The area was originally appears in colonial Virginia history as a 100-acre land grant from governor Sir Francis Wyatt to Edward Waters in 1624, located between a creek and Blunt Poynt.

[1] The creek supported a series of gristmill operations from as early as the seventeenth century, including Causey's Mill built in 1866).

[1] in 1675, the Langhorne family would acquire the land, build a home called 'Gambell', and grow their holdings in the area over several generations.

After the Huntington acquisition took place, the first two years were devoted to creating and improving a natural park and constructing a dam to create a lake that the Board of Trustees named "Lake Maury", after the nineteenth-century Virginian Commodore Matthew Fontaine Maury, who was nicknamed the "Father of Modern Oceanography".

Archer and his wife, would use the acquired 800 acres (3.2 km2) to develop a museum and park that would come to hold 61,000 square feet (5,700 m2) of exhibition galleries, a research library, a 167-acre (676,000 m2) lake, a five-mile (8 km) shoreline trail with fourteen bridges, and over 35,000 maritime artifacts from around the globe.