This was once the Largest Plantation in Perquimans County NC

Jonathan Hill Jacocks House, New Hope Township North Carolina

Date added: August 24, 2024

Front east corner of house, looking west; garage is in background on far right (1997)

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The Jonathan Hill Jacocks House is an impressive example of plantation houses erected by prosperous planters in Perquimans County, North Carolina during the antebellum period. Like many eastern North Carolina plantation seats built during this period, the house was raised in at least two distinct building phases and thus reflects not only the changing architectural fashions of the period, but also an expression of the expanding plantation economy and social development during the early and mid-nineteenth century. While the property contained a dwelling of unknown description in 1814 when it was acquired by Joshua S. Whedbee (ca. 1790-1834), the core of the present house was raised for him ca. 1815 as a substantial two-story side-passage-plan residence finished in a fashionable but subdued Federal-style manner. The house was enlarged into a center-passage-plan dwelling ca. 1838 after its purchase by Jonathan Hill Jacocks (1792-1847), at which time it achieved the size and reserved Greek Revival character it retains today; a monumental Greek Revival portico added most likely in 1847-1848 further distinguishes the dwelling. The house's construction is attributed to master builder James Leigh (1781-1854), whose impressive residence, Land's End, built 1830-1837 about three-and-a-half-miles southeast, is one of several important dwellings constructed by Leigh for the leading planters in Perquimans and Pasquotank counties during the early nineteenth century. While Leigh probably was involved with the construction of Whedbee's Federal-style house, he was most surely responsible for Jacock's Greek Revival enlargement and improvements. The Jacocks House, as an attributed member of this select group of Leigh-built houses, is thus identified with a body of work that ranks among the finest in the Albemarle region of northeastern North Carolina. Although the property consists of slightly less than two of the 2,000 acres associated with the plantation, it contains both the residence and the plantation's sole surviving outbuilding, a rare antebellum log plank smokehouse.

The Jonathan Hill Jacocks House, located in the oldest continuously settled area of North Carolina, is situated about a mile west of the Little River that separates Perquimans County from Pasquotank County, its eastern neighbor. The area was part of Albemarle County which, along with other lands known as "Carolina," was granted in 1663 by King Charles II to eight prominent supporters who were given proprietary control over the colony. In 1668 Albemarle County was divided into four precincts for administrative purposes, one of which was Perquimans Precinct. Settlement of the area was accomplished primarily by outmigration from the successful Virginia colony about fifty miles north. Among the earliest settlers were Quakers, who by the late seventeenth century were not only the largest group within the Albemarle region but exerted considerable political, economic, and religious influence, particularly in the vicinity of the upper Little River. However, Quaker influence gradually decreased as the eighteenth century progressed, during which the government-supported Anglican church became increasingly prominent. One of the county's most prosperous and earliest settled areas was Durants Neck, a prominent peninsula bordered on the northeast by the Little River, on the east and south by Albemarle Sound, and on the southwest by the Perquimans River. This fertile area was named for George Durant (1632-1694), who first purchased land there in 1661 from the Yeopim Indians. The area's accessibility to navigable waterways, fertile, arable soils, and an abundance of game and fish enabled the development of a stable agrarian economy. Durants Neck, like the rest of Perquimans County and nearby Pasquotank County during the eighteenth century, was occupied primarily by small farmsteads worked by industrious families, many of whom were Quakers. During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, however, Quaker disapproval of the growing importance of slavery within the Albemarle region led many adherents to leave the area for Piedmont counties, and eventually to the mid-western territories. These Quaker farms were acquired by ambitious planters who combined the tracts into increasingly larger plantations that required greater numbers of slaves to cultivate them. Planters enjoyed an increasing level of domestic comfort as the nineteenth century progressed, and continued to share extensive family ties that began with the area's initial settlement. Among the most prominent Durants Neck families during the nineteenth century were members of the Stevenson, Whedbee, Reed, and Leigh families, all of whom would be connected to the Jacocks House by direct ownership or through marriage.

