The document, which has gone missing for decades at a time, is being restored by the Library of Virginia.
In an inconspicuous reading room on the third floor of the Library of Virginia, work is underway to restore a seminal document in the history of Chesterfield County – the 1749 Commission of the Peace, now considered the county’s original charter.
“It is the birth certificate of Chesterfield County,” said Liess van der Linden-Brusse, the librarian of the Chesterfield Historical Society.
It is a difficult piece of parchment to miss. Not only does it still have its original ribbon-and-wax seal, but it’s about 80 inches diagonally from corner to corner — the size of a very large television.
Despite that, the charter has had an extraordinary journey over more than 275 years — disappearing multiple times along the way before ending up in the library’s hands in 2017.
“We know that the document was in a lot of locations,” laughed Amanda Pohl, the county’s clerk of court.
The document started out as a pact between Sir William Gooch — Goochland County’s namesake — and King George II to set up Chesterfield’s courthouse and designate various officers to police it.
At the time, van der Linden-Brusse explained, English settlers were moving to the county and increasingly settling south of the James River on the western side of the area around Richmond.
“But for everything in life, they had to go to the [Henrico] courthouse — marriage, deeds, deaths,” she said. “And the courthouse was in Varina, on the other side of the James River.”
So Gooch’s agreement with King George created Chesterfield, with the courthouse directly in its center. A bit more than 25 years later, the American Revolution swept through Virginia.
“During the Revolutionary War, someone took the time to remove it from the courthouse and hide it — as well as all the other documents in that courthouse — to prevent it from being damaged,” said Leslie Courtois, the Library of Virginia’s conservator. Courtois is leading the restoration effort, which began in earnest this spring after being put on hold during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The charter never went missing during the Revolution, but the Civil War was a different story. County administrators left it in the courthouse during the entire Civil War. After the Siege of Petersburg, van der Linden-Brusse said, a Union soldier walked into the empty courthouse and encountered the charter there.
“He sees the document on the wall, and he reads it and realizes that he has an ancestor’s name there. So he folds it up and puts it in his backpack,” she said.
Its whereabouts remained unknown for almost 100 years, until the county’s board of supervisors hired author Francis Earle Lutz to write a book on the county’s history in the 1950s.
Lutz finished the book, Chesterfield: An old Virginia county, and took a vacation to Oneida, New York, where he was surprised by what he found at a secondhand bookstore: “In the window, there’s a small sign that says ‘Chesterfield County Virginia, Commission of the Peace for Sale.’”
Lutz bought the charter for $43.60 — which he successfully petitioned the board of supervisors to reimburse him for — and asked his publisher to add photographs of the document and an account of how it was rediscovered to the book before it was released.
The document’s travels should have ended there. But somehow, it disappeared again. Lewis Vaden was the clerk of court in the county when Lutz returned it; he had the charter hung in his office, where it stayed until he left office in 1962. When he returned to the same post in 1974, “it was no longer hanging in the Clerk of Court’s office.”
This time, it would be missing for more than 40 years — until 2017, when van der Linden-Brusse was going through old newspapers at the Chesterfield Historical Society. She discovered it at the bottom of a cardboard newspaper box, still intact — seal and all.
“And at that point… I just sat down,” she said.
Pohl, the court clerk, said that once the restoration is complete, the charter will be housed in a custom-made frame and kept in a secure location in the courthouse. A detailed facsimile will be on display for the public to see.
“This is a document with frequent flyer miles,” van der Linden-Brusse said. “I’m not kidding, it has appeared and disappeared.”
This story was produced as part of the VPM News series Curious Commonwealth.
