There is no other place in Gloucester as fabled as the Rosewell Ruins, with tales passed from generation to generation. Twelve-thousand-square feet, three stories over a tall English basement, with 17 fireplaces vented into four massive chimneys, the ruins are all that remain of an early colonial plantation. Gloucester’s largest dwelling, the manor was occupied into the early years of the twentieth century. Two hundred years earlier, it was the dream house of Mann Page I, inheritor of great wealth built up from tobacco and slavery. Born in colonial Virginia, he was English educated and knowledgeable in the ways of landed gentry.
So why, you may wonder, did Rosewell end up in ruins?
Rosewell was built on land Page’s ancestors settled a century earlier, taken from the Powhatan people. It was in the heartland of Tsenacommacah, whose primary village was six miles upriver at Werowocomoco. More English settlers arrived and native people moved west. Soon, Englishmen discovered a cash crop: to...