One of the earliest English settlements in the New World, Flowerdew Hundred was established in 1619 by Governor George Yeardly on a peninsula at a bend in the James River and was probably named for Yeardly's bride, Temperance Flowerdew. The 1,400 acres now encompassed in the plantation are part of the original fortified settlement, which contained almost a dozen individual dwellings. Occupied through the eighteenth century, it disappeared c. 1800, but the property continued as a plantation until 1971, when David A. Harrison III set up the Flowerdew Hundred Foundation and began extensive archaeological investigations. These have yielded information about the Native American inhabitants of the area as well as about the colonial settlers. The site is interpreted through a variety of exhibits and reconstructions of historic buildings. America's first windmill was erected here in 1621; on the site is a reconstructed seventeenth-century-style windmill erected in 1975.