Keswick (Powhatan, Virginia)
historic plantation house near Powhatan, Virginia, United States of America
Keswick is a historic plantation house near Powhatan, in Chesterfield County and Powhatan County, Virginia, US. It was built in the early-19th century, and is an H-shaped, two-story, gable-roofed, frame-with-weatherboard building. It is supported on brick foundations and has a brick exterior end chimney on each gable. Also on the property are a contributing well house, a smokehouse, the circular "slave quarters," a kitchen, a two-story brick house, a shed, and a laundry.
It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1974.
History
The builder and first owner of "Keswick" was Charles Clarke, who received a grant of 1,500 acres on the south bank of the James River in both Henrico and Goochland Counties (today Chesterfield and Powhatan Counties) sometime in the early eighteenth century. In the middle of the eighteenth century, Clarke married Marianne Salle (a member of one of the Huguenot families settled in Powhatan County). To house his new family, he built a residence known as the "Manor House." This house was small, as it only had two stories with two rooms on each floor. Charles Clarke died in the late eighteenth century and Keswick passed to his son, James, who at his death passed the property to his son John.
John Clarke built a new house that today is the main house at Keswick Plantation. It had an H-shape that paralleled Tuckahoe across the river.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Keswick (Powhatan, Virginia)” as historic plantation house near Powhatan, Virginia, United States of America. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 6, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q14712662. Authority coordinates are 37.561, -77.664. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1974.
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This entry incorporates text from “Keswick (Powhatan, Virginia)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.