JH Carr & Sons

This is a great photo taken at the SEFA Conference on the "Garden Tour" what a great day! My brother Jim and I had a great time with the Muckenthaler family, "Doing the Willamsburg Tour", if you need to know anything about building a wagon let us know I think we may have struck a deal with the Master Wheel maker!

In addition to English royal govenors Spotswood, Fauquier, and Botetourt, the Palace was home to royal governors Hugh Drysdale, William Gooch, Robert Dinwiddie, and John Murray, the fourth earl of Dunmore. After the Revolution began, it sheltered Virginia state governors Patrick Henry and Thomas Jefferson.

Beyond the house was a formal garden, and guests could stand on the mound of earth that covered the icehouse to look into a large, naturalistic park that stretched away to the north. The stable, carriage house, kitchen, scullery, laundry, and an octagonal bathhouse were arranged in service yards beside the advance buildings.

Three surviving inventories of personal property attest to the elaborate furnishings of a household that required 25 servants and slaves to tend. There were butlers, footmen, cooks, laundresses, gardeners, maids, grooms, and laborers. When Governor Botetourt died, the cellars held 2,820 bottles of Madeira, hock, small beer, strong beer, porter, claret, burgundy, and port. He told a deathbed visitor that he was leaving his Palace comforts "with as much Composure as I enjoyed them."

The entrance hall seems to have been completed in October of 1711. Spotswood had decorated it with a display of bayonet-tipped muskets when William Byrd came to visit that month. Another act to finish and beautify the residence passed in 1713, but it was three more years before Spotswood took up residence, and the work was still incomplete in 1718.