New Kent, VA

At the 2020 census, New Kent was a New Kent County census-designated place and county seat of 739 people, set between Richmond and Williamsburg in a stretch of Virginia where colonial roads, farm fields, and old roadside buildings share the same map. The county seat has been here since 1691, and the old courthouse grounds still hold the 1909 red-brick courthouse, the restored jail, and the New Kent Historical Society. Nearby, the New Kent Ordinary dates to 1692 and operated for centuries as the place where travelers ate, slept, traded, and gathered on court days.

St. Peter’s Parish Church is the headline historic site. Built in 1701–03 with a rare Jacobean form and an 1740 stump tower, it is tied to the January 1759 marriage of George Washington and Martha Dandridge Custis. That story sits alongside the living presence of the Chickahominy Tribe and a county shaped by the Pamunkey, Chickahominy, and York rivers. New Kent is small at the center, but it carries an outsized amount of Virginia history in a few miles of courthouse circle, churchyard, and back roads.