Peninsula In Passage

The Wright Farm Along Bennett’s Creek Sasser Construction is developing a scenic piece of property called The Waterfront at Parkside. Back in 1777 another owner, Joseph Wright (1777 – 1840), called the property Waverton Plantation. Wright’s descendent, John Wright, Master Builder and founder of Waverton Associates, has been involved in real estate and all phases of residential construction for 40 years. He’s also honed an interest in history and the genealogy of the extended Wright family. He’s preserved artifacts including the journals of his great-great-great grandfather William Joseph Wright, yellowed pages covered with exquisite penmanship, noting every transaction of the plantation in the 1860s and 1870s. The Wrights have been in the area since the early 1600s, according to John Wright, when sea captain Thomas Wright settled on 150 acres. The property locally known as Fruitland was first owned by Richard Bennett who sold to the Wrights who sold to the Eberwines. The original Wright home was built sometime prior to 1814. “As a kid I played in the house,” Wright says. “It was rickety and scary for 6 year olds.” The house was dismantled in 1960 and some of the Wright descendants have pieces of the heart pine flooring that was cut from the plantation when the house was built. In about 1850 Joseph Wright’s son, William Joseph Wright (1820 – 1876) planted the upper end of the plantation in fruit trees in the area that is now known as Steeplechase and also on land at the northwest corner of Park Road and Shoulder’s Hill Road. He started one of the first canneries in the South. In the late 1900s, Lucille Eberwine, in writing a paper for the Driver Book Club, noted - In 1850 on the Wright Farm known as “Fruitland Farm,” there was a canning plant to preserve the fruits grown in the orchards there. These cans had to be made by hand out of tin and

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