General Notes

Sewells Point, a corruption of "Mr. Seawell's Pointe," takes its name from Henry Seawell, who had settled by 1629 in Elizabeth City County, from which Lower Norfolk County was carved in 1637. According to the record, Henry Seawell the elder did "cleare, seate, build, and plant" on one hundred and fifty acres of the tract later known by his name shortly after December of 1633. With his neighbor, Captain Thomas Willoughby, Seawell was among the Virginia executors of Captain Adam Thorowgood, the leading Norfolk area citizen of his day, when the latter died in 1640.
Between 1638 and 1640, the first parish church of Lower Norfolk County, the mother church of the Episcopal Church in the Norfolk area, was built on Sewells Point somewhere on the site of the present Norfolk Naval Station. And when Seawell and his wife died in the early 1640s, they were buried in its chancel.

Henry Seawell, a magistrate of Lower Norfolk county, for whom Seawell’s Point was named, died in 1644, and the court ordered his orphan, Henry Seawell, born May 1, 1639, to be sent to Holland for his education. In 1653 he could write and cypher well, and spoke French and Dutch as well as English. He died without issue before 1672, leaving a sister, wife of Lemuel Mason. (Lower Norfolk county records.)