A piece of Colonial history nestled in James City County has been at the heart of the Kingsmill community for years.
Two buildings remain of the former Kingsmill Plantation, encompassed by the gated community and serving as a landmark overlooking a Kingsmill Resort golf course.
Residents, though, fear the 1730s-era buildings won’t survive the construction of 28 homes nearby and that the development will harm other historic artifacts and possibly disturb burial plots.
The plans by Escalante Golf, the owner of Kingsmill Resort, landed the site on Preservation Virginia’s 2025 list of most endangered historic places.
The Kingsmill Plantation dates to the 1600s when its first 300 acres were granted to Richard Kingsmill. It became an important agricultural center for Jamestown Colony. At its height, the plantation spanned 1,250 acres where enslaved Africans farmed tobacco and grain crops for the Kingsmill-descendent Burwell family. The 4,800 square foot manor burned down in 1846, leaving just a foundation behind, and the remains of the plantation deteriorated after the Civil War.
Still standing are the office house and the kitchen, which also served as housing for enslaved Africans. Historians such as William Kelso believe they are an example of one of the few remaining Colonial-era buildings built by and for enslaved people. Kelso was part of the initial archaeological digs when Kingsmill started to be developed by Anheuser-Busch in the 1970s and believes there is more to find under the earth near Kingsmill.
But more than a place of academic study, the site has been a backdrop of the lives of residents such as Blair Hart. She said the space has been a focal point and gathering place for community events and holiday commemorations dating back to the neighborhood’s early days.
Hart, president of the Kingsmill Heritage Society, recalls visiting the plantation site as a child on walks with her grandparents, who built their home in the community in the 1980s. It was part of the draw that brought her family to the neighborhood in 2020.
“It’s hard to think that there will just be houses put here for corporate profit with no regard to what’s here,” Hart said. “There’s an obligation to history, if not the residents around it.”
Escalante’s plans would place several of the 28 homes near the site, also removing a soccer field and covered picnic grounds. A petition to save the field drew nearly 1,500 signatures in 2024.
Hart said the plantation buildings are in poor condition after years of neglect. She and the society believe the planned construction will damage them.
Joel Paige, Escalante Golf’s Vice President of Operations, disagreed. He doesn’t believe the work will have any adverse effect on the structures and that the company is working on required archaeological and natural resource studies. If the archaeological study turns up artifacts or remains, a second phase of the study will be required.
“There's a lot of demand, which is kind of what is driving our plan: people want to live in Kingsmill,” Paige said.
Opponents to Escalante’s conceptual plans have little power to stop them. Escalante owns the land, which is zoned for residential uses, and can build as long as it follows county ordinances. Since the community already has an approved master plan, development plans can be approved through an administrative process and will not have to go before the planning commission or the county board of supervisors.
“We’re following all the rules of the game,” Paige said. “That field, that area, is one of the developable areas according to the original master plan.”
Progress has been temporarily stalled by a trio of violation notices from the county issued in February for unauthorized landscaping and dumping plant cuttings into a resource-protected area down a hill at the plantation site.
The company could face more than $10,000 in fines and must clean up before the county’s stormwater and resource protection division reviews any plans. Resource Protection Section Chief Michael Woolson told WHRO in an email that “the violation activities have ceased, but the cleanup has not begun.”
Paige said the area had been used to dump mulch and plant matter collected during golf course maintenance without knowing it was a protected area, since before Escalante purchased the property, and that it was unrelated to the company’s development plans.
Paige didn’t have a timeline for the development’s completion. He said Escalante will work with the Kingsmill Community Services Association, the community’s homeowners association, to replace the soccer field. Paige said the company is also considering donating the plantation buildings to a charitable organization to manage as the project moves forward.
Hart, though, still hopes that Preservation Virginia's designation will draw new attention to the project and lead Escalante to reconsider its plans.
“It is a beloved place in this community,” she said. “Once bulldozers are taken there, there’ll just be irreparable loss and so many stories that could be told from what lies there won’t be.”
