Five days before the English colonists tied their ships to the trees on the large peninsula on which they soon built Jamestown, they had landed across the river in what is now Surry County, near the modern village of Claremont, to visit the headmen of the Quiyoughcohannock Indians. The next year, they began keeping their hogs on Hog Island. In 1609, Capt. John Smith had a group of Jamestown colonists construct Smith's Fort in modern Surry County. It lay on Gray's Creek, whose mouth opens into the James River opposite Jamestown. Other settlements soon formed across the river from Jamestown on the "Surry Side," and the region formed a part of the Corporation of Jamestown. Colonial authorities divided the Virginia Colony into eight shires in 1634, putting both Jamestown and the area south of the river into James City County. In 1652, Virginia's House of Burgesses designated the portion of James City County south of the James River as Surry County.¹

Surry County is located just across the James River from the colonial capitals of Jamestown and Williamsburg. Since its creation, the river has formed Surry's northern border. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the James constituted Virginia's major thoroughfare, bustling with all varieties of ships heading from the Atlantic Ocean upriver to Richmond and other inland areas. By 1700, vast tobacco plantations checkered the northern swath of Surry County along river as it winds to the northwest past the "Surry Side." A high-society plantation culture developed and formed the basis for the region's wealth. A few of the original plantation homes have survived to provide a glimpse into life in that era, including Bacon's Castle and Four Mile Tree shown at the top of the page (click on the images for more details), as well as Smith's Fort and Mount Pleasant Plantation. The prosperity of the James River tobacco plantations led towns to form near the tobacco warehouses along the river. Cobham, located at the mouth of Gray's Creek, was the primary center of commerce during the 1600s and early 1700s, but years of repeated tobacco cultivation leached nutrients from the soils, making the lands along the river less productive. This caused the county's commercial and government centers to move further inland to the village of Cabin Point and settlement at McIntosh's Cross Roads, later Surry Court House.

In the latter seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the volatile tobacco market prompted many tobacco farmers living in the James-York Peninsula and along the lower James River to see a more stable lifestyle. Many joined less affluent families and began settling in the lands farther away from the James River in the colony’s backcountry along the Blackwater Swamp. Far removed from the hustle of tobacco warehouses and high society of Surry's wealthy tobacco plantations along the James River, the Blackwater Swamp lands were dominated by rich, heavy, moldy soils typical of fertile lowlands. These soils proved ideal for the cultivation of "Indian corn," or maize, wheat, flax, cotton, and other grains, but not tobacco. Itself an important transportation route until the late eighteenth century, the Blackwater Swamp (or River) parallels the James River to the south. Despite its proximity to the James, the Blackwater does not open into Chesapeake Bay. Instead, it drains southward, into North Carolina's Albemarle Sound, thereby forming a gateway from the Chesapeake Bay settlements to the Albemarle settlements of early North Carolina.

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This webpage gives biographical information of some early residents whose farms lay along the southern rim of Surry County, Virginia, the region lying along the north side of the Blackwater Swamp opposite the Dendron Swamp Natural Area Preserve. The only modern local community is the tiny village of Dendron, formed in 1896 as a logging town. However, throughout most of the nineteenth century, the region's center of commercial activity lay a few miles away at "The New Design."

Today, "The New Design" survives among rural Surry County locals merely as a reference to the intersection of Highways #615 (Carsley Road) and #616 (New Design Road) about five miles northwest of Dendron. But in the early 1800s, "The New Design" was a thriving plantation whose adjoining stores and tavern formed the hub of social and commercial activity for southern Surry County.

Maj. James Kee, a Revolutionary War veteran, Surry County Militia officer, and Surry County justice of the peace and Sheriff, founded The New Design in 1796-1797 as his new plantation. He chose a prime location, then at the intersection of the main roads through the region, one leading to the commercial center at Cabin Point near the James River, and the other to Surry Court House, now the village of Surry. Maj. Kee had several storehouses built as well as a shoeshop, and a tiny village soon formed at The New Design. In 1798, Maj. Kee opened The New Design Tavern, with New York native John Stiles Sr. serving as the first tavernkeeper. For most of the nineteenth century, the tavern served as the only way station for travelers journeying across the region. For local residents, the tavern formed the primary community gathering place, with local elections, political meetings, entertainment, and militia musters held there. The militia company from the surrounding region was known as the "New Design Company." The article below gives details on the history of:

Notes:

¹Bohannan, Aurelius Wilson. Old Surry: Thumb-Nail Sketches of Places of Historic Interest in Surry County, Virginia. Petersburg, VA: Plummer Printing Co., 1927.