Eyre Hall

Situated in Northampton County on Virginia’s Eastern Shore, Eyre Hall represents, as the Virginia Department of Historic Resources proclaims, “what is perhaps the most complete picture of gentry plantation life on the Eastern Shore of Virginia.”^[1] Indeed, Eyre Hall is, in many ways, a time capsule of United States history: the property settled in the early seventeenth century; the structure built on the eve of the American Revolution; its components augmented and updated with the designing eye of its antebellum proprietors and the labor of those they enslaved; stewarded through the Civil War unscathed; and piloted through a rapidly industrializing and urbanizing twentieth-century society into the present-day. The result both an important historical relic and a vibrant, continually inhabited home with countless stories to be told.^[2]

In their introduction to the superbly edited volume, The Material World of Eyre Hall, Cary Carson notes that Eyre Hall is one of the few surviving “prodigy houses” built before 1800 that are 1) still owned by the original family, and 2) still home to over 1,500 original objects stemming back to the original building. Carson credits this “unusual endurance” to both money and luck. That is, the fact that Eyre Hall is still owned and inhabited by descendants of the original family is due to the powerful combination of savvy (and sometimes unsavory) business decisions of its former proprietors and pure chance.^[3]

Littleton Eyre, the fourth generation of Eyre’s on the Eastern Shore of Virginia, purchased 700 acres on Cherrystone Creek in 1754. The transaction overcame a series of hurdles including the sheer cost of the tract (£850) as well as the approval of the Board of Trade in London which Eyre received in August 1755. Three decades of land speculation in Northampton and Accomack Counties involving more than 5,000 acres had culminated into “the most significant land acquisition in Littleton Eyre’s career.” Soon thereafter, Littleton Eyre named the land Eyre Hall and officially became the Eyre family’s homebase when laborers completed Littleton’s mansion in 1759.^[4]

From the beginning, Eyre Hall was not the largest mansion in Northampton County, Virginia. However, the dwelling was one of the central architectural and design trendsetters throughout the Tidewater. Littleton Eyre justified the costly undertaking of constructing an elegant mansion because the social payoff was, in his calculation, very much worth the investment.^[5]

“Building well in colonial Virginia was undeniably a costly endeavor, and therefore an efficacious signal of status. A grand house advertised the permanence of the Eyre family who had long-term interests in the community and could be trusted to manage its affairs. From 1759 onwards, Eyre Hall became the beacon of the family’s identity and the locus of its power. It was home.”^[6]

The flat woodland upon which Eyre Hall sits is surrounded by water on three sides: Eyreville Creek to the north, and Eyre Hall Creek to the south, and Cherrystone Creek flowing five-hundred yards to the east. Eastward flowing waterways jutting in from the Chesapeake were the only reliable means of accessing the eighteenth-century inland of Virginia’s Eastern Shore. Although Eyre Hall rested near the bay, Cherrystone Creek remained the only viable route to the property. Mostly impassable roads and horse trails branched out from the property’s eastern portion.

Guests would have been struck by numerous unique architectural features of Eyre Hall as they sailed to the structure on Cherrystone Creek. Perhaps the first feature to engage the eye of visitors would have been Eyre Hall’s gambrel or Dutch roof – one of the first in the region – which allowed for more space in second floor rooms. Over the course of the next fifty years, gambrel roofing became a popular trend among Eastern Shore buildings.

True to the design aesthetic of the ancient Romans and Renaissance Englishmen, the interior of Eyre Hall stresses proportion, hierarchy, and symmetry. Describing the general layout and architectural philosophy of the rectangular Eyre Hall, historian Carl R. Lounsbury describes that “various parts of a feature or space reflect a mirror image on either side of an imaginary center line.” The side-passage layout of the house meant each room was linked from east to west. Inside these rooms, the décor was chosen and adorned in correlation with that room’s social importance. That is, rooms and spaces where the Eyres could expect to host guest would have been decorated to express wealth and status more than rooms and spaces usually occupied by servants or workers.^[7]

While the Eyres likely made the final decision on architectural design and interior décor, servants and laborers were more likely to have put these ideas into practice. Unfortunately, no record exists of the laborers who built Eyre Hall nor of the architect who worked with Littleton Eyre to design the mansion. However, researchers can safely assume that at least a selection of the over 30 human beings that Littleton Eyre enslaved – as well as some of his white servants and tenants – constructed the mansion and brought Littleton Eyre’s desire to display his wealth into fruition.

