| The 2004 season kicked off April 1st with the addition of an exciting new exhibit in the Carter Reception Center. “The Houses of Robert Carter” explores the history of some 22 Virginia houses connected to Robert Carter through his children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. The digital, interactive exhibit allows visitors to use a touch screen to navigate through one to two minute videos on each of the houses. Visitors can browse the houses either by their names or by the particular Carter descendant with whom they are associated. A short segment on Robert Carter and his legacies for Virginia house building provides an introduction to the exhibit. |
 Visitors can search the Carter houses by house name or Carter descendant. |
The exhibit is a veritable who’s-who of colonial Virginia planters and colonial domestic architecture, as Carter’s descendants were responsible for or connected to some of the most important houses constructed in eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Virginia. Of the 22 dwellings featured, 15 still stand today and are privately owned and/or open to the public as historic houses. The others are either ruins, such as Rosewell in Gloucester County; archaeological sites, such as Corotoman, Carter’s home in Lancaster County, and Fairfield, Rosewell’s neighbor in Gloucester; or sites that contain little to nothing of the original house and where no archaeological investigations have as yet been undertaken, such as at Cleve in King George County or Blenheim in Albemarle County. |
Staff from Historic Christ Church, building on the work of the Volunteer Research Committee, joined with Williamsburg multimedia company Legacy Communications to design the exhibit. Creative Director Rob Stephens filmed a number of the sites, while HCC staff tracked down historical documents, architectural drawings and photographs, Carter family portraits, and other materials to help tell the story of these remarkable houses. Editor Cory Caplan of Earworks in Virginia Beach used his considerable talents to shape all these resources into a marvelous final product.
The exhibit was financed in part by a gift made in memory of R. Carter Wellford, III. |
