A Long Time Ago/32 Old Homes in Virginia

From Wally Atkins Family Wiki

Old Homes in Virginia

This page is part of A Long Time Ago: A History of the Atkins-Paynter and Allied Families, the chunked book edition on the Wally Atkins Family Wiki.

  • Book section: Old Homes in Virginia
  • Page range in the book: 228-241
  • Chunk order: 32 of 36

This section has been lightly cleaned for readability from the working transcript. It preserves the strongest place-memory and home-site material from the chapter while avoiding overconfident reconstruction of badly damaged OCR passages.

Source note

  • Book: A Long Time Ago: A History of the Atkins-Paynter and Allied Families
  • Transcript source: `029-oldhomes.md`
  • Editorial note: the front edge of the transcript overlaps the tail of the military section, and the later Arlington/Wilsonia material is badly damaged in OCR, so this page emphasizes the clearest readable entries first

Cleaned import

This section of the book deals with old homes and lands and their connection with the various branches of the Atkins and Paynter families. Homes in the direct line are marked with (D).

Old Atkins Home Place (D)

The old homeplace of Patrick Henry Atkins and Paulina Sue Lawson stood near Keats, Virginia, in Mecklenburg County, Virginia. The book says it later lay under the waters of Buggs Island Lake, between Keats Point and Palmer Point. The family lived there from 1866 to 1905.

This is one of the strongest place-memory passages in the book because it ties the family not only to a homeplace, but to a landscape later lost beneath the lake.

Atkins Place

The book says this place was owned by Andrew Jackson Atkins and Emily Barnes Atkins. It was located on Route 632, four miles west of Red Oak, in Charlotte County, Virginia. The place included a house and 450 acres. The property came down from the Barnes family to Andrew Jackson and Emily, was built around 1820, remained in the family until 1969, and at the time of the book was said to be owned by Mr. Jarry Gillium.

Lawson Hall (D)

Lawson Hall stood seven miles from Norfolk, off Route 60 heading east toward Cape Henry. The plantation originally contained more than one thousand acres and was described as a crown grant to Captain Thomas Lawson in 1607.

The original house was built in 1666. The property was sold in 1880 by Lawson descendants to Mr. Hodgeman, whose grandson was said to be the present owner at the time of writing. The old mansion built by Lieutenant Colonel Anthony Lawson burned at Christmas time in 1900, but was rebuilt on the original foundation, along much the same lines, using salvaged material from the older house. The book gives its address as 1040 Baker Road, Virginia Beach, Virginia.

The Ellington Patent (D)

On September 20, 1779, John Ellington Jr. of Prince George County, Virginia, patented 611 acres in Bute County, North Carolina (now Warren County), between Hawtree and Smith's Creek. The book says this land lay near what is now Buggs Island Lake.

This entry matters because it grounds the Ellington branch in a specific tract of land and helps connect the later Paynter and Atkins world to the same broader lake-country geography.

Arlington (D)

The chapter next turns to Arlington on the Eastern Shore. Despite OCR damage, the readable portion indicates that a historic marker stood on Route 13 south of Eastville in Northampton County, and that the mansion itself no longer stood. It had been located on Route 644, about two miles west of the marker.

The next damaged lines indicate that Arlington was built by John Custis around the mid-seventeenth century and was associated with Major General John Custis, his sister Ann, who married Argoll Yeardley, and later members of the Custis family.

Because the OCR is poor here, this portion should be checked against the original scan before being treated as a precise quotation.

Context notes

  • This is one of the most important place-history chapters in the book because it ties family memory to actual home sites, tracts of land, and later landscape change.
  • The old homeplace of Patrick Henry and Paulina Atkins is especially important because the book explicitly places it between Keats Point and Palmer Point before Buggs Island Lake covered it.
  • This chapter helps the Wally Atkins Family Wiki feel like a family archive rooted in places, not just names.

Related pages

Navigation

Retrieved from "https://family.wallyatkins.com/index.php?title=A_Long_Time_Ago/32_Old_Homes_in_Virginia&oldid=187"