The year 2026 marks the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Cardinal News has embarked on a three-year project to tell the little-known stories of Virginia’s role in the march to independence. This project is supported, in part, by a grant from the Virginia American Revolution 250 Commission. Find all our stories from this project on the Cardinal 250 page.
Dec. 5 will be Susanna Bolling Day in the Commonwealth of Virginia.
According to a joint resolution in the General Assembly, passed by the House and Senate in February 2019, Susanna Bolling was a 16-year-old girl living on her family’s plantation in City Point (later Hopewell) in May 1781. British General Charles Cornwallis arrived and quartered his officers in the Bolling home. Susanna overheard the British discussing their plans to capture the French general, Marquis de Lafayette, at the Half Way House in Chesterfield County.
“In the middle of the night,” the resolution continues, “Susanna Bolling snuck out of her home through a secret underground tunnel, crossed the Appomattox River in a canoe, borrowed a neighbor’s horse, rode through pitch darkness to the Half Way House, and warned General Lafayette of General Cornwallis’s plan to capture him …
“Thanks to Susanna Bolling’s warning, General Lafayette evaded capture and went on to play cat-and-mouse with the British Southern Army, trapping General Cornwallis and his soldiers in Yorktown by August 1781,” leading to “the Patriot victory at Yorktown, which would not have been possible without Susanna Bolling’s courage, patriotism, and determination …”
“Therefore, be it RESOLVED by the House of Delegates, the Senate concurring, That the General Assembly designate December 5, in 2019 and in each succeeding year, as Susanna Bolling Day in Virginia …”
It’s an amazing, little-known story — but is it true?
Brianna Gettier is administrative manager of the Historic Hopewell Foundation. According to Gettier, the foundation approached Del. Riley Ingram with the idea for the resolution. The foundation trustee who was most involved with the resolution is in ill health and not available for comment.
Ingram, of Hopewell, served in the House from 1992 to 2020. In a brief phone conversation, Ingram offered to have a person with knowledge of Susanna’s story call Cardinal News, but the follow-up call was not received.
Libby McNamee is the author of a historical fiction novel for young readers, “Susanna’s Midnight Ride,” which is based on the story of Susanna Bolling. She said she first heard the story from a person with a connection to the Bolling family.
“Talking to people in the Hopewell area, some of them had never heard of it, but there were a lot of them, especially the older ones,” who said they had been told about Susanna as a bedtime story. “I met people who had played in the ruins of that tunnel.”
Beyond oral tradition, there are few documentary sources for Susanna Bolling.
A notation in a Bolling family Bible, transcribed by the Rev. J. Ogle Warfield of Philadelphia, and published in a 1915 edition of “The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography,” gives her parents as Alexander and Susanna Bolling and her birth date as Dec. 5, 1764.
“The Prince George-Hopewell Story,” by Francis Earle Lutz, was published in 1957 by William Byrd Press in Richmond.
Cornwallis “prepared to seek out and annihilate ‘the boy’ Lafayette who was operating on the north side of the James River,” Lutz wrote. “In his movement from Petersburg, Cornwallis spent one night at Mitchell’s, the Bolling home which stood until recently on Mansion Hill in the present Hopewell.” After overhearing their plans, Susanna rode to the “Half-Way House on the present Richmond-Petersburg Turnpike, where she communicated the British plans to the young French nobleman.”
The geography in this account is not clear. The James here flows from northwest to southeast; the Half Way House — which still stands — is on the southwestern side of the river, not the north, where Lutz says Lafayette’s forces were operating.
“The noted British historian, Charles Stedman, in his ‘History of the Origin, Progress and Termination of the American War,’ passes on this legendary act of heroism to posterity,” Lutz wrote. But Chapter XLIV of Stedman’s Vol. 2, which deals with Cornwallis and Lafayette, does not mention Susanna.
“I looked at Stedman and it does not seem to be in there, nor is it the kind of story that Stedman seemed likely to include,” wrote Kevin Shupe of the Library of Virginia Archives Reference Services in an email. “To our knowledge we have no evidence of this ride.”
The Sons of the American Revolution designates Susanna as SAR Patriot #P-347337. SAR’s online documentation cites her entry in “Women Patriots of the American Revolution,” by Charles Claghorn (1991). “Susanna was taken to Lafayette himself, and told him about the plans of Lord Cornwallis,” Claghorn wrote. The information came from three Richmond residents, but Claghorn doesn’t say whether it was oral or documentary.
Two recent biographies of Lafayette, “Hero of Two Worlds” by Mike Duncan (2021) and “The Marquis: Lafayette Reconsidered” by Laura Auricchio (2014), fail to mention Susanna.
An article by Judge Thomas B. Robertson in the Hopewell News, dated 1942 according to this website, gives a different account. In this version, it was not Susanna who alerted Lafayette; instead, Susanna had an unnamed friend deliver the warning to the French general at the Half Way House and “Amphill,” probably meaning Ampthill, a house then located north of the Half Way House (the Ampthill house was moved to Richmond in the 20th century). It’s not clear whether Lafayette was at the Half Way House or Ampthill in Robertson’s account.
None of this is to say that Susanna’s midnight ride could not have happened, but, if it did, the ripples from her oars and the hoofprints of her horse have left only murky traces in history —unless there’s a 200-year-old first-person testimonial still lying undiscovered in a box of Bolling records somewhere.
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