The history of the Jonathan Hill Jacocks House begins with Joshua S. Whedbee (ca. 1790-1834), a grandson of Thomas Whedbee ( -1808), a wealthy landowner in the Whitehat vicinity of Durants Neck, about six miles northwest of the Jacocks House. Joshua's father, Seth, died in 1798, and while Joshua was apprenticed in 1803 to William Jones to learn the cabinet maker's trade, other guardians arranged for his education in Edenton and elsewhere. In 1810 Joshua married Lydia Humphries and the census that year listed them as owning five slaves. They, however, did not list any land for taxes that year, suggesting that the approximate forty-one acres he had been bequeathed by his grandfather two years earlier had not yet come into his possession.

On August 10^th, 1814 Joshua S. Whedbee purchased a "Messuage" of land containing seventy-four-and-a-half acres (forty-seven acres being cleared, the rest being woodland) from Robert Overman of Pasquotank County for $500.00; it is on this tract that the Jonathan Hill Jacocks House stands. The use of the term "messuage" indicates that a dwelling of some sort existed on the tract, but its description, or whether the Whedbees ever occupied it, is unknown. Whedbee added the Overman property to the acreage inherited earlier from his grandfather, and later added adjoining tracts, including ninety-eight acres purchased in 1819 from George Sutton of Gates County; twelve-and-a-third acres acquired in 1823 from the sheriff's sale of Mathias Weeks; and four acres in 1829 from Thomas Humphries, who may have been a relative of his wife. When Whedbee began construction of his residence is uncertain, but a likely date is within a year or two of his acquisition of the messuage in August 1814. It most certainly was before his sale in 1825 of a "negro man Dave by profession a Carpenter" to Francis Toms for $350.00. It is presumed, but not documented and probably un-documentable, that Dave was one of the four male slaves who, along with three female slaves, added to the Whedbee household which in 1820 included, in addition to Joshua and Lydia, two white boys and three white girls.

While ownership of a carpenter slave is not proof that construction undertaken during that period was performed at least in part by that slave, it is highly likely that such was the case, providing a rare attribution of the construction of a significant Perquimans County plantation residence to a specific slave. Dave's new owner, Col. Francis Toms, built the now-remodeled Col. Francis Toms House ca. 1820 in the Perquimans seat of Hertford. Whether Toms's acquisition of Dave is related to continued improvement of his residence can only be speculated.

The Whedbee family continued to grow, and in 1830 it included Joshua and Lydia, together with five teenage boys, one teenage girl, and thirteen slaves, including five males and eight females. Whedbee and his family, like others on Durants Neck, were successful farmers in a region in which the principal crops during the early nineteenth century were Indian corn and wheat, with smaller quantities of oats, beans, and sweet potatoes also being raised. The abundance of game and fish in the area's forests and rivers supplemented meat attained from livestock, primarily hogs and chickens. While individual farm records do not exist prior to the 1850 Census, there is no reason to believe that the operation and production of Whedbee's plantation was any different than that of plantations of similar size that benefited from the labor of between ten and fifteen slaves. Joshua S. Whedbee died in June 1834, survived by wife Lydia and children Maria, Seth S., Joshua, James M., Susan, Rebecca, and Melissa. That November his estate was committed to an administrator on a $7,000 bond, and in 1837 the heirs petitioned for the sale of his land. In December 1837 the widow Lydia Whedbee sold her dower tract of approximately 1,480 acres to Jonathan Hill Jacocks for $1,000.00, beginning the Jacocks ownership of the property.

Jonathan Hill Jacocks was born in August 1792 in Bertie County, the son of Jonathan and Elizabeth B. Jacocks. His family owned several tracts of land in that county, including the Scotch Hall tract near the Albemarle Sound on which George Washington Capehart built the existing Scotch Hall residence ca. 1838. The elder Jacocks represented Bertie County in the North Carolina General Assembly several times between 1780 and 1801, and in 1811 his son began his political career by serving as secretary for a meeting of Bertie County Republicans. Between 1815 and 1817 Jonathan Hill Jacocks followed his father's lead and represented the county in the state House. On September 12^th, 1817 he married Margaret Ryan (Stevenson) Creecy (1800-1826), the widow of Lemuel Creecy of Chowan County and the daughter and sole heir of Thomas Stevenson (1762-1801) and his second wife Elizabeth Ryan (1767-1815) of Durants Neck. The Stevenson's were a prominent local family, descended from Captain William Stevenson ( -1739), and the owners of considerable property at the point of Durants Neck that bears the family name. Much of the Stevenson property was later combined during the nineteenth century through purchase or marriage into the Land's End property of the Leigh family. In December 1817 Jacocks was commissioned Brigadier General of the Thirteenth Brigade, First Division, North Carolina State Militia.

