Peninsula In Passage

18th Century Travel Traveling by road anywhere during the colonial period was a challenge. Colonial roads followed Indian trails, most of which crossed streams and creeks at their headwaters. These trails were widened to wagon and stagecoach roads. In 1673 a crude riding trail, “King’s Highway,” was created for mail service between Boston and New York. By 1750, a continuous road existed for stagecoach or wagon traffic from Boston to Charleston. The “King’s Highway” from Petersburg followed the south shore of the James River and passed through Smithfield to Chuckatuck where it split. One road went south to Suffolk and on to North Carolina and another led east to the ferry crossing the Nansemond River. Mention of the Sleepy Hole Ferry appears in 1701 Virginia General Assembly records and again in 1766 when Lemuel Riddick advertised a tavern and ferry for rent at Sleepy Hole. The King’s Highway and Main Road were names used on 18th century maps for the road from Sleepy Hole towards Portsmouth. Shoulder’s Hill Road was the connector from Driver to the farms in the Bennett and Knott’s Creeks area. The Driver crossroads was the intersection of the stagecoach road from Edenton to Portsmouth with the King’s Highway stage road from Petersburg. Military troops and traffic used the Sleepy Hole Ferry to cross the Nansemond River so the locals were acutely aware of troop movements from both sides…patriots and Tories. These roads skirted marshy creeks and swamps. Country stores, inns and taverns along these byways

served local farmers as well as travelers. Until the establishment of the post office at Driver’s store in the late1800s, there was no government regulated mail delivery system in Nansemond County. Mail was delivered largely via stagecoach drivers and travelers to local taverns, inns and merchants. Merchants, ship captains and travelers handed off pieces of mail until it reached its final destination. Pis Pot Swamp Road, one of the area’s first bypass roads, was built to shorten the drive from the Wilroy area to Driver. At the time the only road to Portsmouth from Suffolk ran through Driver to the Sleepy Hole road and then south skirting the Nansemond River south to Suffolk Town.The Pis Pot Swamp Road was constructed from the Poor Farm by the Glebe Church skirting the swamp to the Wilroy area and is currently named Nansemond Parkway. Taverns

Hargrove’s Tavern, known as the “half-way house” on the road between Suffolk and Norfolk during the eighteenth century, operated near the present day village of Driver. Hargrove’s Tavern was listed as a U.S. Post Office intermittently from 1829 to 1870. W.T. Jordan’s memories of the tavern in the 1850s were recorded in 1907 … a public place of some note, having a country tavern and a large stocked country store; all of the public business of the neighborhood was done there. It was the Post Office and voting precinct for the whole community for miles around, and it was a great convenience to the traveling public of which there was a great deal fifty years ago. On the first of January of every year an immense

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