Eyre Hall

About this property

Eyre Hall is a plantation house located in Northampton, Virginia, close to Cheriton, and owned by the Eyre family since 1668. The property is one of the state's best preserved colonial homes with gardens among the oldest in the United States. The plantation was placed on the National Register on November 12, 1969. It was designated a National Historic Landmark on March 2, 2012. The property where Eyre Hall is located was first patented to the three sons of Thomas Eyre I in 1668 and included 1,600 acres (6.5 km2). A 700-acre (2.8 km2) tract was purchased by Littleton Eyre, a great-grandson of Thomas, in 1754 with the purpose to build a family seat and a working plantation. Eyre reported holding 106 enslaved Africans that year; some of them were moved to the plantation. The original structure built in 1760 was a 41-foot (12 m)-square structure and was a 2½ story wooden home. The house was expanded, an intermediary section was raised to two stories in 1790 and a two-story unit was added in 1807. The house was modernized in 1930 and included a large kitchen, a breakfast room, and a storage building. The property grew periodically over the years too, as a dairy was built in 1760 and a smokehouse was built around 1806. The house is surrounded by boxwood gardens, and formal lawns and fields that melt away into the Cherrystone Creek. On the grounds is also a walled garden from the 1800s, the Eyre family cemetery, and the ruins of an orangery from 1819. Since its origin, 12 generations of the Eyre family have owned the property, several attended the College of William & Mary and served as members of the House of Burgesses. Currently, the estate is owned by H. Furlong Baldwin, a retired Baltimore bank executive and former chairman of Nasdaq who is a descendant of Thomas Eyre. Severn and Margaret Eyre contributed to the consumer revolution of the 18th century, increasing the amount of luxury goods so the family could extend their capacity to engage in a refined manner. The inventory conducted in 1774 inventory mentions two turkey carpets, “Queens china,” “two neat fowling pieces silver mounted,” “1 Violin Bow and Case,” a library with over 300 volumes, and "1 large silver Punch Bowl,” which, valued at thirty pounds, was the most expensive single article of silver included in 1774. This is in all likelihood the supposed Morning Star punch bowl made in London by John Sutton in 1692; an uncommon survival of seventeenth-century residential silver with a Virginia provenance. Eyre family legend dictates that Morning Star, a family racehorse, swallowed champagne from the bowl in the wake of winning a race.

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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