William Mayo started drawing this layout for Richmond in 1736. (Image courtesy Library of Virginia)
William Mayo brought his family from Barbados to Virginia in 1723 at a time of growth and establishment for European interests. He made himself the go-to guy as a professional surveyor and mapmaker in a land possessing few of either distinction. The expansion of the frontiers and the lands on which the new towns arose required planning and division into lots for buying and selling. And, by this, he profited.
Mayo made himself indispensable to the Virginia colony’s mightiest leaders, most notably the complicated grandee William Byrd II. With Byrd and company, he mapped out extensive sections of uncharted Virginia.
This meant taking to the wilderness, and glamping it was not.
Mayo sloshed around in the Great Dismal Swamp, pushed through the thick forestlands into Southwest Virginia and the Piedmont, and along the Potomac and Rappahannock rivers, all the while using his talent and tools to delineate the boundaries of colonies, counties and cities.
Mayo himself ultimately amassed 38,000 acres spread across present-day Goochland, Henrico and Amelia counties. One Goochland grant evolved into southeastern Nelson County, where Mayo Creek is named for him. His holdings included three major plantations in Powhatan, Indian Camp and Fine Creek, and Willis River in Cumberland, some lesser farms and at least three commercial mills. He patented more than 171,000 acres on the western frontier. Mayo managed these businesses with partners but used the labor undertaken by at least 48 enslaved individuals.
In a form of 18th-century road-buddy adventure, Mayo accompanied Byrd on a secret hunt for ginseng because Byrd had heard that the Indigenous people used the plant’s red berries to treat rheumatism and other complaints. Theirs wasn’t the quest for a fountain of youth or a lost city of gold, but if Byrd had thought he could find either, he’d have taken Mayo with him.
And when Byrd chose to lay out a place he’d named Richmond at the Falls of the James River, he asked Mayo to make it happen.
The surveyor took four years to accomplish the project because he was otherwise engaged in making maps to settle Northern Neck boundary disputes between Lord Thomas Fairfax and the Crown. Byrd noted that the stalwart Mayo undertook his Richmond commission “without fee or reward.” Mayo then laid out the town as a freebie for the boss. His map of 1736-37 is the first.
During this period, no formal schooling existed for surveying. One studied how-to texts and, if possible, apprenticed to gain field experience. Mayo learned his lessons well.
He came from Wiltshire in the southwest of England. His parents, Joseph Mayo and Elizabeth Hooper, christened him on Nov. 4, 1684, in Poulshot. Writer and early natural historian John Aubrey, in a 1659 history of Wiltshire, described Poulshot as “a wet, dirty place.” Such a characteristic may have spurred the departure of a Mayo cousin for the more temperate climes of the Caribbean island of Barbados of the then-British West Indies.
There, the 25-year-old Mayo went with his younger brother Joseph.
He married his first wife, 16-year-old Barbados-born Frances Ann Gould, in St. Michael’s Parish on Dec. 11, 1709. They became parents to Sarah, Mary, Johanna and Hester.
Whether he brought surveying knowledge with him or learned it there, Mayo’s expertise soon asserted itself.
From 1717 to 1721, he received a commission to survey Barbados. In April 1722, the British board of trade directed its secretary to subscribe “for one of the maps of Barbados, which Mr. Mayo is about to publish.” The accomplishment earned him money from the map and election into the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge.
Mayo could well have stayed in Barbados, but he may have received a tempting offer to bring his skills to Virginia.
The Mayos came with their daughters, accompanied by brother Joseph and first cousin William Cabell I. By December of that year, the Mayos entered into a rental agreement for land in Henrico County owned by Thomas Randolph of Tuckahoe, who managed properties for William Byrd II.
The family settled in what was a much-larger Goochland County. Their home was situated in present western Powhatan County, perhaps on the site of the successor Blenheim estate. Mayo maintained a full calendar as justice of the peace and county surveyor. He settled the boundary line between Goochland and Hanover counties. The busy Mayo needed an assistant and hired a tall, strong young man: Peter Jefferson, whose son Thomas later achieved some renown.
The Mayos had two more children, Elizabeth and William Mayo Jr., though both died young, as did Hester. Shortly thereafter, so did their mother, Frances Ann.
Then, in 1728, Byrd II hired Mayo to assist in resolving a decades-running boundary dispute between the colonies of Virginia and North Carolina. The governments of both organized separate groups of commissioners and surveyors. This constituted an 18th-century reality TV competition.
Team Virginia by March had made its way to the Great Dismal Swamp. They sloshed through soggy ground and negotiated fallen cypress trees that snagged them, and Byrd wrote of reeds “which grew about 12 feet high, were so thick, and so interlaced with Bamboe-Briars, that our Pioneers were forc’t to open a Passage.” Byrd in his diary referred to Mayo as “honest Astrolabe.”
The groups spent six weeks roughing it and ran their line 73 miles. After arguments that nearly came to blows, Team North Carolina turned back while the Virginians continued on and reached the border of present-day Stokes County, North Carolina. Byrd bequeathed the Mayo River of Henry County its name to honor his colleague.
The Crown annulled North Carolina’s claims and supported Virginia, though the boundary divided some plantations and farms between the two colonies. Today, Virginia and North Carolina both have a Mayo River State Park.
In 1730, Mayo received appointment in the Goochland militia as major. The next year, he wrote a request of marriage to Ann Perratt of Barbados. She consented. Their children were Daniel, Rebecca, John and Joseph.
In 1733, Mayo again accompanied Byrd on a journey to present-day Eden, North Carolina, and Danville.
At Byrd’s home, Blue Stone Castle (in Clarksville, where Prestwould Plantation was later built), Byrd and Mayo “laid the foundations for two large cities, one at the Shaccos, to be called Richmond, and the other at the falls of the Appomattox River, to be named Petersburg. … Thus we did not build castles only, but also cities, in the air.”
“Nonesuch Place” author T. Tyler Potterfield notes, “Byrd’s words suggest that he dreamed of a great city arising at the Falls, but the tone of the sentence implies he did not take it too seriously.”
The Virginia legislature nudged Byrd to start a town for tax purposes, and Byrd finally went along to better control Richmond’s destiny and strongarm competition.
The town that arose along the ridges (and in the mud-riven ravines) along the James River came about through expedience.
“Surveyors like Mayo relied on their ability to measure and record straight lines when creating a town plan,” Potterfield describes. “The planning of Richmond demonstrated little, if any, consideration for the future inhabitants of the city.”
To put it another way, when land becomes real estate, all bets for aesthetic considerations are off. That included no curved streets.
William Mayo used these brass surveying instruments to design his Richmond layout. (Photo courtesy Virginia Historical Society)
Mayo, assisted by James Wood, drew streets 66 feet wide (the length of a surveyor’s chain) and at right angles to the river.
The plan for Richmond, named likely due to the location reminding Byrd of the village west of London, involved a grid with a series of 2-acre squares divided into four half-acre lots and outer estates of 8 to 17 acres.
Mayo then sought to map the entire colony, but the expense delayed the undertaking by 14 years until it was eventually produced by Peter Jefferson and Joshua Fry, assisted by Mayo’s earlier work. He served as the colony’s chief engineer until his Oct. 20, 1744, death in Richmond, aged 58.
His grandson John built (and several times rebuilt) the Mayo’s Toll Bridge (the 14th Street bridge), and a great-grandson, legislator Joseph Carrington Mayo, was Richmond’s Civil War mayor who surrendered the city to the Union army.
