In 1744, Michael Holland obtained a land grant, for a tract of land in Albemarle County, from King George II. In 1758, Francis Jerdone purchased the land, from that royal land grant, to establish his Farmington Estate. The first buildings on the estate were built sometime before the start of the American Revolution. As George Washington’s army was combating the British forces in New York, New Jersey and in other states, Francis Jerdone pledged his allegiance to the British. The Commonwealth of Virginia punished Francis Jerdone’s disloyalty by seizing his property in Albemarle County. Francis Jerdone was able to get his seized property back and in 1785 he sold Farmington to George Divers.
In 1802, Thomas Jefferson designed an octagonal building, with two rooms that is now known as the Jefferson Room, for George Divers as an addition for the Farmington Estate.
General Bernard Peyton, the third owner of the estate who served on the Virginia Military Institute’s first Board of Visitors from 1837 to 1841, divided the Jefferson Room into two stories and four rooms.
In 1927, the Farmington Country Club was established within the Farmington Estate. Presently, the Farmington Historical Society Foundation gives tours of both the clubhouse and the grounds.
In 1870, the River View Farm became the home of two former slaves, Hugh Carr and his wife Texie Mae Hawkins Carr. The farm became one of the largest African-American run homesteads after the passage of the 13th Amendment of the United States Consitution in December 1865.
Hugh Carr and Texie Mae Hawkins Carr are buried, within the property of their farm, next to the gravestones of Conly G. Greer and his wife Mary Carr Greer.
Presently, the River View Farm is part of the Ivy Creek Natural Area, which is jointly owned by the Albemarle County Government and the City of Charlottesville
The Darden Towe Park, which is named after a former Republican Charlotteville City Council member Albert Darden Towe, is also jointly owned by the County of Albemarle and the City of Charlottesville.
In 1853, the Monticola estate was designed as a Greek revival style mansion and built in Howardsville, Virginia, within southern Albemarle County’s border with Nelson County. Howardsville is an unincorporated area which was named after James Howard, a man who settled the northern bank of the James River, at the tributary where the Rockfish River begins.
In 1940, various scenes of the drama movie “Virginia” was filmed at Monticola, before debuting in theaters in 1941.
Author’s Note:
If you would like to book a tour of the Historic Monticola Estate call or text the current property owners Ashley Spence at (540) 280-3385 and Jeremy Vogan at (540) 487-0480.
The new county was cut from the mother county by a line running from the most western point in the line of Louisa County directly to the lower edge of Scott’s Ferry, on the Fluvanna, now the James River …. embracing all of Albemarle Countt lying eastward of that line, including the islands in the river … to the Goochland County line, a few hundred yards beyond the town of Columbia …
In March 1865, a year after the Battle of Rio Hill, forces under General Armstrong Custer Accidently burnt down the textile mills, that produced uniforms for the Confederacy, at the Woolen Mills within Charlottesville, Virginia.
In 2005, a historical marker dedicated to the Monacan Indian Village of Monasukapanough was installed next to the Brook Hill River Park in Albemarle County, Virginia.
In the 1874, the Miller School was designed by architects Albert Lybrock and David Wiley Anderson, five years after Samuel Miller’s death. In 1878, there was a grand opening for the school that Samuel Miller ordered to have created in Albemarle County, Virginia in his last will and testament.
Locust Hill was the birthplace of explorer Meriwether Lewis, whom lived there until the age of six, at the time his family moved to Georgia. Before joining the United States Army, Meriwether Lewis did manage the Locust Hill estate, and resided on the land for a second time during his adulthood.
Benjamin Brown, Senior and his eldest son patented land before and after the creation of Louisa County Virginia. In 1750, after the creation of Albemarle County, King George II of England granted Benjamin Brown, Senior land east and west of the Doyles River. Benjamin Brown and his wife Sara Brown became the founders of Brown’s Cove, Virginia and an area along the foothills of the Shendoah Mountains.
The Brown’s Cove Patriots Historical Marker is dedicated to the seven sons of Benjamin Brown, Senior, who all served during the course of the American Revolution against Britain. The historical maker is located off of Blackwell Hollows Road in Brown’s Cove, next to the Doyles River, in Albemarle County, Virginia.
Brigadier General John Hartwell Cocke II led four Virginia Brigades against the British during the War of 1812, a conflict that some call the “Second American Revolution”. After the war, General Cocke joined former Presidents Thomas Jefferson and James Madison in the founding of the University of Virginia in 1819. The general would serve on the University of Virginia’s Board of Visitors until 1856.
Two years after the death of General Cocke’s friend Thomas Jefferson, he embarked on the designing and the construction of the Fluvanna County Courthouse and of a jailhouse, which is presently known as the “Old Stone Jail”. Both structures were built in Palmyra, a town in Fluvanna County named after King Solomon’s former trading post.
