Ampthill

Half a mile south is Ampthill, built by the 1730s for Henry Cary Jr., a prominent building contractor. Cary’s son, Archibald Cary, acquired the house in 1750. He was a member of all five of Virginia’s Revolutionary Conventions, chaired the committee that drafted the Virginia Declaration of Rights and the first constitution of Virginia, and was speaker of the state senate (1776-1786). Notable visitors at Ampthill included George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Nathanael Greene. The labor of enslaved Africans and African Americans sustained the plantation. The house originally stood nine miles southeast of here in what is now Chesterfield County and was moved to its present site in 1929-30.