Land, Francis, House (Additional Documentation)

About this property

The Francis Land House, or Rose Hall, is a historic brick house in located within the Rose Hall District near Princess Anne Plaza in Virginia Beach, Virginia. It was the plantation home of the prominent Land family, a founding family of Princess Anne County, Virginia. Land family history on the site spanned the 1630s to the 1850s. The house passed through six males named Francis Land and then the last Francis' daughters before being sold to another family. Slaves were first documented on the site in 1694, with importation of new slaves up to the 1730s. In the mid-18th century the plantation had as many as 20 slaves. The first Francis Land arrived in the area in 1638–1639 and later acquired 1,020 acres (410 ha) of land by 1654, 200 of which was acquired via head rights by bringing four people with him. The plantation got as small as 350 acres (140 ha) over the next 150 years and at the time the current house was built the plantation was just under 700 acres (280 ha). The current house sits on 7 acres (2.8 ha) of that original plantation, and is now in the midst of a very commercialized area. The house was at one time thought to have been built in 1732, but recent research has placed its construction in the period 1805–1810 by Francis Land VI. Francis VI and his family lived there around 1805–1819, when Francis VI died. When Francis Moseley Land built the house his family had already been living on that land for 150 years. Francis VI and his wife had two daughters, Mary E. Land and Anne White Land. Mary married John Newton Walke (their son Frank Anthony Walke was a Confederate Soldier). Anne married John Minson Galt in 1833. Their son Francis Land Galt was surgeon and acting paymaster of the famed Confederate raider CSS Alabama. Mary and Anne held onto the land until about 1850–1851, when it was first sold outside their family. In the early 1900s, Junius Thompson Sheets and his wife, Flora, purchased land, which included the historic Francis Land house, in what is now Lynnhaven, Virginia. The roof was raised 20 inches (510 mm) in 1912. In 1929, their son, Emmett Don Sheets sold the property to their daughter, Jane (Jennie) and her husband, Raymond Garfield DeFrees. A large portion of the property was lost to foreclosure during the 1930s, but the DeFrees family kept the primary residence, the Francis Land House, and surrounding acreage as a dairy farm until the mid-1950s. Raymond DeFrees was a civil engineer, and traveled frequently from Washington, D.C. to Florida while working for the Bureau of Evaluation. He was also a charter member of and teacher for the Amateur Astronomer's Club in Washington, D.C. Many groups came to the historic Francis Land house and farm to learn from him.

Location

Categories

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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