Smith's Fort Plantation

Captain John Smith began Smith's Fort in 1609, two years after the first permanent English colony in the New World was established at Jamestown. The remains of the fort, a two-foot-high earthwork, constitute the oldest extant structure of English origin in Virginia. The fort stands on a high bluff overlooking Gray's Creek and encloses a triangle of about two hundred feet on each side. Thomas Rolfe, the only child of John Rolfe and Pocahontas, probably owned this tract. The house is a mid-18th-century Tidewater plantation dwelling likely built for Jacob Faulcon, Surry County clerk, from 1781 to 1801.