Jonathan and Margaret Jacocks had moved to Perquimans County by 1820 when the census that year recorded their household as including four white males, four white females, and forty-one slaves, including nineteen males and twenty-two females. Of these, twenty-two were engaged in agriculture. In 1820 Jacocks began purchasing property in Durants Neck, and until his death in 1847 he was the owner, for varying lengths of time, of numerous tracts of land within the county. Between March 1823 and November 1828 he owned the ca. 1818 Edward Wood House in Hertford, acquiring it from Wood, the Clerk of Superior Court, local postmaster, and proprietor of the town's leading tavern. The Jacocks' were probably residing there when Margaret died on February 23^rd, 1826, leaving two small children, Thomas Stevenson Jacocks, aged seven, and Margaret Stevenson Jacocks, aged ten weeks. She was buried in the Stevenson Cemetery near the point in Durants Neck, and Jacocks erected a handsome obelisk in her memory, with two sides inscribed in tribute and memory to the Stevenson family "by the husband of the affectionate Margaret".

Other members of the Jacocks family moved from Bertie County to Perquimans County as well, where the Jacocks' had roots in the New Hope area of Durants Neck during the eighteenth century. Apparently the first to relocate was Jonathan's cousin Jonathan Thomas Jacocks, who married Margaret S. Clayton in Perquimans County in December 1819. In 1833 Jonathan Hill Jacocks's sister, Mary C. Jacocks, married James V. Reed (1807-1856), a descendant of the Reed family of Durants Neck, and about 1835 his brother, Charles W. Jacocks ( -1848), married Martha Mullen of Perquimans County. With all her children residing in Perquimans, mother Elizabeth B. Jacocks (1776-1853) moved from Bertie County as well, and apparently built what is known as the Elizabeth B. Jacocks House in Hertford ca. 1851 for daughter Mary C. (Jacocks) Reed.

In 1830 Jonathan Hill Jacocks's household included three white males, three white females, and sixty-seven slaves (thirty-eight males and twenty-nine females), this being the largest household/slaveholding in the county. The next year, on February 15^th, 1831, Jacocks married another young widow, Grizzelle Pointer (Copeland) Fletcher (1811-1873), a native of Virginia, the daughter of Capt. Jesse Copeland of the Tenth U. S. Infantry and his wife, Jane, the daughter of Perquimans builder-joiner Henry Pointer. Her late husband, James H. Fletcher (1802-1829), was the son of William Fletcher, the builder of the impressive ca. 1818 Fletcher-Skinner House.

In Perquimans County Jacocks continued the public service activities begun as a young man in neighboring Bertie County. Like his neighbors and peers, most prominently several generations of members of the Skinner, Harvey, Riddick, Whedbee, Blount, and Nixon families, Jacocks followed in an established tradition of prominent landowners embracing public, political, and fraternal duties. In 1822 he served briefly as a commissioner charged with overseeing the construction of a new Perquimans County Courthouse, with one of his fellow commissioners being Col. Francis Toms, who in 1825 bought Dave, the slave carpenter, from Joshua Whedbee, the original owner of the Jonathan Hill Jacocks House.

Also in 1822 Jacocks served the first of three terms in the North Carolina General Assembly representing his adopted county: in the state senate in 1822; in the state house in 1835, succeeding Josiah T. Granberry, who, just two years after Jacock's purchase of his Durants Neck plantation, would build Stockton, an impressive Greek Revival tripartite plantation seat approximately four miles northwest of the Jacocks House; and in the state senate again in 1842-1843. While earlier residents of Durants and Old Necks who sat in the General Assembly included William Jones (in the House in 1813-1816) and neighbor James Leigh (in the House in 1818), Jacocks was one of only four men to represent Perquimans County between 1800 and 1860 in both the state House and Senate (Cheney 1981, 1239). In 1824 he was appointed a road commissioner and in 1832 as a justice of the peace. Jacocks's personal reputation in the county was such that in 1835 he represented the county at the State Constitutional Convention, where he was a Whig spokesman for eastern interests. Although he voted against both organizing the convention and the new constitution it presented, in 1842-1843 he did represent the First District in the state senate. In 1842 he served as a public school committeeman and in 1844 was elected to the Vestry at Christ Church in Elizabeth City (the Church of the Holy Trinity in Hertford was not established until 1848, one year after Jacocks's death). Finally, like many of his prosperous contemporaries, Jacocks was a member of the Masonic order.

