Belle Isle State Park is located in Lancaster County, Virginia, on the Rappahannock River. It sits between Deep Creek and Morattico Creek and is currently under public ownership. The park has an area of 733 acres (2.97 km2) and has facilities for fishing, boating and picnics.
The park is a peninsula surrounded by Tidewater coastal marshes. Wildlife observed includes blue herons, osprey, hawks, bald eagles, white-tailed deer and various reptiles and amphibians. It is near the unincorporated towns of Litwalton, Morattico and Somers.
The park and Georgian style mansion were operated in the 19th century as a plantation. The property was acquired in 1692 by John Bertrand. Belle Isle mansion was built around 1760 by Raleigh Downman and restored in the 1940s. The architect for the restoration was Thomas Tileston Waterman, the first director of the Historic American Buildings Survey . Some of the interior rooms and paneling can be seen today at the Winterthur Museum in Delaware. The house, which is surrounded by the park but still privately owned, was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1971. Bel Air, a colonial revival house on the grounds designed by Waterman, can be rented for overnight stays. In addition, there is a cottage that can also be rented.
The park has a spacious campground that has RV lots, tent sites as well as trailers that are able to be rented. It has a boat launch as well as boats that can be rented as well.
Famous quotes containing the words belle isle, belle, isle, state and/or park:
“Remembering the Strait of Belle Isle or
some northerly harbor of Labrador,
before he became a schoolteacher
a great-uncle painted a big picture.”
—Elizabeth Bishop (1911–1979)
“I generally avoid temptation unless I can’t resist it.”
—Mae West, U.S. screenwriter, W.C. Fields, and Edward Cline. Flower Belle Lee (Mae West)
“It is so rare to meet with a man outdoors who cherishes a worthy thought in his mind, which is independent of the labor of his hands. Behind every man’s busy-ness there should be a level of undisturbed serenity and industry, as within the reef encircling a coral isle there is always an expanse of still water, where the depositions are going on which will finally raise it above the surface.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The superficiality of the American is the result of his hustling. It needs leisure to think things out; it needs leisure to mature. People in a hurry cannot think, cannot grow, nor can they decay. They are preserved in a state of perpetual puerility.”
—Eric Hoffer (1902–1983)
“Borrow a child and get on welfare.
Borrow a child and stay in the house all day with the child,
or go to the public park with the child, and take the child
to the welfare office and cry and say your man left you and
be humble and wear your dress and your smile, and don’t talk
back ...”
—Susan Griffin (b. 1943)