Henrico: Virginia's Oldest County and Its Lost City

Henrico County is one of the eight original shires of Virginia, organized in sixteen thirty-four, making it among the oldest continuously functioning political subdivisions in the United States. The county takes its name from a city that no longer exists, built on an idea that was destroyed before it could become real.

In sixteen eleven, the colonial governor Thomas Dale sailed up the James River and founded the Citie of Henricus on a defensible peninsula surrounded on three sides by water, about twenty miles above Jamestown. The settlement was named for Henry Frederick, Prince of Wales, heir apparent to the English throne. Dale envisioned Henricus as the capital of the Virginia colony: a planned town with proper streets, a church, guest houses, and, most ambitiously, the first university in the Americas.

The university project moved faster than almost anyone expected. A charter was granted in sixteen nineteen. More than ten thousand acres of college land were set aside to provide operating income. Churches across England raised the equivalent of thirty-two thousand pounds sterling in donations. One hundred English tenant farmers were sent to work the land, their labor intended to support the faculty and students who would follow.

On March twenty-second, sixteen twenty-two, the Powhatan Confederacy launched a coordinated attack on English settlements across the Virginia colony. The assault, led by Chief Opechancanough, killed more than three hundred colonists in a single day. Henricus was destroyed and burned. The university lands were abandoned. The project that might have been the first institution of higher learning in the Western Hemisphere was erased in hours.

Henrico County survived as a legal and administrative entity, its boundaries eventually giving rise to ten other counties and three independent cities. But the Citie of Henricus, and the university that almost was, exist today only as an archaeological site on Farrar's Island in the James River.