As one can imagine, several additions have been made to Eyre Hall over the course of its over 265-year existence. The addition to the dining room was one of the earliest. Taking over Eyre Hall after the death of his father in 1768, Severn Eyre and his wife Margaret constructed a large (24’ x 20’) heated room off the northeast end of the house. The dining room’s addition to the eastern part of the house tucked it behind the elegant westward facing porticos mentioned earlier, but closer to the eastward facing servicing spaces – such as the kitchen. Inside, the new dining room offered view into the garden, a large fireplace, comfortable chairs, elegant furnishings, and expensive vases, rugs, and artwork to properly express their wealth and status when hosting.

A new era of construction, decoration, furnishing, and entertaining accompanied John and Ann Eyre’s proprietorship of Eyre Hall in the late eighteenth century. Without altering the house’s original plan, John and Ann Eyre complemented some of Eyre Hall’s bulkier Georgian features with neoclassical design elements. The couple also added more space to the mansion. “The most noticeable improvement to the house during this building campaign,” writes historian Carl L. Lounsbury, “was the expansion of the east wing.” Bedchambers and service areas were added. And the one-story dining room constructed by Severn Eyre was “raised to two full stories and integrated structurally and visually with the construction of a housekeeper’s apartment to the east.” Slave quarters were also constructed during John and Ann Eyre’s stewardship: around ten in total housing 90 enslaved people at Eyre Hall and the neighboring Eyreville plantation. Now, service workers and enslaved people could move more fluidly between their living and working spaces – the private and public spheres of Eyre Hall – during John and Ann Eyre’s regular entertaining of family and friends.

Among other decorative enhancements, the Eyre’s wallpapered the mansion’s main north passage with “Les Rives du Bosphore” in 1817. In doing so, the Eyre’s joined other wealthy nineteenth-century Chesapeake buyers in adorning their house with Romantic panoramic wallpapers. Likely purchased from one of France’s foremost designers of scenic papers, “Les Rives du Bosphore” (The Banks of the Bosphous) depicts Turkish architecture, landscape, and fashion. By artistically bringing the “Orient” to the Eastern Shore of Virginia, the Eyre’s demonstrated wealth and power to each their many guests. But the execution of this display of status can be attributed to an unknown perceptive paperhanger whose keen eye ensured that, today, Eyre Hall is likely “the most successful known installation of ‘Les Rives du Bosphore.’”

Amidst all the decorative enhancements made by John and Ann Eyre between the 1790s and 1850s, the mansion did experience its share of chaos and uncertainty. When the British blockaded the Chesapeake Bay in 1813 and 1814, they brought with them the threat of destruction and pillaging to Americans along the Bay’s shores. Eyre and his neighbors feared losing their homes, horses, and those they enslaved. Writing to her husband in February 1813, Elizabeth Upshur Teackle (the sister of Ann Eyre) expressed the palpable anxiety throughout the Chesapeake:

“No intelligence from Mr. [John] Eyre yet in answer to [Ann Eyre’s?] proposed plan of setting out northwards on the 22nd, which she writes me was her intention. I am led to suppose this scheme is abandoned or postponed as it is now past the time of my calculation for her arrival. I suppose Mr. Eyre is alarmed for the safety of his property…as there is great confusion. Mr. Bowdoin writes to Louisa, in their county [Northampton?] on account of British now in their neighborhood. Indeed, some ladies dining at Mr. B[ayly?]’s really witnessed an engagement 7 or 8 miles from the shore between two American privateers and a British vessel of war, the particulars of w[hic]h had not been ascertained when Mr. B wrote. The coast along there is so much exposed that I am more than ever of [the] opinion that I shoul’d deprecate a residence in that quarter. Mrs. E. writes me that some of the enemy’s men had actually landed on Maggothy [sic] Bay shore and had taken what provisions they wanted, but had paid honestly for every thing.”

Though Eyre Hall was safe at present, the British swarmed the Chesapeake and even landed on the Atlantic side of Northampton County – mere miles from Eyre Hall – along Magothy Bay. News of the war circulated amongst the Eyre’s social circle. Finally, in September 1813, the war reached Eyre Hall. Eight enslaved people escaped from the property to British lines. “Mrs Eyre is in great trouble for the loss of her house servant,” Elizabeth Upshur Teackle wrote to her husband in 1813. “Jack died, and Jim has taken himself off to the enemy, with Billy who was the gardener and hostler, beside several others of the most valuable men Mr. Eyre had belonging to the crop. We found Mr. Eyre at work in the garden, not having a single man left who cou’d attend to that business.”

