Wills Corner | Cherry Grove Road

Wills Corner

 “In 1642 Isle of Wight County was divided into two parishes, called Upper and Lower parishes.  The Pagan River was the general dividing line.  Inhabitants of Ragged Island and Terrascoe Neck won their petition to be changed from Nansemond to Isle of Wight County in 1656.  In 1674 the House of Burgesses passed an act settling the old boundary dispute between Nansemond and Isle of Wight.  An interesting stipulation in the act was that “…the house and cleared grounds of Captain Thomas Godwin, who has been an ancient inhabitant of Nansemond County be deemed in the county of Nansemond, anything in this act to the contrary notwithstanding.”

Mills E. Godwin, Jr., a descendant of this Captain Godwin wrote:  “The home of Thomas Godwin I was at Wills Corner, about one mile north of Chuckatuck on the boundary line of Nansemond and Isle of Wight counties.  It was known as “Castle” and later as “Oldcastle”. (1)

At one time it is also reported that there was a Christian Church located near here called Wills Chapel. (2)  Former members of Mill Swamp and Smithfield Baptist churches founded Whiteheads Grove Baptist Church in old Wills Chapel, a former Christian church.   The congregation moved to a new building on Joel Brock’s farm near Longview in 1844.  Under the leadership of the Reverend J. F. Deans of Smithfield Baptist, it moved to a new building at the present site in 1877.  The name was changed to honor John Whitehead, who had given the land. (3)

My dad, Barbee Gilliam, bought the store at Wills’ Corner in 1950 from the widow of a brother of Herbert Hall.  I remember going to the store with my dad right after he bought it and before he had opened it himself.  There was a pot-bellied stove in the store and since I had put my hand in the snow before going in I put my hand on the stove to dry my glove and learned that you should never touch a pot-bellied stove.

At the time he bought the store, the woods came right up to the back door.  He was also able to buy some of the Wills’ property right behind the store and bulldozed the woods behind the store.  He then added a section larger than the original building.  Originally there were stairs going up to the apartment over the store from inside the store and a 2-room apartment over the store.  There was a large porch across the whole front.  He enclosed the porch, and added two large bedrooms and a bathroom upstairs.  The porch became our living room.  The old sitting room where the steps were became our kitchen.  The store itself doubled in size.  He sold everything, clothes, sewing supplies, medicine, wine, beer, groceries, that wonderful cheese that came in the round wooden boxes, ham, side meat, salt fish, and just about anything you could think of.

We lived in the apartment over the store and I learned to skate around the counters in the store when we weren’t busy.  It was the only pavement around.  At night the regulars would play checkers on a wooden checkerboard sitting on a wooden nail keg in the back section of the store.

On Sundays, everyone brought something to put in the Sunday Stew.  In the store, crops were planted and harvested, football and baseball games were bet on and discussed, jokes between this store and Gwaltney’s in Chuckatuck were played by the regulars, and something was going on all the time.  My dad kept a gun under the counter and never hesitated to pick up any troublemaker and throw them out of the store.  One time someone came in and tried to rob him, he picked up a cabbage and used his best baseball pitch to hit the would-be robber in the head with a cabbage.  It was the closest thing around.

In time he was able to purchase all four corners.  Isle of Wight County decided to square up theintersection with Route 10 and went through the middle of the lot across Route 10 from the store.  There was a house on that corner just about where the road is now that was torn down.  There was a building on the left corner of Oliver Drive that was torn down.  I used it for a barn and had 4 stables in it.  There was an old storehouse at the Nansemond County end of that lot.  It was used as a dwelling when my dad bought the store but was formally a store.  The story was that boys would stand in front of it and open the gate between the two counties since one had a fence law and the other didn’t.