Water
Quality
Monitoring

 HUGHLETT POINT

The Weather Channel photo and map above show the disastrous Hurricane Isabel centered over the Northern Neck and Richmond, VA on Sept. 18, 2003. Evidences of the vast damage done by the hurricane to the forest are scattered all about us here. The Division of Natural Heritage of the Department of Conservation and Recreation, manager of the 36 Natural Area Preserves in the state, has elected to leave the Isabel wreckage of fallen trees where it lies as the most extreme recent example of the natural processes that constantly alter the topography and flora of the Chesapeake shoreline. Not an unmitigated “disaster,” the hurricane also has opened new light zones in which plants and trees of the understory have sprung up (among which, unfortunately, is the invasive Japanese honeysuckle). It caused “tip-up mounds” that create little ponds with their own ecosystems, and it covers the forest floor with nutrients in the form of rotting wood. Clear cutting by timber and paper companies is a kind of man-made hurricane in terms of its effect on the landscape, but it too gives way in time to new forest growth. The most disastrous impact on the forest is bulldozing, paving of roads, and building of houses---in other words, development. 

Three Ideologies of Human “Dominion” Over the Land

 Until the early 90s this area was still being farmed, and the young woods around you here were a corn field. The pines that now stand here so close together that even deer have trouble getting through them are thus 10-12 year of age. Americans have always taken seriously (even literally) the biblical mandate to “be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion. . . .” (Genesis 1:28). To let productive fields revert to native woodlands comes hard for many of us. Even if that decision is made, three philosophies still compete: 1) we should thin the woods enough so that 40 years from now timber of commercial grade can be harvested; or, 2) we should thin the woods for esthetic reasons, to give the area a park-like appearance and be rid of thorn bushes and poison ivy; or, 3) we should let the land go back to nature so that in the end it appears in its pre-European settlement condition. The DCR has chosen the latter course, in the hope of showing that human settlement and the natural environment can co-exist to their mutual benefit.

The Earliest Inhabitants (Native Americans) 

If you were standing here in the summer of, let us say, 1600 AD, you might see small bands of Algonquin-speaking Native Americans fishing and collecting oysters and clams, as their predecessors had done since at least 6500 BC. We know they were here because they left behind their indestructible arrowheads and stone tools. We know that 500 feet north of the Preserve, you could have seen a village with barrel shaped houses, covered with mats or bark, and smoke holes in the top. These were easily disassembled and relocated as weather, farming, and hunting needs dictated. (Because the sea level of the Bay has risen more than five feet in the past four centuries, many prehistoric Native American village sites, including this one, are now several hundred yards offshore.) Besides oystering, you might also see Indian women growing corn, beans, squash, pumpkins, gourds, and sunflowers. The men are growing tobacco and medicinal plants, when not out hunting deer in the area.[1] Captain John Smith’s map of Virginia of 1612 suggests that Hughlett Point lay within the chiefdom of Wiccocomico, known to have had about 130 bowman and a total population of about 520 when Smith visited them in 1608. The Chicacoan band was also in the area. These village groups had their own werowances (chiefs), who may have been influenced but not controlled by the paramount chief of eastern Virginia, Powhatan, whose base was at Werowocomoco on the York River, above Gloucester.[2] By about 1655 no Indian lodges or villages would any longer be visible here. By act of the Virginia General Assembly in 1652, the two chiefdoms of the area had been removed to a “reservation” of 4,400 acres between Dividing Creek (the southern boundary of HPNAP) and the Rappahannock River. By the time of their removal, disease and violence had reduced the population of braves in the Wiccocomico chiefdom by half. Though the combined tribe remained allied with the British and even provided bowmen for the English militia in the Indian wars of 1675-1677, by 1719 the last chief, William Taptico (Tapp), died and Indian identity on the Northern Neck ceased.[3] (The belongings listed on an inventory of Tapp’s estate show that he was already living like an English colonist.[4])

The 17^th Century English Settlement and Jno. Hughlett 

Captain John Smith (pictured above) explored the Chesapeake Bay early in 1608, opening the way for a flood of English settlers during the next half century. The first settlers “traveled from one plantation to another by boat. Dense undergrowths in heavy forests, and no roads, made land travel impossible. It is along these coast lines, inlets, rivers and bays that we find the homes of colonial pioneers, their plantations, and their graveyards.”[5] Settlement in what was to become Northumberland County must have begun around 1640; the county began sending a delegate to the General Assembly in 1645 and was officially incorporated in 1648.[6]John Hughlett is first mentioned in the land records of 1652. He may have come south from Kent Island in Maryland, a settlement of which the Virginia Secretary of State, William Claiborne, was proprietor. In 1651 Claiborne also obtained a grant of 5,000 acres in Northumberland County on the Great and Little Wicomico Rivers and many Kent Island people settled there. Hughlett was active in purchasing land, mostly in the Coan River area of the county, but by the 1660s the Preserve in which you now stand came to be known as Hughlett Point. It is possible that the Point took its name from a John Howett, who was granted land south of the Great Wicomico River in 1652. It is even possible that these two men are one and the same.

John Hughlett was a colorful and controversial figure. In 1653 he was accused by Thomas Gaskins of murdering his own wife, Hannah. On Sept. 20 of that year at what was one of the earliest court trials in the county, Hughlett produced as witnesses two women who had prepared Hannah’s body for burial and swore they saw no sign of foul play. Early forensic science thus saved the day for John, for he was acquitted. He later married twice again, and got hauled into court at least once again for stealing a sailing vessel---a crime for which he was fined 5000 pounds of tobacco and “a cask.” (Was it rum? Whisky? Does it matter?) His community standing must have recovered from these trials, for in 1679, for more than 20,000 lbs. of tobacco, the Justices of the County purchased from him the land in Heathsville (20 miles north-west of here) upon which they erected the third county court house. The 1851 Northumberland courthouse still stands on the same site that Hughlett sold to the county, adjacent to the 18^th Century courthouse inn known as Hughlett’s Tavern.

We have no evidence that John Hughlett actually ever owned Hughlett Point, or that a plantation house ever stood in the tract. At least one neighbor at the south-west corner of the Preserve on Dividing Creek has picked up from her beach a collection of potsherds and pipe stems that suggest that a plantation house once stood nearby. Perhaps planters there grew tobacco on Hughlett Point in the 17^th-early 18^th centuries. Corn fields existed on parts of the tract until 1994. As the whole, the Preserve is low-lying and swampy, probably even more now than it was three centuries ago due to the rising Bay level and water table. It certainly supports its natural vegetation of woods and swamps better than it would cash crops, or a restaurant and condos.

by W. Sibley Towner 3/28/05

       jtowner@aol.com; 804/435-3566