From the Eyre’s perspective, they had lost the laborers that made the mansion of Eyre Hall function. Ann Eyre found herself mourning the loss of her enslaved servant. John Eyre found himself toiling at the duties he usually charged those he enslaved with completing. More importantly, however, eight freedom seekers seized their opportunity to escape John and Ann Eyre’s enslavement in a courageous attempt to begin a life of full freedom. Escape attempts such as these – along with the responses they illicit – convey a fuller human history of Eyre Hall beyond architecture and decoration.

Severn Eyre guided Eyre Hall through the Civil War and postbellum era after John Eyre’s death in 1855. Much to his neighbors’ “execration,” Severn Eyre maintained his loyalty to the Union which saved Eyre Hall from total physical and financial ruin during the Civil War. Even so, the abolition of slavery in the United States clearly effected Eyre Hall financially. In August 1863, Severn Eyre was one of two hundred Northampton County residents fined for the destruction of a lighthouse on nearby Smith’s Island. Eyre paid his portion of the $20,000 promptly in the form of $304. However, Lincoln suspended the collection of the fines after Eyre had paid but before many Northampton residents did. “In this manner,” Eyre wrote to Lincoln, “I became a sufferer by my promptness, and they gainers by their slowness in obeying the mandates of the [government].” Eyre pleaded with Lincoln to repay Eyre’s fine arguing that his “conduct during the Rebellion has been such, as to render this simply an act of justice.” “I had never voted for secession, or been in any way connected with it,” Eyre contented, “and had in no shape or form violated any law of the Govt, after the occupation of the place…and had gained the execration of a few people by my Union sentiments…I have been made poor by the war…Two lines from your excellency to the Treasury department…will do an act of justice, to an unfortunate individual who is a sufferer by the war & much in want of money.”

A site of enslavement at its core, Eyre Hall substantially felt the institution’s abolition after 1865. No longer to allowed to force large numbers of enslaved people to cook, clean, butler, tend crops, drive carriages, forge iron products, or make repairs and additions to the mansion, Severn Eyre reoriented the Eyre family’s lifestyle and searched for wealth-building opportunities elsewhere. With the approach of the Gilded Age, the center of the Eyre family’s life shifted under Severn from the Eastern Shore of Virginia to the urban hub of Baltimore. In Baltimore, the Eyres could invest in railroads, embark on venture capitalist schemes, and build on social connections with the city’s elite. As a result, Eyre Hall increasingly became a summer home rather than a year-round habitation for the Eyres after the Civil War. By 1882, the entire Eyre family permanently resided in Baltimore. It would not be until the early 20th century that Eyre Hall would be restored and modernized.

Severn Eyre’s death in 1914 put the future of Eyre Hall under threat for the first time. Eyre’s only son died prematurely, and his oldest daughter passed away before 1914. Ultimately, Severn Eyre deeded the Eyre Hall property to his only surviving daughter, Mary, and to his 16-year old granddaughter, Margaret. The fate of the property, the mansion, and its furnishings were unclear for over a decade until Margaret gained possession of the house when she married Henry duPont Baldwin in 1928. From the moment she returned to Eyre Hall after her honeymoon, Margaret Eyre Taylor Baldwin dedicated her life to the restoration, modernization, and general care of Eyre Hall.

Modernization did not mean emphatic redecoration. Much of the furnishings introduced by John and Ann Eyre (less so those of Severn Eyre whose move to Baltimore meant Eyre Hall essentially skipped the Victorian aesthetic) were put back to use. Modern amenities merely complemented what she thought was already a beautiful home. Her vision entailed “preserving the old and making the new blend in with the historic character of the house.” She made major structural repairs to the roof and the cellar, replaced foundation walls, added second-floor bathrooms, and constructed a new kitchen and service wing to the east.

The 20th century also brought new commercial ventures for Eyre Hall. Henry duPont Baldwin built a packing plant for clams and oysters at the junction of Cherrystone Creek and Eyre Hall Creek. Watermen brought in their catch, the Eyres put it through the packing plant, and the product was shipped by train to cities in the north and west as far as Boston and Chicago. The leftover shells served as substitutes for stone in local road construction projects. The family rented their land out to farmers of broccoli, cabbage, and other winter crops which, after World War II, were increasingly harvested using tractors rather than mules. Due to Margaret Eyre Taylor Baldwin’s diligence and commitment, Eyre Hall was brought firmly into the 20th century.

Although still privately owned, tourists can visit Eyre Hall’s early formal gardens which are “among the best-preserved examples of its type.”