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Pear Virginialley, State Route 628 vicinity, Shadyside, Northampton County, Virginia

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Pear Virginialley, State Route 628 vicinity, Shadyside, Northampton County, Virginia

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Summary

Significance: Constructed in the first half of the eighteenth century, Pear Valley is a rare representative example of the second generation of housing as it evolved in the early Chesapeake. Its small size combined with high quality craftsmanship exemplifies the character of many early planters' houses now long lost. In its finish, the framed dwelling retains key structural features illustrating the development of early American architecture in the adaptation of English building traditions within the Virginia context. Especially notable are the use of a false plate and lap work rather than complicated joinery at the eave; and the treatment of the structural framing members, which are exposed and chamfered. The practice of leaving the posts and plates visible and finishing them neatly continued throughout the eighteenth century, carrying forward an emphasis on structure and structural ornamentation in keeping with an earlier mode of building and a practice common to Chesapeake buildings. Structural ornamentation was also expressed through masonry. The glazed headers used in the chimney and north gable end wall of Pear Valley are representative of this. The use of glazed headers in the Flemish bond, moreover, is a treatment employed in well-crafted buildings through the first half of the eighteenth century. Its use not only complements the chamfered framing seen inside Pear Valley but also provides evidence of its construction date. The quantity of intentionally exposed posts and plates found at Pear Valley is known to survive in only one other house today, Belle Air in Charles City County, Virginia. Belle Air was erected in the second quarter of the eighteenth century, and was expanded ca. 1800.

One construction feature at Pear Valley, however, presents a technique unusual among surviving buildings framed in the manner developed in the seventeenth-century Chesapeake: the roof with clasped purlin-like components. Purlins are horizontal timbers that connect rafter trusses in a roof framing system. In Pear Valley's roof, the purlins link pairs of common rafters. The term "clasped" refers to the placement of the purlins in relation to the rafters and collar beams. The purlins are placed on the underside of the common rafters and pegged into position at the joint of purlin, rafter, and collar beam. This adds rigidity to the roof structure in much the same way as the tilted false plate does.

The joinery for clasped purlins is in keeping with the simplification of the English box frame that occurred in the Chesapeake. The clasped purlin joinery technique is seen in only one other Chesapeake building, the brick kitchen at Westover. As in Pear Valley, the purlin-like timbers provide lateral stability to the common rafters but do not carry their weight; this is an important deviation from the English use of both principals and common rafters, and is representative of the modifications to the traditional framing system made in Chesapeake.

The significance of Pear Valley, therefore, lies in the integrity of its architectural form and structural system and in the expression of structural details like the innovative use of the clasped purlin like elements that rarely survive. It presents key information about the range of framing techniques carpenters employed during the long development of building forms and methods that adapted English precedents to the Chesapeake and broader American setting.

Other houses on the Eastern Shore, such as the Mason House in Accomack County, may be older and share construction elements such as the feathered lapped, riven plaster lath secured with one rosehead nail, but alterations have obscured or removed much of their original fabric while Pear Valley survived with its framing largely intact. The closest comparables to Pear Valley are the Rochester House on the Northern Neck, which is also a one-room dwelling but constructed a decade later, and a barn at Burrages End in lower Queen Anne's County, Maryland, notable for its early framing.
Survey number: HABS VA-960
Building/structure dates: ca. 1740 Initial Construction

date_range

Date

1800
person

Contributors

Historic American Buildings Survey, creator
Price, Virginia B, transmitter
Preservation Virginia, sponsor
Price, Virginia B, transmitter
place

Location

northampton county37.22676, -75.99277
Google Map of 37.226762, -75.9927652
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Source

Library of Congress
copyright

Copyright info

No known restrictions on images made by the U.S. Government; images copied from other sources may be restricted. http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/res/114_habs.html

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