He owns a plantation of nineteen hundred acres, nearly one thousand of which is under cultivation. Unlike too many agriculturists of the South, he is his own general overseer, and his family of seventy persons (only eleven of whom are white), receive his daily personal care. He owns all the soil that is left unsubmerged on which the English built their first town in America. His house has many bullet-marks, made there during the battle at Jamestown Ford, on the 6th of July, 1781; and in the broad level field in front of his mansion, the French army was encamped when on its way to Yorktown the same year. Within that field a venerable chestnut-oak, riven, but not destroyed, by lightning, was yet standing, under which a court-martial was held by Cornwallis, and upon its branches a culprit was hanged. It is called the "Council Tree." Mr. Coke's plantation is truly classic ground, for upon it occurred events connected with those widely-separated incidents, the opening and the closing of the heroic age of America. Over it the lordly Powhatan once walked, and the feet of his gentle daughter pressed its soil when speeding on her mission of mercy to the doomed settlement of Jamestown. Over it the royal and republican armies marched, and there fought desperately for victory.
I was at Mr. Bacon's cottage soon after an early breakfast, and before nine o'clock had crossed the estuary in a punt, and sat within the shadow of the old church tower, which stands like a sentinel, watching the city of the dead at its feet. This crumbling pile, surrounded by shrubbery, brambles, and tangled vines; and the old church-yard wall, of English brick, inclosing a few broken monuments, half buried in earth or covered with a pall of ivy and long grass, are all the tangible records that remain of the first planting of an English colony in America. As I sat upon the hollow trunk of a half-reclining and decayed old sycamore, and sketched the broken tower, the questionings of the eloquent Wirt came up from the depth of feeling: "Whence, my dear S—— arises this irrepressible reverence and tender affection with which I look at this broken steeple?
* This view is from the old church-yard, looking toward James River, a glimpse of which may be seen through the arches. The stream is here about three miles wide. It is uncertain at what precise time the church, of which now only a portion of the tower remains, was erected. It was probably built sometime between 1617 and 1620. According to Smith, a fire consumed a large portion of the town, with the palisades, at about the close of 1607, the first year of the settlement. Captain Smith and Mr. Scrivener were appointed commissioners to superintend the rebuilding of the town and church. Afterward, in speaking of the arrival of Governor Argali in 1617, he says, "In James towne he found but five or six houses, the church downe, the pallizados broken, the bridge in pieces, the well of fresh water spoiled, the store-house used for the church," &c. The tower here represented was doubtless that of the third church built, and is now (1852) about 234 years old. The tower is now about thirty feet high, the walls three feet thick, all of imported brick.
Wirt's Musings at the Church at Jamestown.—The Ancient Monuments.—Paulding's Ode.—Efforts at Early Settlement.
Is it that my soul, by a secret, subtile process, invests the moldering ruins with her own powers; imagines it a fellow-being—a venerable old man, a Nestor or an Ossian, who has witnessed and survived the ravages of successive generations, the companions of his youth and of his maturity, and now mourns his own solitary and desolate condition, and hails their spirits in every passing cloud? Whatever may be the cause, as I look at it, I feel my soul drawn forward as by the cords of gentlest sympathy, and involuntarily open my lips to offer consolation to the drooping pile." * Around this
"Old cradle of our infant world,
In which a nestling empire lay,"
the Spirit of Romance and the Muse of Poetry delight to linger, and the bosom of the American glows with increased patriotism as he contemplates this small beginning of the mighty progression around him.