In August 1838 Jacocks bought the 180-acre home tract of the late Joshua Whedbee at public auction for $2,812.00, the property adjoining lands he already owned along the Little River. Here he settled with his family, which in 1840 was again the largest household in the county: four adult white males, three adult white females, three white boys, two white girls, and 101 slaves (fifty-eight males and forty-three females); fifty-four persons were engaged in agriculture. In addition to the 1,269 acres on which he claimed ownership on the county tax list in 1843, he managed property for five other persons as well.

When Jacocks undertook the expansion and stylish remodeling of the old house of Joshua Whedbee cannot be precisely determined. As a man of considerable wealth and political prestige, he surely would have sought to display his social position at an early date after the acquisition of the Whedbee place which occupied a prominent location along the main road entering the southern half of Durants Neck. As incentive for building as impressively as possible, Jacocks no doubt looked to James Leigh's splendidly stylish Greek Revival brick plantation seat, Land's End (ca. 1830-1837), which was completed just one year before Jacocks's purchase of the Whedbee dwelling. Other planters of Jacocks's social standing in the Old Neck and Durants Neck areas also occupied impressive residences graced by monumental full-width porticoes: the Fletcher-Skinner House (ca. 1818), the family home of Grizzelle Jacocks's first husband; Cove Grove (ca. 1830), the home of Benjamin S. Skinner and his wife Elizabeth, a daughter of James Leigh; and the Francis Nixon House, a ca. 1818 dwelling that was enlarged about 1835. Given the proximity of Leigh's Land's End to the Jacocks plantation, the similar social standing of the two men, and similarities between the Jacocks House and other dwellings attributed to Leigh, there seems little doubt that Jonathan Hill Jacocks commissioned master builder James Leigh to enlarge and modernize the Whedbee house into a plantation residence commensurate with Jacocks's wealth and social position. Adding to the ambiguity of the date of Jacocks's alterations is the bequest included in his will, written eight days before his death on January 29^th, 1847, of not only the buildings and improvements but the "materials prepared for completing said improvements and buildings". The nature of the work in progress, whether it was a continuation of Jacocks's initial improvement to the Whedbee dwelling, a subsequent improvement or stylistic updating of the house, or construction of ancillary structures, remains a mystery. It seems most likely that the improvements included the addition of the two-story portico on the facade, as similar Greek Revival porticoes are not uncommon in Perquimans County.

In the house the Jacockses enjoyed a level of material comfort attained only by the wealthiest planters of the day. Among the enumerated items contained within Jacocks's estate, in addition to the usual beds, bedsteads, and furniture, were a gold watch, jewelry, a bead-work box, a box of shells, a portrait of Jacocks, a dozen Windsor chairs, several "other" chairs, a settee, and a mahogany sideboard, bedstead, and wardrobe, the last item "recently ordered from New York." Like most learned, well-to-do men, Jacocks possessed a personal library, and among over 200 volumes were Niles National Register, The American Farmer, The Wealth of Nations, North Carolina law books, and works by Shakespeare, Fielding, Smollett, Goldsmith, and Wesley. The family was a musical one, owning a piano, violin, German flute, and an assortment of sheet music. French brandy, Holland gin, and Madeira wine indicated genteel tastes. Several items listed in his estate indicate that his business transactions extended to Providence, R. I. and Charleston, S. C., where quantities of corn were sold, and to New York where wheat was sold. Like many of the planter elite in the Albemarle region, he owned "houses and lots" in the newly fashionable resort of Nags Head, where families summered to escape the heat and diseases that afflicted much of eastern North Carolina. Other bequests in his will included "pew No. 9 at Christ Church [in] Elizabeth City for which I have paid the deed" and $100 to the church.

