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Historical Highway MarkersDoncastle's OrdinaryW-167
Here, on the road from Williamsburg to New Kent, Stephen Forneau operated a popular tavern by 1715. Col. John Chiswell had acquired the property by 1755, and George Washington visited several times. On 3 May 1775, Patrick Henry and Hanover County militiamen camped at the ordinary, then owned by Thomas Doncastle. Henry and his men, marching on Williamsburg after royal governor Lord Dunmore removed gunpowder from the public magazine, turned back here after extracting compensation for the powder. The armies of Lt. Gen. Charles Cornwallis, the Marquis de Lafayette, and the Comte de Rochambeau camped at the ordinary, then owned by Adam Byrd, in 1781. The tavern survived until the early 1860s.
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References/Bibliographic Citation: Martha W. McCartney, “History of the Sherman Tract” (2007). Martha W. McCartney, James City County: Keystone of the Commonwealth (James City County: The Donning Company, 1997), 186-187. W.W. Abbot, ed., The Papers of George Washington: Colonial Series (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia), 1:283-284, 6:182, 184. Stanley J. Idzerda, Lafayette in the Age of the American Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 214-215. Robert A. Selig, “Revolutionary War Route and Transportation Survey in the Commonwealth of Virginia, 1781-1782” (Virginia Department of Historic Resources, 2009). Howard C. Rice and Ann S. K. Brown, The American Campaigns of Rochambeau’s Army 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972). Howard C. Rice, trans., Travels in North America in the Years 1780, 1781, and 1782 by the Marquis Chastelleux (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1963). William G. Stanard, “Diary of Captain John Davis of the Pennsylvania Line,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 26 (1918): 5-12. “Williamsburg Gunpowder Incident” https://www.amrevmuseum.org/read-the-revolution/history/williamsburg-gunpowder-incident |