HICKORY HILL 



HE plantation known as Hickory Hill, home of 

 the late Williams Carter Wickham, Brigadier- 

 General of Cavalry, C. S. A., is situated in the 

 County of Hanover, twenty miles north of Rich- 

 mond. It came into the possession of the Carter 

 family the 2nd of March, 1734, and was long an 

 appendage to Shirley on the James. 



The house was built and the garden begun in 1820, when 

 William Fanning Wickham, son of John Wickham, of Richmond, 

 aad his wife, Ann Carter, of Shirley, made their home on her share 

 of the estate inherited from her father, Robert (after whom Gen- 

 eral Lee was named), son of Charles, son of John, son of Robert 

 Carter, of Corotoman, known as the "King." The house was 

 destroyed by fire in 1875 and the present dwelling then erected. 



The grounds surrounding the house were laid out in 1820 on 

 broad and long lines by Mr. and Mrs. William F. Wickham. 

 The avenues of cedar trees, cedar hedges and boxwood hedges, as 

 originally planned, are still standing and have excited the admira- 

 tion of many. The feature of the home is the old pleasaunce 

 with its tall, stately trees — its roses and violets, its arbors, avenues 

 and terraces — the emerald of its broad stretches of grass and its 

 matchless boxtrees now more than one hundred years old. 



The pleasure garden is a rectangular plot of ground, three hun- 

 dred and fifty-five feet by four hundred and forty feet, containing 

 approximately four acres, to which adjoins the vegetable garden 

 of approximately two acres. Its central glory is "the box-walk" — 

 an avenue of the Sempervirens boxwood — the trees varying from 

 thirty to forty feet in height, extending a distance of three hundred 

 and seven feet in double line from the entrance gate and forming 

 a perfect arch above the fifteen-foot walkway. At every season, 



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