The size and success of Jonathan Hill Jacocks's farming operations are indicated by the quantities of the one-year provisions that he allotted upon his death to his widow and "her family, white and black." These included 20,000 pounds of fodder, 500 pounds of sugar, five bushels of yaupon, and 1,500 pounds of bacon, hams, and shoulders. Other enumerated items included corn, flour, sweet potatoes, cheese, poultry, pork, fresh herrings, shad, lard, tea, coffee, molasses, salt, pepper, allspice, vinegar, and both tallow and sperm candles. The farm was of such size that even after Grizzelle was given her choice of "horses, stock of all kinds, {and] Farming utensil, as much and such of it or them as she may need," there was still "one bay horse, three mules, two yokes of oxen, one ox cart, one horse cart, three plows and gears, one single gig and harness, [and] two saddles and bridles" to leave to Thomas, the oldest son.

Grizelle was also given use of eighteen of the plantation's eighty-nine slaves, several of whom were over eighty years old. The other slaves were given to the adult children from his first marriage, Thomas Stevenson Jacocks and Margaret Stevenson (Jacocks) Leigh, the latter being the wife of Edward Augustus Leigh, the youngest son of James Leigh, and to the young children of his second marriage, sons Jesse C., Jonathan Henry, and Hardy Hill and daughter Grizzelle Emily. The remaining slaves were to be sold by the executors. Included among the slaves were several craftsmen: Hercules, a blacksmith; Maria, a weaver; Tom, a shoemaker; carpenters Big John and Daniel; and Madison, an apprentice to carpenter R. M. Green. The size and contents of Jacocks's estate were neither surprising nor extensive for a man of his social standing, being indicative of a level of security, comfort, and refinement attained by only the wealthiest planters in the Albemarle region during the 1840s.

It is not until 1850, three years after Jacocks's death, that the census provides the names of household members and statistics for farm production. The Jacocks household was headed by Grizzelle, aged thirty-nine, and included her eleven-year-old daughter, Grizzelle; seven-year-old son, Jonathan; five-year-old son, Hardy; thirty-six-year-old sister, Emily Ann Copeland (who died four years later); and the farm's thirty-year-old overseer, Tillman R. Gregory. Son Jesse C., was probably away at school. Grizzelle Jacocks reported ownership of 625 acres of improved land and 575 acres of unimproved land, with a cash value of $19,000.00. The plantation was worked by forty-five slaves. It contained three horses, six asses/mules, ten milk cows, four oxen, fifty cattle, fifty-five sheep, and seventy-five swine, with the value of animals slaughtered during the past year given at $270.00. For reasons unknown, the farm produce seems somewhat low, consisting of 750 bushels of wheat, 4,000 bushels of corn, fifty-five bushels of peas and beans, a mere ten bushels of Irish potatoes and twenty bushels of sweet potatoes, 300 pounds of flax, six bushels of flax seed, 150 pounds of butter, and 165 pounds of wool.

Later in 1850, Grizzelle P. Jacocks married Dr. Robert Crawley Jenkins, a Virginia-born physician about twenty-five years old. Jenkins added to his wife's landholdings and by 1860 he owned 2,000 acres in various tracts, with 800 acres being improved and 1,200 acres unimproved. In addition to his medical practice, Jenkins actively engaged in farming, employing twenty-one-year-old Joseph R. Spruell as overseer in 1860 of thirty-three slaves. Jenkins's livestock holdings, which were valued at $5,500, were among the largest in the county and consisted of twelve horses, twenty-one asses/mules, ten milk cows, sixteen oxen, fifty-four cattle, one hundred sheep, and 300 swine. The fact that Jenkins had $1,500 worth of livestock slaughtered the previous year, an amount that was not only surpassed by only one other planter in Perquimans County but almost twice as high as the next highest amount in the Durants Neck census district, leads to speculation that he may have sold meat for export. Most of the sixty-one farms in the district slaughtered between $150 and $300 worth of livestock in the previous twelve months, and even neighbor Edward Augustus Leigh, the owner of 2,310 acres at Land's End (father James Leigh having died in 1854), slaughtered animals worth only $600. Jenkins' increased reliance on livestock is further reflected by the fact that he owned implements and machinery worth a paltry $100, while Leigh recorded ownership of $600 worth of implements and machinery and worked over twice the amount of improved acreage, 1,700 acres, as did Jenkins, even though the two men owned comparable total acreage. The Jenkins farm's production amounted to 5,250 bushels of wheat, 12,400 bushels of corn, 150 bushels of peas and beans, twenty bushels of Irish potatoes, one hundred bushels of sweet potatoes, 300 pounds of butter, and 200 pounds of wool, quantities comparable to the largest planters in Durants Neck. Other crops included forty tons of hay and sufficient sugar cane to yield twenty gallons of molasses. Among Jenkins's neighbors was Jesse C. Jacocks, the eldest son of Jenkins's wife by her first husband; it is presumed that much of the 667 improved acres and 167 unimproved acres that constituted his farm were lands once owned by his father, Jonathan Hill Jacocks. It is of note that in 1859 only fifteen farmers in Perquimans County raised cotton, all but four being in the Yeopim District, now Bethel Township; only one of these farmers was in Durants Neck, Thomas Newby, who raised a single bale.

