After several months spent driving Mathews County’s back roads, Dave Brown and Thane Harpole of DATA Investigations LLC of Gloucester have completed a grant-funded architectural survey of 222 county structures. They discussed the survey with members of the Mathews County Historical Society during an Oct. 1 meeting at Kingston Parish Hall.

Brown said the reconnaissance survey included a wide range of structures, from houses to wharves, stores and churches. Mathews County is one of the least surveyed localities in Virginia, he said, and the state previously only had 177 properties in its database for the county. Forty-nine of the recent surveys were repeats of some of the previous ones, he said, so DATA Investigations’ work nearly doubled the number of known structures in Mathews that are at least 50 years of age.

Each of the surveys took only about 15 to 20 minutes of on-site time, said Brown. Investigators would stop by a property, ask for permission to walk around the gr...