Bacon's Castle

Arthur Allen, a wealthy Surry County merchant and Justice of the Peace, built this Jacobean brick house in 1665 near Chippokes Creek and the James River. It is commonly regarded as the oldest brick dwelling in North America.

In 1676, Nathaniel Bacon led an armed rebellion of frontiersmen angry about the Virginia government's lack of response to conflict between the English colonists and Native Americans. Bacon and his men wanted Gov. William Berkeley to attack their villages and drive them out of Virginia, but Berkeley refused. Bacon's men occupied the house in mid-September 1676 as a fort, but Bacon himself never lived there and is not even documented as having ever visited it. Despite the initial successes of Bacon's Rebellion, including the destruction of the colonial capital of Jamestown, the insurrection fizzled following Bacon's death from dysentery on 26 October 1676.

The frontiersmen who rebelled with Bacon against royal authority were former indentured servants, both black and white, who had completed their required servitude and begun squatting on former Indian lands, and landless white immigrants from the British Isles. This first full-scale armed revolt of white and black indentured servants and slaves pitted the elite tobacco plantation owners living along the major rivers against men who owned inland smaller farms together with landless servants and slaves. To prevent similar uprisings, the government dissolved indentured servant policies and to increase the African slave trade. Thus, the lasting impact of Bacon's Rebellion was the institutionalization of chattel slavery in the British colonies.