Martin's Hundred: The Colony That Vanished

In sixteen twenty, English settlers established Martin's Hundred, a plantation settlement along the James River about seven miles downstream from Jamestown. Its administrative center, Wolstenholme Towne, was a fortified cluster of rough-hewn cabins, the most vulnerable of the Virginia Company's outlying settlements.

On March twenty-second, sixteen twenty-two, warriors under Opechancanough attacked English settlements throughout the colony in a coordinated assault. At Martin's Hundred, seventy-eight of the roughly one hundred forty inhabitants were killed and the remainder captured or fled. The hundred accounted for nearly a quarter of the entire colony's death toll that day.

The settlement was never rebuilt in its original form. The land eventually became Carter's Grove Plantation. In nineteen seventy, archaeologist Ivor Noel Hume of the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation began excavating and in nineteen seventy-seven uncovered the exact site of Wolstenholme Towne, finding burials, weapons, and the foundations of the settlement, one of the most significant colonial-period archaeological discoveries in American history.