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Court of Chancery

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2001–2003, R. Calvin Clendaniel Associates. The Circle
  • Court of Chancery (Photograph by Matthew Aungst)
  • Court of Chancery (W. Barksdale Maynard)

Since 1792, this court, a distinctively Delaware survival, has decided issues of equity. For 211 years, its judges periodically traveled from courtroom to courtroom, but with an expanding caseload it required a permanent home, for which planning started in 1995. The nearby Brick Hotel (ES8) was the favored site until preservationists protested. The architects for the red brick court building were a Lincoln, Delaware, firm, then in its fortieth year and one of the oldest in the state. The pedimented two-story front with Doric pilasters and an arcaded ground floor recalls both eighteenth-century market houses and the State Police headquarters north of Dover (1956, Pope and Kruse). A cherry-paneled courtroom has bulls-eye windows reminiscent of those at the Capitol in Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia.

Writing Credits

Author: 
W. Barksdale Maynard
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Data

What's Nearby

Brick Hotel
The Circle
Sussex County Courthouse
Old Courthouse
Masonic Lodge (Georgetown Academy)

Citation

W. Barksdale Maynard, "Court of Chancery", [Georgetown, Delaware], SAH Archipedia, eds. Gabrielle Esperdy and Karen Kingsley, Charlottesville: UVaP, 2012—, http://sah-archipedia.org/buildings/DE-01-ES7.

Print Source

Cover: Buildings of Delaware

Buildings of Delaware, W. Barksdale Maynard. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008, 263-264.

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