Like others of his social and professional standing, Dr. Jenkins was involved with the county's civic and political affairs. In 1851 he was appointed as one of several justices of the peace in Perquimans County, a position that neighbor James Leigh of Land's End had fulfilled for a number of years. While Leigh and other planters, such as son-on-law Benjamin S. Skinner of Cove Grove, were trustees of a succession of private academies in Perquimans County during the antebellum period, Jenkins, like Jacocks before him, was appointed to oversee the improvement of the county's early public school system. In 1860 he became a member of the Board of Superintendents of Common Schools in the county, a position he probably held until the schools were disrupted by the upheaval of Civil War. In April 1861, as North Carolina entered the Civil War, Jenkins was appointed to solicit contributions toward outfitting the county's volunteers and was a member of the Committee of Vigilance and Safety for the Durants Neck District. Yet, as the war dragged on, he was sufficiently war-weary to participate in an anti-blockade runner, anti-guerilla meeting in 1863. The three youngest Jacocks sons, Jesse, Jonathan, and Hardy, all enlisted in the Confederate Army with Jesse rising to become a captain in the Bethel Regiment. Hardy died in February 1865 during the war's last months, and was buried in the Stevenson Cemetery at Land's End.

The end of the Civil War found Perquimans County, like the rest of North Carolina, facing profound economic, political, and social changes. While Dr. Jenkins continued his medical practice and civic responsibilities, such as being appointed a Warden of the Poor in 1866, by 1869 he was encountering sufficient economic difficulties that he began to increasingly mortgage the Jacocks/Jenkins property. According to the 1870 census, Robert and Grizzelle Jenkins inhabited the Jacocks house by themselves, with Jenkins declaring ownership of real estate valued at $14,500 and personal property worth $6,000. Despite the loss of slave labor, the farm remained surprisingly large and productive, suggesting that, as was common throughout eastern North Carolina after the Civil War, the new freedmen remained on the farm as tenants or sharecroppers. Underscoring this tradition is the fact that the 1870 Census for New Hope Township enumerated forty black residents with the Jacocks surname who comprised nine separate households. As all of the male heads of these households were listed as "Working on Farm," a designation used for a non-landowning "Farmer," it can be conjectured that these freedmen were tenants on the Jacocks/Jenkins farm. Furthermore, of the eighteen black Jacockses who in 1870 were at least twenty-three years old and thus living at the time Jonathan Hill Jacocks made his will in January 1847, nine, or exactly half, have names corresponding to specific slaves mentioned in the will. All but one of these, fifty-year-old Martha who had been bequeathed to son Hardy Hill Jacocks, were among the slaves willed by Jacocks to his oldest son, Thomas Stevenson Jacocks, who had died in 1852 at thirty-three years of age. They included eighty-year-old Grace Jacocks, who as a fifty-seven-year-old woman in 1847, had been referred to in the will as "old Grace."

Additional research will be required to document whether any of these black Jacockses were indeed members of the slave household associated with the Jonathan Hill Jacocks House. The likelihood that some of them would have been adds a critical but often overlooked dimension to the house's social history involving the transformation of the antebellum plantation dependent on Slave labor into a post-war farm that was no less dependent upon the labor of newly freed tenant and sharecropping farmers.

