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VAF-Chesapeake Chapter Field Tours
Since 2021, chapter organizers have arranged tours at various sites in Maryland and Virginia, usually in the spring and fall. All VAF members are welcome to attend and bring up to two non-member guests.
2026
In October 2026 we toured two sites in New Castle Co., Delaware - Weston (ca. 1800, 1850) and the Cleaver House and Store (aka Linden Hall) (1832).
Weston is an excellent example of an intact late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century farm complex located south of the Chesapeake & Delaware Canal, within the agriculturally rich lands of central Delaware. The main dwelling, constructed in multiple phases beginning circa 1830, exemplifies the widespread practice of rebuilding and enlarging older dwellings during the mid-nineteenth century. In the late 1850s, the then-owners of Weston constructed a substantial new house in front of the earlier dwelling, effectively transforming the original portion into a rear service ell. In addition to the main dwelling, Weston retains a significant collection of historic agricultural and domestic outbuildings.
Our second stop of the day was also a circa 1830 dwelling, Linden Hall. The house was commissioned by prominent landowner and merchant Joseph Cleaver, whose unique needs for the building are still legible in its design. Cleaver intended one portion of the building to serve as a residence for himself and his family, while the other was dedicated to office and retail space for his mercantile business. These distinct functions are cleverly disguised on the exterior behind a unified Federal-style façade, giving the building the appearance of two connected urban townhouses—an unusual sight in the small village of Port Penn.
VAF Chesapeake at Linden Hall, Port Penn, DE
In April 2026 the Vernacular Architecture Forum Chesapeake Chapter visited three properties in New Kent County, Virginia: Shuttlewood, Saint Peter's Parish Church, and Hampstead.
Shuttlewood is an intact example of the ubiquitous I-House form built for a wealthy planter in the 1850s.
Saint Peter's Parish Church is a National Historic Landmark as the second oldest extant church in Virginia, built 1701-03, and is noted for its exceptional brickwork.
Hampstead is an elegant 1825 two-story brick house overlooking the Pamunkey River Valley, noted for its refined interior details and extant outbuildings.
Chesapeake Chapter Members
at Hampstead
2025
On September 13, 2025 Chesapeake Chapter members visited two sites in Howard County, Maryland. First up was Blandair, a five-bay, two-story brick house constructed around 1858 for Thomas H. Gaither and Sophia Mayo. It has a center-passage plan with large double parlors, a dining room and a small drawing room on the first floor; all the rooms feature arched marble mantels adorning interior chimneys.
The Blandair farm is an excellent example of the changing face of the Maryland landscape between the late-eighteenth and late-twentieth centuries.The house and its both earlier and later outbuildings (double-pen, plank quarter, meathouse, granary, springhouse-dairy, tenant houses, and hog house/hay barn) today sit in a county park in Howard County, Maryland, surrounded by Columbia, a town developed by the Rouse Corporation. Blandair was not subsumed into the development through the determination of Elizabeth Smith, the reclusive last private owner of the farm.
In the afternoon we were hosted by the Franciscan Friars Conventual in Ellicott City at Carrollton Hall (also known as Folly Quarter), a refined neoclassical house designed by Baltimore architect William Small, who apprenticed under Benjamin Henry Latrobe. Constructed in 1831-1832 on Charles Carroll of Carrollton's estate for his granddaughter Emily MacTavish, the granite ashlar building is classically proportioned with monumental, tetrastyle Greek Doric porticos on its front and rear facades. We also toured the adjacent Shrine of St. Anthony, originally built in 1930-31 as a novitiate or place for novice members of the order to live, worship, and train together. Inspired by the Sacro Convento of Assisi, Italy, Friar Benedict Przemielewski designed this Italian Renaissance building on a rise overlooking Carrollton Hall.
Carrollton Hall
2024
On May 5, 2024, we headed to Charlottsville, VA to visit Pavilion IX at the University of Virginia (UVA), designed by Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Henry Latrobe to be a classroom and housing for one of the professors at the new university. It was built from 1819-1822 by masons Charles Carter and William Phillips and carpenters John Neilson and George Spooner.
That afternoon, the group visited three-part-plan house, Oak Lawn, completed in 1822 and thought to have been built by some of Jefferson’s builders at UVA. It was the house of Nimrod Braham, a merchant, magistrate, and militia officer. UVA recently purchased Oak Lawn and began a long-term research and planning project on the property. This visit represented an opportunity to examine a house that has been little studied. Our tour guides were Jeff Klee and Mark Kutney.
Oak Lawn, Photo courtesy of Jeff Klee.
2023
On June 24, 2023, we toured the former Aquia Quarries in Stafford County, Viriginia that supplied the stone for both the White House and the US Capitol. Aquia freestone is a definitive element in this region’s vernacular architecture. It was used architecturally from at least the 1660s to the 1970s, due to the fact that it was easily quarried and worked by the most rudimentary agricultural tools. Our tour guides were Jerrilynn and Rick McGregor, respectively the historian and former president of the Stafford County Historical Society.
