During the Indian massacre of 1622, nine of the settlers at Berkeley Hundred were killed, as well as about a third of the entire population of the Virginia Colony.

The Berkeley Hundred site and other outlying locations were abandoned as the colonists withdrew to Jamestown and other more secure points.

In 1636 William Tucker, Maurice Thompson, George Thompson, William Harris, Thomas Deacon, James Stone, Cornelius Lloyd of London, merchants and Jeremiah Blackman of London, mariner, and their associates and company patented the 8,000 acres known as Berkeley Hundred.

A portion of the Berkeley Hundred patent was purchased from descendant Giles Bland by Benjamin Harrison III.

By the time Benjamin Harrison VII inherited Berkeley in 1799, the land was worn out after more than two centuries of mono-culture tobacco and cotton crops and the plantation was drifting towards financial ruin.

[10] During the American Civil War, Union troops occupied Berkeley Plantation, and President Abraham Lincoln twice visited there in the summer of 1862 to confer with Gen. George B. McClellan.

[6][11] John Jamieson, a lumber tycoon who as a youth had been at Berkeley as a drummer boy in McClellan's army, purchased the property in 1907.

In 1925, his son Malcolm inherited the property, expending large sums of money to turn the ruined main house into a livable and stately home for himself and his bride Grace Eggleston.

An entablature with dentil moldings support the gabled roof, which is pierced by three dormer windows and two large brick chimneys.

In 1862, during the American Civil War and while the Union Army of the Potomac was camped at Berkeley Plantation, Confederates under General J.E.B.