Internal Improvements   Several prominent members or near relatives of the Cabell family attempted to improve their living situation (and that of those around them) by sponsoring or helping to sponsor public works. Long before Henry Clay and the Whigs made such “internal improvements” a political issue, a few Cabells believed that good civil governors […]

How They Lived   The University of Virginia’s extensive manuscript collections on the Cabell family reveal both the quotidian and the sublime. In those moments wherein the Cabells intersect with the story of our state and nation, the documents are revealing. Perhaps even more useful from a historian’s point of view, and often profoundly moving […]

  Members of the Cabell family helped to found the University of Virginia, guided it through the first crucial decades of its existence, and have continued to patronize it as students. At every stage of the institution’s life, there have been Cabells present. As noted elsewhere, Cabells were also involved in other educational enterprises, but […]

Cabells and Education   Joseph Carrington Cabell‘s contributions to education in the Old Dominion are well known–his sponsorship of the University of Virginia in the General Assembly and his tireless labors alongside Thomas Jefferson on behalf of that institution. This co-founder of the university in Charlottesville was acting in a well established family tradition of […]

and the Cabell Political Dynasty   The region surrounding the first Cabell homeplace in Nelson County always remained the seat of the family’s power. Between 1776 and 1795, when Nelson was still a part of Amherst County, there were at least two Cabells from central Virginia in the state legislature every year save one. In […]

Revolution: The Four Colonels   By their political and military service on behalf of the colonists in the American Revolution, the Cabell family earned a reputation for patriotism. Early on, the Cabells identified with the patriot cause. William Cabell, Sr. (1730-1798), for example, participated wholeheartedly in the non-importation movement of the early 1770s, designed to […]

Faith of the Fathers: Cabells and Religion   Though there is evidence that Nicholas and Rebecca Cabell, parents of William Cabell the émigré, dissented from the Church of England during the seventeenth century, their son became a staunch supporter of that church in Virginia. At various times a lay reader, vestryman, and church warden, William […]

County Boundaries: Central Virginia, 1635-1809                 A map of the interior of Virginia in 1729, just after William Cabell had arrived, settled in Henrico County, and married Elizabeth Burks. His future home, Warminster (location of “Liberty Hall“), is shown in yellow. At that time, the location of the […]

Cabells and the Westward Movement   “Of the family as a whole it may be said, that they cleared the forest & tamed the wilderness around them; improved & added to their inheritance, while they maintained a liberal hospitality in proportion to their means.” – N. F. Cabell (p. 59 of Cabellana) When William Cabell […]

Cabell Contributions to Virginia and United States History Once firmly established in the New World, members of the Cabell family served Virginia and, eventually, the nation in a variety of roles. In some fields of service, politics and military duty for example, descendents of the patriotic William Cabell self-consciously tried to live up to their […]