On a farm consisting of 921 improved acres and 917 acres of woods, the Jenkinses in 1870 maintained livestock valued at $4,000, including eleven horses, twenty-three asses/mules, eight milk cows, eight working oxen, six cattle, and 175 swine; there were no sheep. The value of slaughtered livestock was placed at $1,000. Crop production amounted to 10,000 bushels of Indian corn, 1,000 bushels of oats, 200 bushels each of wheat and peas/beans, 450 bushels of Irish potatoes, fifty bushels of sweet potatoes, and twenty-five tons of hay. Whereas in 1860 twenty gallons of molasses had been produced on the farm from sugar cane, ten years later enough sorghum was raised to produce an astounding 400 gallons of molasses, most of which was probably sold as export. Neither Jenkins or Leigh raised any cotton, but the crop was gaining a foothold in New Hope Township, formerly the Durants Neck census district. Of seventy farms enumerated in the township, fourteen farmers raised a total of fifty-seven-and-a-half bales of cotton.

Mrs. Grizzelle Pointer (Copeland) Fletcher Jacocks Jenkins died on February 9^th, 1873 at the age of sixty-one. She was survived by husband, Robert C. Jenkins, sons Jonathan Henry Jacocks and Jesse C. Jacocks, and daughter Grizzelle Emily (Jacocks) Leigh, who had married Edward Augustus Leigh in 1857 after the death in 1850 of his first wife, her half-sister Margaret Stevenson (Jacocks) Leigh. Mrs. Jenkins was buried in the Stevenson Cemetery near Land's End, as had been her second husband Jonathan Hill Jacocks and their son Hardy Hill Jacocks.

In December 1874 Jenkins purchased a house and lot in Elizabeth City (now the site of the Charles O. Robinson House on East Main Street), and the next month, at age of forty-eight, married twenty-two-year-old Mira T. John, the daughter of Dr. Palemon John (1828-1902), who published The North Carolinian, a progressive newspaper in a building nearly across the corner from Jenkins's lot. Whether the Jenkinses ever resided in Elizabeth City is uncertain. He was listed in the 1880 Census in the Jacocks House in New Hope Township, Perquimans County, which he occupied even though he had lost ownership of the home tract by foreclosure in 1878. He was still residing in the house when he died about 1882, for his estate was settled in Perquimans County; he, however, was buried in the Episcopal Cemetery in Elizabeth City.

Even though Dr. Jenkins occupied the house until his death, in 1878 the house and farm were sold under foreclosure to Cyrus W. Grandy of Norfolk, Virginia. Grandy had earlier lived in Elizabeth City, representing the First District in 1872 in the North Carolina Senate. In 1899 ownership of the property was transferred to C. W. Grandy and A. H. Grandy, business partners trading as C. W. Grandy and Son. The Jacocks-Jenkins Farm was part of more than 3,400 acres acquired in Durants Neck by the Grandys during the late nineteenth century, including Land's End, which was acquired in 1892 from Edward Augustus Leigh, whose two wives were the daughters of Jonathan Hill Jacocks. An elegantly-finished plat map of the Grandy property in 1902 includes stylized representations of both dwellings, with the Jacocks property, containing 695 acres, being labeled as "Pleasant Valley Farm". In April 1917 the Grandy heirs sold Pleasant Valley Farm to William G. Gaither, Jr. and W. R. Lambert of Elizabeth City, and they, in turn, sold it the next month to G. B. Webb. Gaither, a Perquimans native, was the great-grandson of James Leigh; his mother, Helen Virginia (Leigh) Robinson, returned Land's End to Leigh family ownership the same year.

During the entire Grandy ownership of Pleasant Valley Farm, the Jacocks House was occupied by tenant Leonidas Carvosso "L. C." Relfe (1854-1919), who resided here with wife Mary Elizabeth (Keaton) Relfe (1860-1936) from their marriage on March 19^th, 1879 until his death from skin cancer. A farmer who successfully managed the Grandys's farm, L. C. Relfe was the owner of a general store situated on New Hope Road at the end of the lane in front of the house. Here Relfe served as the only postmaster of the Jacocks Post Office, which was established on December 17^th, 1894 and discontinued on August 31^st, 1911. An ambitious man, Relfe also operated a cotton gin on land he owned on the east side of New Hope Road across from his store, and owned a race horse named "Hazel" which was entered in races in nearby Edenton. The Relfes had six children between 1880 and 1891, with three, including twins born in 1891, dying before their first birthday.

