Notes
This photograph shows Roundabout, the former plantation of Patrick Henry. In November 1764, one month after John Shelton sold Hanover Tavern, Patrick Henry had his overseer purchase 650 boards at £1.6s. per hundred for the construction of a house in Louisa County, on land that he had acquired from his father as payment of a loan. According to the deed, which was registered on October 21, 1765, the Roundabout plantation consisted of a 1,700-acre tract of land located within Trinity Parish on “both sides of Roundabout Creek, adjacent to Old Mountain Road and Major Thomas Johnson.”
The Old Mountain Road (Route 640), mentioned as a reference point in the document, was a main thoroughfare in the eighteenth century for those traveling to the Blue Ridge Mountains and beyond. To the south of Roundabout plantation was another well-traveled path called Three Chopt Road. This forest trail received its unusual name because colonists could follow it from the tidewater to the mountain gap of the Rivanna River by the sign of triple ax-marks in the bark of the trees along the trail.
A number of Sheltons lived off the Old Mountain Road, including Patrick Henry’s wealthy uncle-in-law, Joseph Shelton, and his wife’s first cousin, Thomas Shelton, who lived at Roseneath near the present town of Orchid. According to local tradition, Patrick Henry often stopped here on his way to court. Henry's closest neighbor was Major Thomas Johnson, who lived about two miles away at Roundabout Castle. Johnson was the former deputy sheriff of Louisa and a member of the vestry that Henry had defended in the famous Parsons’ Cause in 1763. Two years later, Thomas showed his gratitude by helping Patrick Henry secure his brother’s seat in the House of Burgesses after William Johnson’s resignation in 1765. On May 29, 1765, during his first session as a burgess, Patrick Henry offered his famous resolutions against the Stamp Act, in which he denied Parliament’s right to tax the colonists without their consent. Although he was representing Louisa County when he offered this “first impulse” to the Revolution, the Roundabout deed indicates that Henry had not yet moved to his Roundabout property and was still living in St. Martin’s Parish. It is possible that Patrick Henry and his family resided at his father’s plantation while their home was being completed.
By December 1765, Patrick Henry’s account book shows no further payments to his carpenter, John Gilbert, whom he had hired nine months earlier. Although more work was done on the house, such as plastering and whitewashing, it appears that the Henrys had moved into their home by Christmas. A picturesque description of Roundabout was given to biographer George Morgan by local resident W. T. Meade, in 1906: “I first knew the premises forty-two years ago. There were outbuildings at Roundabout but none had been there during Mr. Henry’s occupancy. These buildings have now all gone down. As to reminiscences of Mr. Henry’s life in Louisa, my old neighbor, Captain William Perkings, says that his father, who joined farms with Mr. Henry, told him that [Mr. Henry] always walked to court, carrying his gun and hunting by the way. I knew the building in which Mr. Henry lived just one hundred years after his residence there. It was a story and a half structure about twenty feet by eighteen feet with a shed on the north side. This shed was well finished off as a bed room, which added to one and often two bedrooms upstairs in the main building, furnished sleeping apartments for the household. Around every Virginia mansion there were scattered several small buildings which served the purpose of kitchens, lumber rooms, pantries, and smoke houses; there was almost always one fitted up as a bed room for the boys of the establishment. These outhouses were called into requisition when there was an unusual number of guests, so that a description of the mansion does not give an adequate idea of the capacity of the planter for entertaining guests.”
Another local resident, Josephine Neal, described the Roundabout house as having “a large front room from which a stairway led to a half-story upstairs. The shingle roof sloped down the back, and in the rear of the front room was another large room, one story in height. To the left of the front room as one entered the front door was a lean-to or passageway connecting with a third large room. There was a fireplace to the right in the front room, and another to the right in the back room; also a chimney at the end of the house to the left. The present stable at Roundabout was partly made from old hand-hewn beams of the original house.”
In 1766, Patrick Henry was appointed to the vestry of Trinity Parish in Louisa, and in 1769, he was elected to the legislature as a representative of Hanover County, where he owned property. That same year, Henry became one of the few lawyers allowed to practice before the General Court at Williamsburg, the colony’s highest court. During this period, he also began to teach law to Isaac Coles, a young cousin who boarded with him in 1767, and to William Christian, his future brother-in-law. County tithe records for 1768 list Henry as owning 1,900 acres of land in Trinity Parish and ten enslaved people named Ben, Dick, Isaac, Ben, Dinah, Beck, Jenny, James, Will, and Pedro. Two years later, he was listed as having nine tithables and 2,000 acres. Despite its considerable acreage, most of Roundabout was uncultivated, and the few slaves he had could only tend to about thirty acres of tobacco. In a conversation with his cousin, Edmund Winston, Henry stated that “he thought his property was not worth more than £1,400, adding that if he could only make double that sum, he would be entirely content.”
In 1771, Patrick Henry and his family left Roundabout plantation for their new home in Hanover County called Scotchtown. With a house large enough to accommodate six children, closer proximity to Williamsburg, and a more agreeable social setting, Scotchtown appeared to be a perfect choice.
On July 12, 1773, Patrick Henry sold the Roundabout house and 700 acres to Lewis Walden for £300. Four years later, Walden conveyed the Roundabout property to the Reverend George Goldie. In 1795, the property was sold to Major Thomas Johnson’s daughter, Mary, and her husband, Captain Henry Garrett. James Michie purchased Roundabout from Garrett’s estate in 1814. He sold it in 1838 to Captain William Perkins, in whose family it remained until 1893. The original house was destroyed by fire about 1920. In 1976, a marker was erected on the site of Patrick Henry’s home to commemorate the patriot.
In 1995, this and another photograph (95.35.2) were pulled from the papers of Dr. Robert D. Meade (1903–1974), which were purchased by the Patrick Henry Memorial Foundation in 1946.