GLOUCESTER — Somewhere in the piney woods off Route 17 just north of Woods Cross Roads a recently installed highway historical marker hints at one of the great, enduring mysteries of Gloucester.
In actuality, it’s two mysteries. Solving the first puzzle may well yield an answer to the second.
Since a fall day in 1676, when Nathaniel Bacon — either the original American revolutionary or an irascible scoundrel and miscreant, depending on your point of view — succumbed to a painful bout of dysentery at a prominent Gloucester plantation, no one has been able to pinpoint where he was buried. The plantation, Gloucester Hall, has also been lost to the ravages of time.
At the time of his death, Bacon was leader of a band of armed men — traitors would be the word the British authorities would have used — fomenting an ill-fated insurrection against the British governor, Sir William Berkeley. An impetuous, energetic son of prominent parents, Bacon at the age of 27 had been dispatched out of England with his wife and two daughters by his father in 1674 after a shady money-making scheme.
In Virginia, Bacon found ample opportunity to ascend to power and influence and wasted little time trying to attain both. Capitalizing on rising fears over hostilities with American Indians on the frontier, Bacon assembled a band of Virginians under the auspices of protecting vulnerable colonists.
Bacon’s actions ultimately led to a showdown with Berkeley, who was Bacon’s cousin by marriage. In the course of the conflict Bacon ended up in Gloucester, trying to rally support among the prominent Gloucester residents.
By 1674, Gloucester was the most populous county in Virginia, according to statistics from “American Slavery, American Freedom,” a 1975 book by Edmund Morgan. At the turn of the 17th century, Gloucester had 5,730 residents, the most in Virginia, according to Morgan.
Bacon’s travels in Gloucester led him to Gloucester Hall, which would later become a house of distinction, serving in 1684 as the first Virginia residence of Royal Gov. Francis Howard, Baron Howard of Effingham. The home was built around the 1660s by Col. John Pate on a 2,100-acre plantation in north Gloucester.
At Gloucester Hall, Bacon became ill with the “bloody flux” and “lousey disease,” wrote historian Warren M. Billings, in “Sir William Berkeley and the Forging of Colonial Virginia.”
The death of Bacon on Oct. 26, 1676, at the age of 29 effectively doomed the uprising and it quickly petered out, with some of his followers ending up hanging from British gallows. What transpired next is the stuff of legend.
What’s generally regarded as fact is that Bacon’s followers feared that his body would become a spectacle and publicly mutilated as a lesson to anyone who dared to attempt to usurp the Crown. One story goes that the followers faked a burial at a nearby church and instead interred his remains in a lead coffin and plopped it in the Poropotank River, which meanders along the county’s northeast border.
In 1994, a sonar scan of the Poropotank River was undertaken by a Gloucester businessman whose company manufactures scanners that are typically used to hunt for drowning victims and sunken wrecks. The search yielded a trove of crab pots, trees and sunken boats, but no lead coffin containing the remains of Bacon.
Billings finds the lead coffin scenario unlikely. So do local historians Dave Brown and Thane Harpole.
Where would the men have obtained a lead coffin? How and why would they have hauled it two miles away to the river? A more likely scenario is they buried Bacon nearby in an unmarked grave, the historians surmise.
Find the house and maybe, just maybe, Bacon’s grave is nearby.
Research by Texas resident A.J. Pate, who sponsored the highway historical marker commemorating the nearby site of Gloucester Hall, indicates the house may have fallen into disrepair in the 1720s when Sarah Pate, a daughter who was the lone descendant of John Pate, married and likely moved away to a plantation on the James River.
Brown, the Gloucester historian, said the exact location of the house is unknown. It’s likely, he said, within a mile of the highway marker based on a remarkable and rare assemblage of surviving historical documents.
“We hope to begin our search for it in 2013,” Brown said.
Lingering questions about Bacon will likely never be answered, despite extensive scholarly research. He’s a difficult fellow to describe, Billings said. No pictures of him have been found, clouding the historical record.
“One of the great puzzles is how he got to be a political figure of any consequence,” Billings said. “I always just sort of described him to my students as a bit of a smart-ass who flew high and fast and all that went to his head.”
Billings has vowed to never write another thing about Bacon.
“There are parts of it that I still don’t understand,” he said. “And I’ve given up trying to.”
