Gargaphia

The site of Gargaphia, the home plantation of Anne Toft (ca. 1642-ca. 1687), is about a mile southeast of here. Toft came to Virginia about 1660, when fewer than 1/5 of English arrivals were women. Closely allied with Col. Edmund Scarburgh II, a burgess and Virginia’s surveyor general, she acquired more than 30,000 acres in Virginia, Maryland, and Jamaica, on which indentured and enslaved laborers worked. While she was single, she engaged in international trade, defended her interests in court, and became the wealthiest woman on the Eastern Shore. About 1671 she married Daniel Jenifer of Maryland. A great-grandson, Daniel of St. Thomas Jenifer, was a signer of the U.S. Constitution.