Eyre Hall, U.S. Route 13 & State Route 636 vicinity, Cheriton, Northampton County, Virginia

Significance: One of the Eastern Shore's most notable 18th century houses, with relatively complete surviving plantation complex, including dairy, smokehouse, overseer's house, graveyard and orangery (ruins). Home of the prominent Eyre family.

Eyre Hall is a rare example of a vernacular, Chesapeake architectural ensemble of the Colonial and early Federal period. The house that Littleton Eyre built ca. 1759 and the expanded and updated building created by his grandson
John Eyre in the early nineteenth century shared an architectural vocabulary with their less affluent neighbors.
Commonalities in domestic use, in construction materials like wood clapboards, and in form, such as the
gambrel roof and the three-room side-hall plan, reinforced similarities between the Eyre's and their neighbors,
while its almost monumental scale, elaborate woodwork, and other fine interior finishes simultaneously
sharpened distinctions. The builders' sophistication, as well as their social and economic status, was reflected
in the evocation of classicism in the dwelling's aesthetics, refinement, and proportions. The spatial hierarchies
of agricultural fields, garden, outbuildings, and house mirrored those of the Chesapeake's patriarchal society,
with Eyre Hall and its successive masters at the center of the layered landscape they forged. It is through this
symbolic gesture, the melding of house and owner, that this exceptionally intact architectural artifact offers
exceptional insight into Chesapeake culture, with all the social distinctions and racial separation that
characterized and sustained it from the Colonial period into the antebellum era.
Survey number: HABS VA-809
Building/structure dates: ca. 1759 Initial Construction
Building/structure dates: 1796 Subsequent Work