Sharswood, part 3: The smaller building is older than the mansion

A house from before 1800

Behind Sharswood’s 1850s main house stands a timber-framed building that architectural investigators date to the eighteenth century. Encyclopedia Virginia describes it as sixteen by thirty-two feet, while Preservation Virginia identifies a hall-and-parlor plan: two rooms, with one historically larger and more public than the other.

Investigators based the early date on physical evidence that includes heavy timber framing, mortise-and-tenon joints, surviving weatherboards, hand-wrought nails, and a substantial central fireplace. The evidence suggests that the building was probably an earlier main house, before the Gothic Revival residence existed.

A later conversion for enslaved families

Encyclopedia Virginia dates the conversion to sometime after 1820. Openings were altered and the two-room building became a duplex used as living space for enslaved families—one household on each side, according to the architectural interpretation presented by Preservation Virginia and 60 Minutes.

The building may also have served as a kitchen or laundry at different times. That wording is important: its use changed, and surviving architecture cannot identify every person, task, or year by itself.

The structure should not be assigned a single unchanging label across its full life.

Why the survivor matters

Preservation Virginia calls the building a rare survival. Its value is not that it can recreate an enslaved family’s experience on its own; it is that it preserves material clues that can be tested against census schedules, deeds, labor records, family knowledge, and archaeology.

A responsible reading leaves room for uncertainty. It distinguishes an investigator’s interpretation from a documented name, avoids staging hardship as spectacle, and treats the building as part of a human story whose descendants remain active participants in its preservation.