The Aquia Church, 1751-1757.
Also visited were buildings that utilized Aquia freestone, including nearby Concord, with its stone end chimneys. Built during the second quarter of the eighteenth-century as a hall-parlor house, it has been in the MacGregor family since the 1850s. The tract included at least five quarry pits and three landings on Aquia Creek for ease of transport. Next, was the Robertson-Towson house, a c. 1815 ruin built of Aquia freestone. The house is one a few buildings in Stafford that was constructed of blocks of freestone rather than rubble and featured a simple side-passage design with a hall and one room on each floor. It remained in the Towson family until at least 1999. The final stop was the open-span, cruciform design Aquia Church, an impressive and well-preserved 1750s brick structure with Aquia stone embellishments. Construction of this magnificent building commenced in 1751 and was completed in 1757, undertaken by master mason William Copein (1730-1805). It is considered one of finest colonial-era buildings in the United States.
September 16, 2023, took us to Hopewell. Built in 1818 with a 1966 Chesapeake styled addition, Hopewell farm is among the most elaborate, innovative, and intact working farmsteads in the region. It represents a particularly robust example of the gable-and-hipped-roof house type particular to the region, manifesting an L-shaped configuration that joins the two gable roof sections with a hip. It also features a raised basement kitchen, furnishings that date back generations, a terraced landscape, and a full complement of outbuildings. Our hosts were Peter and Mary Pearre, the sixth generation of the family to reside here.
Pavilion IX at UVA, Photo courtesy of Jeff Klee.
2022
On May 7, 2022, chapter members visited two, mid to late eighteenth-century houses in Virginia, Clermont in Berryville and Fort Bowman in Shenandoah County. They likewise represent divergent immigrant building traditions. Our tour guide was Dennis Pogue.
Clermont evolved in four major building campaigns and is one of the best preserved, and most intensively documented historic structures in Clarke County. Beginning with 1756, one-story frame, jerkin-head-roofed house, and adding a kitchen in 1777, a dining room in 1788, and a two-story stone kitchen and quarters in 1836. Outbuildings include a log duplex quarters for the enslaved and a stone and log spring house.
The 1771 Fort Bowman house is a remarkably well-preserved example of an eighteenth century hybridized vernacular assemblage featuring a combination of English and Germanic styles. English patterns are manifested in the symmetrical façade with end chimneys, while the irregular plan, framing techniques, and details reflect the Bowman family’s German heritage.
On September 24, 2022, the Chapter headed to the Eastern Shore to visit two of Maryland’s oldest structures, the recently restored Cloverfields house and gardens in Wye Mills, and Third Haven Friends Meeting House in Easton. Our tour guides were Willie Graham and Carl Lounsbury.
Cloverfields, as one of Maryland’s oldest houses, offers primary evidence of early building practices. It began in 1705 as a two-story, hall-parlor house with an old- fashioned stair tower, erected by owner, builder, and planter Philemon Hensley. It received changes in additions in 1729, the 1750s, 1760s, and 1783-84. Among the remarkable components that set this house apart are its massive bent principal rafters, heavy board false-plate, and a variety of brick bonding patterns, including an early use of glazed-header Flemish bond with rubbed stretchers, and a belt course and water table stepped at the corners in the English mode.
Third Haven Friends Meeting House is among the oldest positively dated buildings in Maryland and likely the oldest extant Friends meetinghouse in the country, dating to 1684-1685. It was erected by carpenter John Salter approximating specifications outlined in two surviving agreements. As built, it encompassed a T-plan with cross-wing entrance and stair hall to the front. In 1797 the wing was removed, and a six-bay section was added that featured a retractable partition and dual entrances into separate men’s and women’s spaces, as was indicative of the emerging American Friends meetinghouse prototype.
Group visiting Concord.
2021
On September 25, 2021, VAF members from the Chesapeake region held their first event, a tour of two rare houses in Frederick, Maryland, the Dutch H-bent Beatty-Cramer House (1748) and the German Georgian Schifferstadt (1758). These buildings represent the early settlement of the region and the assimilation of various immigrant building traditions. Our host was the Frederick County Landmarks Foundation, including architectural director, Jospeh Lubozynski.
Highly unusual for Maryland, the Beatty-Cramer House was built for Thomas Beatty following the building traditions familiar to his Dutch wife Maria Jensen, who migrated here from the Hudson Valley. The original two-room, single-pile section exhibits the heavy timber, transverse “H-bent” construction emblematic of Netherlandic framing, featuring posts connected by an anchor beam to form an H-shape.
Schifferstadt is an exceptional surviving example of colonial-era German architecture constructed ca. 1758 by German immigrant and owner Elias Bruner. It features a distinctive Durchgangigen or center-hall arrangement of interior spaces. Also noteworthy are its central wishbone chimney, Liegender Stuhl (leaning truss system), vaulted cellar, stone kitchen window sink, decorative hardware, Stroh Lehm (mud and straw) paling insulation, and five-plate jamb stove, all characteristic of German architecture.