Elydale
You are here
Karlan Mansion (Elydale)
1877–1878, early 20th century. 8051 Wilderness Rd., Wilderness Road State Park, 5 miles west of Ewing
Built for wealthy landowner Robert M. Ely, this house is one of Lee County's showplaces. It is a two-story, hipped-roof, brick house situated at the head of an oval drive flanked by mature maple trees. In the early twentieth century, the house received a two-story, three-bay pedimented Doric portico with symmetrical, yet uneven, spacing between its columns. A late-nineteenth-century photograph of the house, though, shows a five-bay two-story wooden porch with decorative sawnwork extending across the front. The house's eaves are adorned with brackets and scalloped wooden trim. Karl Harris purchased and renovated the house in the 1950s and renamed it Karlan. The house was later sold to the state and since 1993 it has served as the center of Wilderness Road State Park. The three-hundred-and-ten-acre park includes Martin's Station, a replica of a colonial frontier fort that was on this site in 1775.
Writing Credits
×
Data
-
Location: Ewing, VirginiaRegional Overviews:Types:Styles:no metadata available
What's Nearby
Citation
Anne Carter Lee, "Karlan Mansion (Elydale)", [Ewing, Virginia], SAH Archipedia, eds. Gabrielle Esperdy and Karen Kingsley, Charlottesville: UVaP, 2012—, http://sah-archipedia.org/buildings/VA-02-LE11.
Print Source
Buildings of Virginia: Valley, Piedmont, Southside, and Southwest, Anne Carter Lee and contributors. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015, 515-515.
If SAH Archipedia has been useful to you, please consider supporting it.
SAH Archipedia tells the story of the United States through its buildings, landscapes, and cities. This freely available resource empowers the public with authoritative knowledge that deepens their understanding and appreciation of the built environment. But the Society of Architectural Historians, which created SAH Archipedia with University of Virginia Press, needs your support to maintain the high-caliber research, writing, photography, cartography, editing, design, and programming that make SAH Archipedia a trusted online resource available to all who value the history of place, heritage tourism, and learning.