The proposed discharge compromises nationally historic resources
(adapted from an article by Henry Ruffin Broaddus originally published in the Mattaponi Pamunkey Rivers Association Newsletter, Spring 2001)
Newcastle Farm, on the Pamunkey River in Hanover County, is a site rich with history and eerily marked by a disposition for remaining undisturbed by urbanizing forces. Inertia is on the side of the pristine wildlife conditions enjoyed and preserved there by Virginia Indians for thousands of years before the arrival of colonists. At present, alongside colonial bullets and Civil War buttons, one still finds American Indian pottery shards and stone tool remains each time the fields at Newcastle are plowed.
No settlement of any kind exists there anymore, only a farm that has been in my family for more than 150 years. The only port is a concrete boat landing better suited to canoes than to cargo vessels. Conditions were not always so, but the history of Newcastle has followed a pattern of returning to a comparatively natural state, despite numerous failed efforts to promote municipal growth and development there.
One of the earliest colonial documents pertaining to the area is the 1739 deed from William Meriwether to John Henry, father of Patrick Henry. As soon thereafter as 1747, after the Williamsburg capitol building burned, Newcastle was under consideration by legislators as a site for the capital of the colony (see: Dill and Tarter, "The 'Hellish Scheme' to Move the Capital," Virginia Cavalcade, Summer 1980). Records of debate from the time indicate that the town, known primarily for its tobacco warehouse and inspection center, was considered to be an important trading center with a promising future as a port city.
By 1749 advocates who supported moving the capital from Williamsburg to Newcastle described it as "a Place capable of being made with an inconsiderable Expence secure and defensible against every enemy" (ibid.). Others legislators favored a site on the James River. Still others favored leaving the capital at Williamsburg.
Unbeknownst to these colonials, the ultimate enemy of city-building at Newcastle would not be a political or foreign threat, but a natural one. And the threat to urbanization would come from the very resource that had attracted settlement in the first place, the Pamunkey River. Against this threat, plans for a city at Newcastle would be ultimately indefensible.
