In 1623, 73 settlers were slain in Martin's Hundred at Wolstenholme Towne, situated on the James about 6 miles (9.7 km) below Jamestown; the survivors temporarily abandoned the settlement.
Governor Francis Wyatt and his Council wrote to the Earl of Southampton that they had under consideration a plan of "winning the forest" by running a pale between the James and York rivers.
In February 1633, the assembly voted to have men in "the compasse of the forest" east of Archer's Hope and Queen's Creek to Chesapeake Bay (essentially all of the lower peninsula) to go "before the first day of March next" to Dr. John Potts' plantation, "newlie built," to erect houses and secure the land in that quarter.
... in this manner to take also in all the grounde between those two Rivers, and so utterly excluded the Indians from thence; which work is conceived to be of extraordinary benefit to the country ..."[2] After 1644, Native Americans of the Powhatan Confederacy had been overcome and were no longer a threat.
Blair and the trustees of the College of William & Mary bought a parcel of 330 acres (1.3 km2) from Thomas Ballard, the proprietor of Rich Neck Plantation, for the new school.
[3] This was on the western outskirts of Middle Plantation, just a short distance from the almost new brick Bruton Parish Church, a focal point of the extant community.
(The present-day College still stands upon those grounds, adjacent to and just west of the restored historic area known in modern times as Colonial Williamsburg).
The design and construction had been oversee by the College of William & Mary's President Benjamin S. Ewell, who owned a farm in James City County.
There was combat in the Williamsburg area in the spring of 1862 during the Peninsula Campaign, a Union effort to take Richmond from the east from a base at Fort Monroe.
Throughout late 1861 and early 1862, the small contingent of Confederate defenders was known as the Army of the Peninsula, and led by popular General John B. Magruder.
In early May 1862, after holding off the Union troops for more than a month, the defenders withdrew quietly from the Warwick Line (stretching across the Peninsula between Yorktown and Mulberry Island).
[4] In the 1930s, the Merrimack Trail was improved as State Route 168 from Anderson Corner (near Toano in western James City County) to the eastern tip of the Peninsula to reach ferry services across the harbor of Hampton Roads to Norfolk.
North of Interstate 64, Queen's Creek forms the border between the military reservations land of Camp Peary and the Cheatham Annex section of the Naval Weapons Station Yorktown.