Cooperating with financier Collis Huntington, Wickham developed coal resources and the Newport News Shipyard.

His son Henry T. Wickham also became a lawyer and would work with his father and eventually twice become the speaker pro tempore of the Virginia Senate.

Wickham was also descended from Robert "King" Carter (1663–1732), who served as an acting royal governor of Virginia and was one of its wealthiest landowners (and largest slaveowners) in the late 17th and early 18th centuries.

Hickory Hill was long an outlying appendage to Shirley Plantation, much of it having come into possession of the Carter family by a deed dated March 2, 1734.

[1][4] He married Lucy Penn Taylor[1] and had several children, including Henry T. Wickam discussed below who followed his father's legal and political career path.

[1] After participating in the First Battle of Manassas, Wickham was commissioned by Governor John Letcher as lieutenant colonel of the Fourth Virginia Cavalry in September 1861.

On May 4, 1862, he incurred a severe saber wound during a cavalry charge at the Battle of Williamsburg and was captured while recovering at Hickory Hill, but quickly paroled.

Recognizing that the days of the Confederacy were over, he participated in the Hampton Roads Conference in an attempt to bring an early end to the war.

[8] However, unlike fellow Confederate officer and railroad leader William Mahone, Wickham was initially unable to secure capital or financing in Virginia, or from Europeans.

Fresh from recent completion of the western portion of the U.S. transcontinental railroad as a member of the so-called "Big Four", Huntington became the C&O's new president.

Under their leadership, an additional line was extended east from Richmond through the new Church Hill Tunnel and down the Virginia Peninsula through Williamsburg to reach coal piers located on the harbor Hampton Roads, the East Coast of the United States' largest ice-free port at the small unincorporated town of Newport News in Warwick County.

In modern times, Newport News, which merged with the former Warwick County in 1958, has grown to become one of the major cities of Hampton Roads.

Throughout the years after the Civil War, while developing railroads (and remaining an officer of the C&O), Wickham continued active in politics.

[10] Wickham died of heart failure on July 23, 1888, at his Richmond office,[4][11] and was interred in Hickory Hill Cemetery in Hanover County near Ashland.

"[13] The general's comrades and C&O employees gave a statue of Williams Carter Wickham to the City of Richmond in 1891, which was placed in Monroe Park.