Henricus: The Second English City, and What It Attempted
Near Richmond, Virginia
In sixteen eleven, a military governor named Sir Thomas Dale sailed up the James River from Jamestown with more than three hundred men, chose a peninsula of land here in what is now Chesterfield County, and began building a second English city in the New World. He called it Henricus, in honor of Prince Henry, heir to the English throne.
Dale had arrived in Virginia earlier that year to find Jamestown barely surviving. He imposed martial law, and then he expanded. Henricus was meant to replace Jamestown as the colony's center of gravity, a healthier site well above the tidal marshes that made the original settlement so deadly. Within a year it had streets, a church, guest houses, and a hospital. The hospital, called Mount Malady, was the first in all of English North America.
Henricus also became, briefly, the site of America's first proposed institution of higher learning. In sixteen nineteen, the Virginia Company set aside ten thousand acres nearby for the College of Henryco, meant chiefly to educate Native American children in the Christian faith and English ways. It was being built when the coordinated Powhatan attacks of March twenty-second, sixteen twenty-two, struck the settlement. The college site was destroyed. Henricus itself was abandoned.
Before that, Pocahontas had lived here. Kidnapped by the English in sixteen thirteen and brought to Henricus, she converted to Christianity, met the tobacco planter John Rolfe, and married him in April of sixteen fourteen. It was an alliance that bought several years of peace between the English and the Powhatan Confederacy.
The city lasted eleven years and changed the course of a continent.
