Gloucester County, Virginia

The name Zanoni, which is the area of Gloucester on the Ware River between Wilson Creek on the south, Bailey's Point on the northeast, and the Goshen estate on the north, is said to have come from the title of a popular book. Zanoni, by Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton, may have been popular at some time in the past, but it is almost unreadable now. I have a copy published by J. B. Lippincott & Co., Philadelphia, in 1884 ("the Lord Lytton Edition", "complete in one volume"). I started to read it one day, but put it down after wading through only a few pages.

Zanoni general store and post office was run for many, many years by Charles Robins and his wife Mary Lou Robins. My father, while a boy, used to commute across the river from Schley to work for his uncle Charlie.

Schley is named for Admiral Winfield Scott Schley (1839-1909, see also this wikipedia article). Rumor has it that the name was submitted by the mother-in-law of E. B. Brown, who ran the Schley general store (built in 1910 as a successor to a store opened in 1898 by Sam Brown).

Ancestry.com provides this etymology of the name Schley: (1) from Middle Low German slīc ‘tench’, a nickname for someone thought to resemble a tench or a metonymic occupational name for a fisherman or seller of these fish. (2) possibly a topographic name for someone living by the Schlei river.

Wan, which is the community around Indian Road and Rt. 14, between Ware Church and Cow Creek Mill Pond, supposedly got its name by mistake. The story is that someone sent a letter to the postal service seeking to name the post office (now Ware Academy) "Ware". But the postal service employee could not read the handwriting, and gave the area the name "Wan" instead.

History does not record how the name "Ware" came to be used in Gloucester County. Thomas West, who is the source of the name "West Point," was Lord de la Warr (Ware) and also provided a U.S. state's name (can you guess which one?). Peter Ware was also a prominent early settler in the area. I have seen a suggestion that Francis Willis, one of the first Burgesses from Gloucester (in 1652), was from the area around Ware in Hertfordshire, England, though I'm not sure I believe that. Perhaps one of these is the source of the name of the Ware River, which probably preceded the name of Ware Parish.

The county slogan, Land of the life worth living, comes from a description of Gloucester by author Thomas Dixon, Jr.. His book, The Life Worth Living, recounts his stay in the county, living at "Elmington". I have a copy published by Doubleday, Page & Company, New York, 1905, "illustrated with photographs by the Author."

Another of Dixon's books, The Clansman, was the basis for the D. W. Griffith film Birth of a Nation. Let's just say that Dixon's work would not today be considered politically correct.