Charles City invites visitors to tour history with Autumn Pilgrimage House Tour
Charles City’s 68-year-long tradition is back.
First held in 1954, the Autumn Pilgrimage House Tour is returning on Saturday after a two-year hiatus due to the COVID pandemic.
The tour, which is organized by Westover Episcopal Church, gives visitors the opportunity to visit several local historic homes, some of which are open to the public just for the tour. The sites will be open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. for the tour.
Some of the homes included in the tour are Berkeley Plantation, which was the site of the first Thanksgiving and the Inn at Eagles’ Watch, one of the state’s few surviving 17th-century brick homes and now a bed-and-breakfast. The homes are all located within a handful of miles of each other in Charles City County, which was first settled in the 1600s as colonists began to move out of Jamestown, the first permanent English settlement in the Americas, and into the surrounding areas.
Other homes on the tour are River Edge, a 250-year-old colonial plantation that once briefly played host to the Army of the Potomac; Cary Hill, an 18th-century house that today is used as an event venue; Kittiewan, a former working plantation which serves as headquarters for the Archeological Society of Virginia; and Westover Plantation, written about by John Rolfe and considered by some to be one of the most perfect examples of Georgian architecture in America.
Westover Episcopal Church, where presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, William Henry Harrison, John Tyler, Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson once worshipped and is still an active church, is also on the tour.
“From imposing 18th century plantation houses to smaller domestic structures, churches and church glebes, the county offers a stunning breadth of well-preserved American Colonial architecture,” reads the tour’s webpage on westoverepiscopalchurch.org. “Continually changing views of the James River from many of the houses lend a clear perspective of its importance and majesty from earliest colonial times to the present.”
Tickets, which are valid for one day of admission at all sites on the tour, are available now for $45, and for $50 on the day of the event.
Attendees can also pre-purchase box lunches for $15 each. To buy tickets, visit westover-episcopal-church-106504.square.site/.
Proceeds from the event go to the church and its outreach programs, including Meals on Wheels and other local feeding programs as well as children’s outreach.
“All the houses on tour tell a compelling story through architecture about the lives of those in the past and present who have lived in this beautiful rural county,” the website says.
Sian Wilkerson, sian.wilkerson@pilotonline.com, 757-342-6616
