Enslaved People of Bacon’s Castle, 1673-1865

Bacon’s Castle is the oldest surviving brick house in North America. It was constructed around 1665 for wealthy merchant-planter Arthur Allen I. Allen’s plantation seat was 2,450 acres located two miles from the James River, bounded on one side by Lower Chippokes Creek. He commissioned a 5,000 square-foot Jacobean manor home. When Preservation Virginia (formerly the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities) began to operate Bacon’s Castle as a public site in 1973, they interpreted it with the understanding that enslaved people had labored there for generations. In 2019, researchers and staff began compiling documents pertaining to enslavement at Bacon’s Castle, identifying named enslaved individuals from existing source material for purposes of submitting a dataset for Enslaved.org. The dataset presented contains the principal information about each individual and the source in which they are referenced. Data points include a unique identifier (which we have assigned), name, surname, alias, age, gender, full source citation, and names of parents.