Author’s Note:
Brigadier General John Hartwell Cocke II, whom was born in Surry County, Virginia, attended school at William and Mary, where he empathized with abolitionist views from the abolitionist minded faculty on campus. In 1800, General Cocke ran for the Virginia House of Delegates and lost, never to run for that seat again. General Cocke lived in Surry County until he moved to the Bremo estate, in Fluvanna County, in 1809. On May 5th, 1817, General Cocke founded the Agricultural Society of Albemarle and devoted time towards educating the African American slaves that he inherited from his father John Hartwell Cocke and his mother Elizabeth Kennon Cocke. General Cocke became an official of the American Colonization Society, which sought to resettle freed black slaves and manumitted slaves to the African country of Liberia, and he joined the Virginia Society for the Promotion of Temperance. Soon after joining the Virginia Society for the Promotion of Temperance, he became the Vice President in 1826 and the President of that organization in 1830. As a devout Christian, not only did he not consume alcohol, he never sought ownership of any tobacco crops, despite the popularity of tobacco in the Commonwealth. Later in life his abolitionist views, which he acquired at William and Mary, subsided and he turned more into an anti-abolitionist by siding with the Confederacy during the start of the U.S. Civil War.
General Cocke had three sons, one of whom was named Philip Saint George Cocke. Philip Cocke was born in 1809, in Surry County, and attended the University of Virginia from the years of 1825 and 1827 to 1828. On July 1st, 1828, Philip Cocke entered the United States Military. In 1832, after graduating from the United States Military Academy, Philip Cocke served in Charleston, South Carolina as a second lieutenant of artillery, for the U.S. Army, during the South Carolina Nullification Crisis. On April 1st, 1834, Philip Cocke resigned his military commission so that he could marry Sally Elizabeth Courtney Bowdoin. From 1853 to 1856, Philip Cocke served as president of the Agriculture Society to Albemarle, that his father has once served as president for. In 1860, in response to John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry the year prior, Philips Cocke organized a calvary troop and the year after he joined the Confederate army. Upon joining the Virginia volunteers for the Confederate cause, his rank was reduced from Brigadier General to Colonel. During the Battle of First Manassas, which was called the First Battle of Bull Run by the Union Army, Philip Cocke commanded the fifth brigade of Confederate Virginia volunteers, as U.S. Senators, Confederate President Jefferson Finis Davis. and others were looking on as spectators. Months after the battle, Philip Cocke resigned from the Confederate army, due to physical disability and nervous prostration, and committed suicide in December 26th, 1861.
While visiting the Piedmont Virginia Community College, I got to see a “Vanguard of Freedom Historical Marker” that was erected, in honor of the United States Army in 1975, on the campus grounds during the United States Bicentennial. The plaque, near the foothill within the college’s entrance, discusses Revolutionary War Patriots, Thomas Jefferson’s friends Captain Meriwether Lewis, whose relative Phil Anderson still lives in Charlottesville, and Lieutenant William Clark, President Zachary Taylor, Confederate Generals Stonewall Jackson and Robert Edward Lee, Confederate Colonel John Mosby, the Confederate soldiers, from Albemarle County, who served in Gettysburg during Pickett’s Charge, Charlottesville author Stephen McDowell is related to one of the few Albemarle County Confederates who survived Pickett’s Charge, Union General Winfield Scott, who was a native Virginian, Virginia Spanish American War veterans, Virginian World War I and World War II veterans.
Next to the “Vanguard of Freedom Historical Marker” is a secondary marker, attributed to the United States Bicentennial, which is dedicated to the Irishmen and Irishwomen who settled in Virginia and in other parts of the United States of America.
On February 29th, 1864, General George Armstrong Custer led about 1,500 Union calvary members into Albemarle County, Virginia, for a diversionary raid, at Rio Hill, that was to pull Confederate troops away from the forces defending the outskirts of Richmond. As General Custer’s raid was occurring, Kilpatrick and Dahlgren were conducting a series of raids, outside of Richmond, in an attempt to liberate Union soldiers from the Libby Prison and to attempt to assassinate Confederate President Jefferson Finis Davis.
General Custer’s men destroyed the winter camp of the Stuart Horse Artillery. In response, about 200 Confederates, under the leadership of Captain Marcellus Newton Moorman, rallied for a counter attack against General Custer’s calvary forces. Since the diversion was successful, instead of continuing the engagement, General Custer had his men withdraw from skirmish in Albemarle County.
After the end of General Custer’s raid, what became known as the “Kilpatrick-Dahlgren Raid” ended up becoming an abject failure, since no one was liberated at Libby Prison and no assassination attempt was made on President Davis.
On April 20th, 1966, the Dogwood Vietnam Memorial, a project of the Charlottesville Dogwood Festival, became the first ever memorial dedicated to veterans of the Vietnam War in the United States of America. The idea of the memorial was proposed after the public was notified that the first soldier to die from Vietnam was from the area surrounding Albemarle County. A total of 26 Vietnam Veterans, who were from Albemarle County, are honored at the war memorial established in Charlottesville, Virginia.
On April 13, 1743 the third United States President Thomas Jefferson was born in the Shadwell Plantation; that his father Peter Jefferson built in Albemarle County, Virginia. In 1770, five years before the start of the American Revolution, Jefferson moved into Monticello after the Shadwell Plantation burnt down.
Photograph of the Shadwell Historical Marker taken on April 20th, 2022. (Hamilton Photo)
Hamilton Historical Records 