Grand mansion is lost to time

Travellers' Rest was a beautiful old mansion on Kings Highway in Stafford County. Now it's part of 'Lost Fredericksburg.' By Donna Chasen THE LIBRARY OF VIRGINIA

Date published: 11/27/2004

A long driveway leads to Travellers' Rest, off Kings Highway in Stafford County. The land on which the house was later built was originally owned by Col. James Ball in 1700. The site was documented for the WPA Virginia Historical Inventory in 1938.

VIRGINIA MILITARY INSTITUTE ARCHIVES

First of two parts

KINGS HIGHWAY in eastern Stafford County was once the site of numerous estates and manor houses whose lawns sloped gracefully down to the river's edge of the Rappahannock. Flat lands and fields of corn spread out gracefully on either side of this highway leading to Northern Neck.

Not all of these grand homes remain standing today. Travellers' Rest--one of the grandest--is just a memory, its grounds once used as a sand-and-gravel company's site. In its prime, the house was the center of hospitality. Legend is that there was prominently displayed the sentiment "Enter ye weary, no matter whence you came and whither you go, and have rest." Today, the site, about five miles from the Chatham Bridge near Sherwood Forest, sits deserted and radically changed due to years of excavation, its only remaining feature an overgrown and hidden old cemetery.

Travellers' Rest evolved throughout the years from a somewhat small Colonial home to a grand mansion with beautiful gardens laid out in formal patterns by an English landscape gardener.

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Date published: 11/27/2004