Part of my continuing series highlighting the ten postcards you can send your friends on Facebook using our new Facebook Postcard application.

This week's postcard is from one of my favorite Virginia State Parks, Chippokes State Park. The picture on the postcard is the historic Jones-Stewart mansion. In 1854, Albert Carroll Jones built the present Chippokes Mansion, which overlooks the historic James River. This Italianate structure was built of brick, stuccoed and painted on its river facade.

Chippokes was once the site of one of the few legal distilleries in the Commonwealth. Local legend has it that the mansion survived the Civil War because Albert Jones sold his brandies to both sides during the war. The plantation changed owners many times before it was bought by Thornton Jeffress of Rochester, New York and V.W. Stewart of Wilson, North Carolina in 1918.

Mr. and Mrs. Stewart moved to Chippokes and put much effort into restoring the property and compiling a detailed history of the plantation. Upon her husband's death, Mrs. Stewart, in order to preserve the plantation in its entirety, donated Chippokes to the Commonwealth as a memorial to her husband in 1967. Mrs. Stewart hoped that the plantation would be made into a park and preserved as a working farm to interpret day-to-day farm life through the centuries.

Gift shop operated by the Friends of Chippokes State Park
and located in an outbuilding of the Jones-Stewart Mansion

The Mansion sits amid a formal garden that a cadre of volunteers lovingly tend. A number or outbuildings also dot the garden. The park is also home to a Farm and Forestry Museum with historic farming equipment. The Museum is managed by The Chippokes Farm Foundation. Chippokes also features four rental cottages that are restored historic tenant houses, The furnishings are reflective of the period.

Cabin 4 Master Bedroom

This postcard represents the historical aspects of our Virginia State Parks. All of our parks interpret the history and culture of the park and local area in addition to the natural world for which we are perhaps better known. However, we have a number of parks whose focus is primarily history.

We have two Civil War battlefield state parks - Sailor's Creek and Staunton River Battlefield. We have the Southwest Virginia Museum Historical State Park with a collection that chronicles the exploration and development of southwest Virginia during the 1890s coal boom as well as the pioneer period. Finally we have Wilderness Road State Park with a carefully restored 18th century station (Martin's Station) on the Wilderness Road.

Re-enactors at Sailor's Creek Battlefield State Park

Historical interpreters at Wilderness Road State Park
demonstrate life at a station on the Wilderness Road

Send this week's postcard or one of the nine others to a friend today, You can access the application by clicking here or by clicking on the Postcard link on the left side of our Facebook page under the picture.