The Tidewater Trail 



after the county was founded, came into the possession of Mr. 

 Robert Colgate Selden, and for the last eighty-odd years it has been 

 identified with the Selden name. Mr. Selden was a native of Nor- 

 folk; but his wife was Miss Courtenay Brook, whose mother, 

 Elizabeth Lewis, had inherited Warner Hall, possibly the oldest 

 and the most celebrated of all the Gloucester homesteads. Warner 

 Hall, though the original house was burned in the nineteenth cen- 

 tury, is still in the possession of a descendant of that original 

 Warner, who came to America in 1628, and, some years later, 

 established the estate that still bears his name. It was he who gave 

 to the State of Virginia and the American nation such distinguished 

 great-grandsons as George Washington and Robert E. Lee, not to 

 mention a score of able men and charming women of less historic 

 significance. 



Mrs. Selden's association with Warner Hall, as well as her close 

 relationship to most of the leading Gloucester families, probably 

 was the controlling factor in inducing her husband to buy the Sher- 

 wood property, and to develop there the accessories of a famous 

 Virginia home. Young Selden and his bride were both evidently 

 endowed with a full measure of love for country life, which has 

 from the beginning been a characteristic of the people of their 

 native State. It is in the blood of every true Virginian. Their 

 forebears brought it with them from England, Scotland and Wales. 



Sherwood, in its eighty and more years of present existence, has 

 known but three owners — the builder, his daughter, Mrs. Eliza- 

 beth Lewis Dimmock, and his granddaughter, Mrs. Henry A. 

 Williams, the present owner who perpetuates in her Christian name 

 Elizabeth Warner, wife of the first John Lewis and daughter of the 

 second Augustine Warner, Speaker of the Virginia House of Bur- 

 gesses in 1675-6-7 and 8. 



Sherwood stands about a mile from the public highway that 

 runs eastward through the little peninsular made in Gloucester by 

 the Severn and Ware Rivers. Its back is to the Ware, an arm of 

 which makes a most attractive western boundary for the park, 



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