and Jamestown, the year before, had turned 350. Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip came to crown the anniversary, and replicas of the three ships that brought the first English here in 1607 — Susan Constant, Godspeed and Discovery — were tied up in perpetuity at Jamestown. I came on a field trip with my schoolmates to take in the sights and something of the history of the place and of Colonial Williamsburg, just up the road. Bacon’s Castle was not on our itinerary.
