Rolleston Hall was the heritable family home of the Moseley’s along the Eastern Branch of the Elizabeth River. Constructed around 1650, with land grants bequeathed to William Moseley reportedly as early as 1652.[i] Initial grants for the land that would become the property, were given to Mosley by William Berkley in 1648, amounting to roughly 800 acres. Between the 1650s until the late 1800s, Rolleston Hall was occupied by a direct descendant of William Moseley. Even as late as 1782, wills through the Moseley family referenced the” Plantation at Rolleston” as bequeathed to their next of kin.[ii] By the 18th century the land was firmly used as a plantation with a singular manor existing for the Mosely family. The plantation in the 1700s was centered around tobacco planting accordingly. 

Rolleston’s exact location is a bit hard to discern. While there exists, maps related to the Mosely territory and later lands seized from Henry Wise along the Elizabeth River, there is no marker for it. A 2009 blog entry denotes that Rolleston Hall stood about five miles west of 443 Kempsville Road[iii] (Present day this would be the location of the Barry Robinson Center) 

While Rolleston Hall was the inherited estate of the Mosely home through the 1600s-early 1800s, by at least 1860, the land hand been purchased by the Wise family, of former Virginian governor Henry A. Wise. Wise purchased the Rolleston plantation and its lands from his brother, John Wise, around 1860. Henry Wise’s son, John Sergeant Wise, wrote about the estate and settling in to it around 1860; noting even in 1860 having discussions about the state of Virginian affairs on the eve of the Civil War at the estate.[iv] On his time at the estate, there is little easily found. Wise was in poor health through much of his time on the lands. Much more can be gleamed on life at the plantation for the Wise family through the view of his son, John. (See End of an Era) One notable description of the land from John Wise, was its seclusion from the rest of Norfolk at the time. From the bank of the river, he noted over a mile, with the estate being built up from its previous owners. 

Henry Wise was forced to flee from the land as early into the war as 1862, and the lands were seized by Union forces. Despite having claims to the land following the end of the war, Wise was denied repossession of his lands at Rolleston in 1865 by General Grant. A New York times column regarding Wise’s petition to reclaim the territories highlights the denial for his land to be returned; this dated his departure from Rolleston as early as 1861, with extensive reasoning behind his denial for repossession of the lands after the war. The lands were seized and with the assistance of the American Missionary Association, a Freedmen School was established around 1864.[v] 

Rolleston Hall would serve as a school with the Freedman Bureau of affairs for the remainder of its existence. Reportedly by the end of the 19th century the manor home itself had burned down, with little in the way of actual marker to determine its proper location (see above). Regardless, Rolleston served as the site of one of two Bureau schools for the then Princess Anne County, reportedly enrolling over 130 individuals.[vi] The school that existed at Rolleston did not appear in regular school reports, nor if it did was it kept under the same name. Of note in the Norfolk District (First District) regarding the Freedmen’s Bureau, several schools were listed in both Norfolk and Portsmouth in the years following the Civil War, none of which seem to connect to Rolleston Hall.

Keywords/Search Terms

Moseley Family | William Moseley and descendants | Ancestral Homes and Estates in Norfolk and the Hampton Roads| Henry Wise | Freedmen’s Bureau Schools | Freedmen's Bureau in Norfolk| Colonial Homes| Plantations-Princess Anne County

Sources: 

[i] Kellam, Sadie Scott et al. Old Houses in Princess Anne, Virginia. Portsmouth, Va: Printcraft Press Inc., 1958. Print. Pg 130

[ii] “Families of Lower Norfolk and Princess Anne Counties.” The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, vol. 5, no. 3, 1898, pp. 327–34. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/4242061. Accessed 30 Aug. 2023.

[iii] Castleberry, Amy Hayes. Virginia Beach. Charleston, SC: Arcadia, 2010. Print.

[iv] Wise, John S. (John Sergeant). The End of an Era. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Co., 1899. Print.

[v] American Missionary Association. History of the American Missionary Association: forty years of missionary labor, -1886. New York, 1886. Pdf. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, <www.loc.gov/item/ltf90009740/>.

[vi] Mansfield, Stephen S. Princess Anne County and Virginia Beach : a Pictorial History. Norfolk: Donning Co., 1989. Print.pg67