Virginia Historic Gate Building & Installation SErvices

Matt Wiley leads the Virginia industry of historic restoration, renovation, preservation or whatever other term you might use to define built to match historic wood pieces.  Today, we call it Architectural Millwork, simply because an architect or Matthew himself will draw up the design using old photos, or just descriptions from written accounts – get client approval and historic tax credit building credits approved to help offset the costs of shop building the historic pieces, and then site installing them.

The gate design pictured form that quintessential federal elongated ellipse over a center opening.  The historic look and feel have a completely modern custom designed steel core to ensure the next hundred years of service.  These gates open to Carter’s Grove Plantation a newly restored historic plantation house. 

Carter’s Grove, also known as Carter’s Grove Plantation, is a 750-acre (300 ha) plantation located on the north shore of the James River in the Grove Community of southeastern James City County in the Virginia Peninsula area of the Hampton Roads region of Virginia in the United States.

The plantation was built for Carter Burwell, grandson of Robert “King” Carter, and was completed in 1755. It was probably named for both the prominent and wealthy Carter family and nearby Grove Creek. Carter’s Grove Plantation was built on the site of an earlier tract known as Martin’s Hundred which had first been settled by the English colonists around 1620. In 1976, an archaeological project discovered the site of Wolstenholme Towne, a small settlement downstream a few miles from Jamestown which had been developed in the first 15 years of the Colony of Virginia. The population of the settlement was decimated during the Indian Massacre of 1622.

After hundreds of years of multiple owners and generations of families, and the death of the last resident in 1964, Carter’s Grove was added to Colonial Williamsburg Foundation’s (CW) properties through a gift from the Rockefeller Foundation in 1969.

Carter’s Grove was open to tourists for many years but closed its doors to the public in 2003 while CW redefined its mission and role. Later that year, Hurricane Isabel seriously damaged Carter’s Grove Country Road, which had linked the estate directly to the Historic Area, a distance of 8 miles (13 km), bypassing commercial and public roadways. CW then shifted some of the interpretive programs to locations closer to the main Williamsburg Historic Area and announced in late 2006 that it would be offered for sale under specific restrictive conditions, including a conservation easement.

In December 2007, CNET founder Halsey Minor acquired the Georgian style mansion and 476 acres (193 ha) for $15.3 million (~$21.7 million in 2023) and announced plans to use it as his home and for a thoroughbred horse breeding program with the Phipps family. The Virginia Outdoors Foundation and the Virginia Department of Historic Resources co-hold the conservation easement on 400 of the 476 acres.  Samuel M. Mencoff acquired the property in 2014.