“In the past century, the following houses (at least in the Cabell land grants) have fallen down, burned down, or been removed: Liberty Hall, Edgewood, Colleton, Red Gables, Green Hill, Montevideo, Yellow Gravel, Union Hill and Traveler’s Rest (now in the final stages of decay.) Rock Cliff is the only frame house that has been […]

In approximately 1742, Dr. William Cabell built the “Swan Creek Plantation” at the center of his Virginia properties and distributed the surrounding tracts to his four sons. Nicholas Cabell inherited the main house upon his father’s death and renamed it during the Revolution, “Liberty Hall.” In 1895, the same year in which the University of […]

“The needle does not tremble to the pole with more certainty than my heart beats with love for the home of my birth…” – William D. Cabell, writing to brother Joseph from Norwood (18 August 1856) In colonial and early national Virginia, landowning white men of means constructed private residences to make political statements as […]

“From Tobacco to Castor Oil”: The Medicine Chest of Colonial and Early National Virginia Men and women brought forcibly from Africa, Native Americans, and European settlers had their own folk remedies for most ailments, in addition to those treatments which a “physician” might prescribe. Until well into the nineteenth-century, medical practitioners in Virginia drew on […]

Practitioners of medicine in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Virginia did not believe in germs or bacteria, but that did not stop them from providing essential services to those around them. Before the massive specialization of knowledge that would characterize the nineteenth century, gentlemen of this era read widely in a number of fields, including medicine and […]

Specific information about individual Cabells’ involvement in the political process–on both the state and national levels–may be found in the “Contributions” section, under Statesmen. This page is intended to make those contributions more meaningful by identifying the major political movements into which the Cabells and other Virginians found themselves swept up, from the Revolution to […]

Cabells as Agricultural Innovators   James Madison, fourth President of the United States (1809-1817), was chosen first president of the Albemarle Agricultural Society on October 7, 1817.       The vast majority of white Virginians in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-centuries, including most Cabells, either farmed their own lands or supervised enslaved African Americans who […]

Denominational Changes in Colonial and Early National Virginia   When Englishmen established their first permanent North American colony in Virginia in 1607, they carried their religion with them. The crown, the Virginia Company, and–in 1619–the House of Burgesses each confirmed the (Anglican) Church of England as the established church of the colony of Virginia. The […]

17 September 1753 From the beginning, the Cabells were implicated in slavery and the domestic slave trade. Below is a bill of sale between Jonathan Loving and William Cabell, Jr. dated 17 September 1753. Cabell purchased from Loving “one Negro Girll called Judy.  

Enslaved Persons and the Cabell Family Just as the Cabells shared in the foundational chapters of eighteenth-century Virginia history–championing the cause of independence, building new churches and communities, etc.–they shared in the most shameful chapters as well. Over half of white Virginians owned enslaved persons in the first part of the eighteenth century. William Cabell […]