In June 1609, while voyaging from England to the Virginia colony, John Rolfe found himself on an unplanned, fateful layover in an island paradise.

A four-day storm (the same one that is said to have inspired Shakespeare's "The Tempest") scattered and destroyed ships, and Rolfe, his wife Sarah, and several other passengers were stranded in Bermuda.

During the next year, while the 100-or-so castaways built two new ships to finish the trip to Jamestown, Sarah gave birth to the Rolfes' daughter, Bermuda. Neither Sarah or her infant daughter – said to be the first English child born in Bermuda – survived for long afterwards, however. A few years after landing in Jamestown in May 1610, Rolfe named his plantation Bermuda Hundred for his daughter.

Just weeks after landing at Jamestown in the spring of 1607, a band of settlers set out on an expedition up what is now the James, with instructions from the Virginia Company of London to explore the source of the river.

Led by one-armed veteran Capt. Christopher Newport, the expedition landed on the third day at the village of the Arrohattoc Indians, where the adventurers became the first Englishmen to set foot on what was to become Henrico soil.

Although the settlers soon returned to Jamestown – after planting a flag at the falls and claiming the river for King James I – that visit was only the first of their exploratory trips upstream.

With the possible exception of the midnight ride of Paul Revere, perhaps no historical event stirs the imagination or fires the patriotism of schoolchildren as does Patrick Henry's "Liberty or Death" speech.

But while Revere's ride was important, Henry's speech in 1775 was a genuine turning point in American history, providing the impetus that helped set the colonies on the road to revolution.

Delivered at St. John's Church in what was then Henrico Parish, the speech rallied a crowd that was inclined to delay confrontation with Great Britain and convinced the members to approve Henry's call to arms.

The occasion of Henrico’s 400th birthday this year has been the cause for celebration throughout the county in a variety of ways during the past 10 months. But in 1961, it appeared possible that the county may have celebrated its last meaningful birthday at the age of 350.

Henrico found itself on life support that year, its lengthy and rich history threatened by the possibility of a merger with the City of Richmond. The impetus for such action: Henrico’s success and rapid growth – made clear to city officials by the 1960 Census, which showed the city’s population had fallen by more than 10,000 residents since 1950, while Henrico’s had grown by nearly 60,000 during the same period.

Henrico County was on the verge of becoming an urban county in the early 1930s, but its government was not organized enough nor properly equipped to handle the growing daily demands it faced in order to operate efficiently, a state auditor wrote at the time. County residents took note, and a grassroots effort began to change the system.

The result: voter adoption in 1933 of the county manager form of government – a form that in the years since has proved a model for nearly all other county governments in Virginia but one that remains the only specific one of its kind in the state.

Motorists zipping along Route 360 or Interstate 295 through eastern Henrico may seldom think about it, but their travels slice across some of the most hotly-contested, strategically-significant territory of the Civil War. Over the course of the week ending on July 1, 1862, the area was the scene of six major battles.

These conflicts, which we now know as the Seven Days Battles, are occasionally labeled the Seven Days Campaign. But rather than being a true, separate campaign, the battles actually represented the culmination of the Peninsula Campaign – Union General George B. McClellan's unsuccessful effort to capture the Confederate capital at Richmond and end the war.

It would be another century before the English colonies erupted into war with the Motherland. But in the mid-1670s, Virginia was already seething with restlessness and discontent.

Thanks to declining tobacco prices and growing competition from Maryland and the Carolinas, Virginia’s one-crop economy – already slammed by a series of hailstorms, floods, droughts and hurricanes – was foundering. Colonists were resentful over what they perceived to be excessive taxes, and displeased with trade restrictions under England’s Navigation Acts.

Nearly 80 years ago, in one of the most important elections in Henrico County’s history, voters cast their ballots without electing anyone to office.

But their decision that day – one that passed by a margin of 1,842 votes to 1,132 – helped change the course of Henrico’s future by making it unique among nearly all other Virginia localities in one very critical way.