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Delaware » Lower New Castle County » Townsend Vicinity » Brook Ramble

Brook Ramble

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1804–1806. Grears Corner Rd at Green Giant Rd.
  • (Dave Tabler)

James Crawford, a gentleman farmer, employed the so-called town house (or side-passage) plan that was popular in the late eighteenth century for urban and rural dwellings alike. According to a tax roll of 1816, his brick house was one of only twenty-eight of that material in today's Appoquinimink and Blackbird hundreds, putting it in the top 9 percent of local building stock (50 percent of dwellings then were log, 41 percent frame). It remained in the Crawford family for generations and was never altered, still retaining its punch-and-gouge Federal chimneypieces and fine staircase. The current owners rescued the house from abandonment in the 1970s and restored it again after a disastrous attic fire caused by lightning in 2003. The cruciform, Gothic Revival Greenlawn Farm Manager's House (c. 1860), only survivor of a historic farmstead razed for a shopping center on North Broad Street in Middletown (see photograph on p. 29), was moved here to the Brook Ramble grounds in 1992.

Writing Credits

Author: 
W. Barksdale Maynard
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Data

What's Nearby

Outbuildings
Cochran Grange
St. Andrew's School
Founders Hall (Main Building)
Kip du Pont Boathouse

Citation

W. Barksdale Maynard, "Brook Ramble", [Townsend, Delaware], SAH Archipedia, eds. Gabrielle Esperdy and Karen Kingsley, Charlottesville: UVaP, 2012—, http://sah-archipedia.org/buildings/DE-01-LN21.

Print Source

Cover: Buildings of Delaware

Buildings of Delaware, W. Barksdale Maynard. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008, 221-221.

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