Homes on Tour

Families in Waterford, Virginia, live modern lives in old houses. Many Waterford residents live with hand-dug wells, low ceilings, and no air-conditioning. Homes and buildings that originally were businesses have been lovingly restored and renovated for twenty-first-century living.

Each day during the Homes Tour, some villagers open their homes to visitors. Docents welcome you and speak about the history, architecture and furnishings of these dwellings. Village houses date from the late eighteenth century through the federal and Victorian periods and into the twentieth century.

Docents will introduce you to the cast of colorful characters who once inhabited these fascinating houses. They were Quakers and staunch abolitionists, slave-owners, merchants, artisans, freed slaves, warriors, and idealists. Three centuries of life in a unique American village will tell the back-story to your visit to the Waterford Fair.

Tours are included in the ticket price.

Houses on Tour in 2012

Below is a list of houses open during each day of the 2012 Fair; your ticket allows you into the homes on tour.

Friday The Pink House Braden House Joseph Janney House Pierpoint House (Ratcliffe House) Asbury Johnson House

Saturday Marshall Claggett House The Dormers Ephriam Schooley House (Parker-Bennett House) Old Acre

Sunday Samuel Means House Marshall Claggett House Graham House Hollingsworth-Lee House

House Descriptions and Photos

Friday

The Pink House

This house was constructed by Lewis Klein (1783-1837) sometime between 1816 and 1825, when he opened a “House of Entertainment” (tavern) in the building. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries the ground floor was used first as a pharmacy and later as a general store. An interior stair connecting the ground level to the rest of the house was added in the 1950s, and the soft brick was painted a distinctive pink.

  The Braden House

Robert Braden (1765-1827) probably built this house between 1816 and 1820. It clearly fits into the local vernacular: brick on a stone foundation, Flemish bond and closers on the front façade, five-course common bond on all other sides. Elbert Divine reportedly added the bay window on the south side and the front porch in 1913.

 

 

 

The Joseph Janney House

Quaker Joseph Janney purchased 12 acres from the Hague family in 1781 and appears to have constructed this dwelling to replace one on Bond Street that he sold in 1784. His house is of log construction, clad in weatherboards, on a stone foundation. According to local legend, the house was originally shorter: extra logs were added atop the walls to create additional space on the upper level. The two parts of the dwelling had no interior access to one another until this century.

 

 The Pierpoint House (Ratcliffe House)

Samuel Pierpoint and his family lived here while operating a dry goods store (the remains of which are still visible to the right of the home) from 1809 to 1812. Ann Taylor Ratcliffe purchased the house in 1844, and many local children attended a school here run by her daughters; the home remained in the family until 1909. The house is characterized by two front doors common in Pennsylvania German community dwellings.

Asbury Johnson House

Asbury Johnson built this home in 1886. It is the earliest of the Victorian houses lining Second Street, and is less exuberantly embellished than others of the period. This two-story wood frame home has both interior and exterior easements, to preserve its historical integrity; one unusual (but not unique) feature is red glass around the front door.

 

 

Saturday

Marshall Claggett House

This small house was constructed circa 1760 at Corby Hall, the Hough homestead about two miles north of Waterford. About 1870, Marshall Claggett, an African American, bought the house, dismantled the logs, and moved it to Waterford. The cement block addition at the rear was built in the mid-20th century. This dwelling exemplifies typical log house construction: one story, one room, V notches linking the logs, a stone foundation and chimney. In 17th and 18th century Virginia, more people lived in log houses than in any other type of structure.

The Dormers

Mahlon Janney’s nephew and heir, Mahlon II (b.1773), is credited with constructing this house sometime after 1803. John Schooley and his son Milton lived here and operated the mill until the latter’s death in 1908. The wings each side, a rear addition, the roof dormers, and the Colonial Revival door surround are not original to the house. The off-center door placement is rare in a 19th-century five-bay dwelling.

Ephriam Schooley House (Parker-Bennett House)

This house was originally constructed as two separate dwellings. They were not merged as one until 1959. The southern half was built before 1827; the northern half was added prior to 1851. The southern portion originally had a central door opening into the hall; the parlor adjoined the hall. Today those two rooms are one large room. The northern side is essentially unchanged from its two-room side-passage plan, with a passage to the left of the two rooms. Rear additions and a tiny wing on the northern end expand the living space.

Old Acre

James Moore, Jr., probably constructed this house between 1815 and 1838, when he sold it to his nephew James Moore Steer (1810-1874). Steer and his brother-in-law Reuben Schooley operated a series of agricultural manufacturing shops behind the house along Factory Street, giving that street its name. Exterior brickwork indicates that the northern block of Old Acre was built before the southern end, originally a single story.

Sunday

Samuel Means House

Mahlon Janney built the stone wing circa 1762 as part of his thriving mill operation. The two-story stone portion appears far grander than a typically simple miller’s cottage, indicating that Janney himself probably lived there. The interior three-room floor plan of Janney’s house is one that is often referred to as the “Quaker” or “Penn” plan. The brick wing was added before 1803, when owner Asa Moore (c.1770-1823) insured the house for the staggering sum of $2,300. The brick addition converted Janney’s three-room plan into the fashionable center-hall plan. Twentieth century owners added onto the rear of the dwelling. A one-story stone wing that abutted the west end was demolished in the early 1900s; it may be the source for some of the lovely stone walls you see along Bond Street.

Marshall Claggett House

See description under Saturday home tours.

Graham House

Leven Smallwood (c.1765-1812) built the right side three-bay section of this house shortly after his 1810 purchase of the lot. He built a one-and-a-half-story brick structure on a stone foundation. A one-story brick addition was later added to the left of the original structure. Quakers Isaac Walker (1781-1851) and Jacob Mendenhall (1788-1822) operated a dry goods store here as early as 1816. Walker purchased the property after it was auctioned in 1833. Robert Graham, a veteran of the Loudoun Rangers, bought the building in 1879 and used it for his carriage painting business. He removed the half-story of brick from the right side and added a full second story of German siding to the entire edifice. The frame second floor was originally accessible only via exterior stairs on the left end.

Hollingsworth-Lee House

The land on which this two-story brick house sits was part of the mill tract for many years. By 1827 Samuel Gover was living in a brick dwelling here. Around the time of the Civil War, Robert Hollingsworth (1814-1871), a Quaker schoolteacher from Frederick County, Virginia, bought the house from the Govers. During the war, Confederates seized Hollingsworth and fellow townsman William Williams and marched them to Richmond’s Castle Thunder Prison, intending to trade them for two Loudoun residents held by the North. The interior floor plan of this dwelling is unusual: the door opens into a passage that runs the depth of the house; a single room is to the right of the passage.