John Berkeley was born about 1560 at the family estate, Beverstone Castle in Gloucestershire, England. He was the only son and one of four children of Sir John Berkeley and his first wife Frances Poyntz Berkeley. The Berkeley family had once owned more than thirty manors in eight shires, but by the time of Berkeley's father's death in October 1582, the family estate had been reduced to the one property of Beverstone Castle and Manor.
In 1597 John sold his ancestral castle, possibly to enter the iron industry, for the man recommended in 1621 to erect and conduct ironworks on the Virginia frontier could have been no industrial novice. The Society of Southampton Hundred, holding patents under the Virginia Company of London and obliged by it to employ an anonymous gift of £550 in educating Indian children as Christians, determined to augment the sum and use it in erecting "an ironwork" in Virginia, promising for Indian education the returns pro rata on the gift. By 1621, £4, 000 was ventured and Captain Bluett was sent with eighty workmen to Virginia. Bluett died shortly after reaching Jamestown, and the authorities, accepting Berkeley's terms, gave him Bluett's privileges with means to hire twenty additional mechanics and to transport them, himself, his son, and three personal servants from the Isle of Wight before August.
Berkeley was appointed to the Virginian Council; he built ironworks on the west side of Falling Creek, south of James River, seven miles below Richmond, and early in 1622 sent word to England that he expected to make iron by Whitsuntide. But when the Londoners voted to meet his expenditures, Berkeley and his workmen lay dead in Virginia surrounded by ruined machinery. On March 22, under crafty Opechancanough, the Indians massacred 347 white persons in Virginia. Maurice, John's son, survived, and the company, powerless to provide funds to recreate the works, granted his petition to release him from their service and give him the 800 acres formerly promised him and his father for their service in the ironworks.
John Berkeley ended tragically and his work perished with him. But he built for himself a home in men's minds. The Virginia Historical Society preserves slag from his furnace.
John Berkeley was married to Mary, daughter of John Snell, Esquire. They had ten children.
