No, it is not a village that you now see peeping out through the grove over there by the river; it is the group of buildings constituting the homestead of Shirley.  In the bright sunlight, you can pick out bits of the mansion through the trees, of the dairy, of the kitchen, and of the smaller buildings; while farther out stand the roomy barns and the quaint turreted dove-cote.  All the buildings are of brick and show a warm, dull red.

Time has left few such scenes as this—­the completely equipped home-acre of a great; seventeenth century American plantation.  The scene is not exactly a typical one; for few of such early colonial estates, and indeed not many of the later ones, had homesteads as complete, as substantially built, and on as large a scale as this of Shirley.

Now, as you can need no further guidance, we are going off some two or three hundred years into the past, to see if we can get hold of the other end of the story of this plantation.

Perhaps the start was “about Christmas time” in the year 1611, when Sir Thomas Dale, High Marshal of the Colony of Virginia, sailed up the river from James Towne; killed or drove away all the Indians hereabout; and then, thinking it ill that so much goodly land should be lying unoccupied, took possession of a large tract of it for the colony.  But the part that came to be called Shirley is soon lost sight of in the fogs of tradition.  Later, we catch a glimpse of it in the possession of Lord Delaware.  But it is not until the middle of the seventeenth century that we get a firm hold of this elusive colonial seat and of its colonial owners.

At that time, in the colony of Virginia, two of the proud families on two of the proud rivers were the Hills, who had recently acquired the plantation of Shirley on the James, and the Carters, who were establishing their seat at Corotoman on the Rappahannock.  In the story of these two houses is most of the story of Shirley.

The Hills became one of the leading families in the colony.  It was Edward Hill, second of the name, who built the present mansion.  He was a member of the King’s Council; and his position is indicated, and his fortune as well, by the building in those early times of such a home.  Antedating almost all of the great colonial homes, it must long have stood a unique mark of family distinction.  The exact date of the building of the manor-house is not known, but doubtless it was not far from the middle of the seventeenth century.

In the meantime, the Carters had become notable.  This family reached its greatest prominence in the days of Robert Carter, who was one of the wealthiest and most influential men in the colony.  In person he was handsome and imposing; in worldly possessions he stood almost unequalled; and in offices and honours he had about everything that the colony could give.  His estate included more than three hundred thousand acres of land and about one thousand slaves.  Either because of his imposing person or of his power or of his wealth, or perhaps because of all three, he was called “King” Carter.  He does seem to have been quite a sovereign, and to have known considerable of the pompous ceremony that “doth hedge a king.”