The Relfe household was an active one, with the teacher in the local school residing here (she being included in a ca. 1900 family photograph), and the family being host to visiting Methodist preachers and family friends on extended hunting trips. Relfe's relative prosperity enabled him to send. each of his three children away to school, and his stature within the community won him election to the Perquimans County Board of Commissioners. After his death, the farm equipment, livestock, and the contents of a large barn (which stood near the road until the 1980s), were sold at auction.

His widow vacated the house shortly afterwards, residing in the nearby community of New Hope until relocating to Belhaven about 1924.

In 1920 G. B. Webb sold the farm, then totaling 614 acres, to E.F. Turner of Gates County, and the farm has remained in out-of-county ownership since: from 1933 to 1939 by George L. Turner of Gates County, from 1939 until 1954 by William Paul Jackson of Pasquotank and Gates counties, and since 1954 by James. M. and Bernard S. Hofler of Gates County. In 1996 the house tract of one-and-three-quarter-acres was acquired by the Historic Preservation Foundation of North Carolina, Inc., a state-wide non-profit organization commonly known as Preservation NC. The Jonathan Hill Jacocks House was sold through Preservation NC's revolving fund in late November 1997 with preservation covenants to ensure its sympathetic renovation and continued Maintenance. The new owner, a great-granddaughter of L. C. Relfe, plans to undertake a complete rehabilitation of the property, having already covered exposed sections of the roof with tarps and undertaken emergency masonry repairs to stabilize the chimneys.

Site Description

The Jonathan Hill Jacocks House is a large, two-story, frame dwelling that consists essentially of two houses joined in an L-plan configuration. The earliest house is a former two-story, single-pile with rear shed rooms, side-passage-plan Federal-style dwelling. This house was considerably enlarged ca. 1838 into a fashionable Greek Revival center-passage-plan dwelling by the addition of a front block and a large rear ell. This house, in turn, was stylishly updated, most likely in 1847-1848, with a full-width two-story portico that is now the facade's most notable characteristic. The house lot consists of one-three-quarter acres and contains, in addition to the dwelling, an antebellum sawn-plank smokehouse that is a rare surviving example of a rapidly disappearing property type, a frame automobile garage that dates from the 1930s or 1940s, and sections of a picket fence erected before 1940. The only trees on the rectangular tract are two shade trees, one being a gracefully wind-blown live oak, and a large, old-fashioned lavender-colored crape myrtle in front of the house; the latter is the sole remnant of formal plantings the house possessed during the nineteenth century. Another shade tree is dead.

The house rises impressively among broad expanses of fields on the southwest side of New Hope Road about three-and-a-half miles south of the unincorporated crossroads community of New Hope in Hew Hope Township, Perquimans County, North Carolina. New Hope Township occupies Durants Neck, an elongated triangular peninsula projecting southeasterly into the Albemarle Sound, the major geological feature of the Albemarle region of northeastern North Carolina. Durants Neck is bordered on the northeast by the Little River (forming the boundary with Pasquotank County), on the east and south by Albemarle Sound, and on the southwest by the Perquimans River. To the northwest of Durants Neck is Old Neck, a much smaller projection into the Perquimans River; the Jacocks House is approximately eight miles from the nearest part of the Old Neck Historic District. At its widest point Durants Neck is almost eight miles wide, and over a distance of about ten miles it tapers to Stevenson Point where the Little end Perquimans rivers empty into Albemarle Sound. The Jacocks House is Situated about two-thirds of the way down the neck, amidst large, flat, agricultural fields enclosed by woods that occupy lowland wet areas to the north and west. About one-mile northeast of the house is the Little River, accessed by unpaved Jacocks Lane, a state-maintained road which extends through farmland once owned by Jacocks. The Jacocks House has few close neighbors, primarily modestly-scaled houses from the 1970s and 1980s Situated along the northeast side of New Hope Road opposite the Jacocks House. The nearest neighbors on the same side of the road are a one-story brick ranch house about a half mile northwest and a simple frame dwelling about one-and-a-half miles southeast, both houses being separated from the Jacocks place by uninterrupted farmland. Vistas of flat, productive farmland extend southerly and southwesterly from the Jacocks House to distances of as much as two miles, yielding a panoramic glimpse of the flat landscape characteristic of lands along the Albemarle Sound. The Jacocks House is situated at the end of an unpaved private farm lane that is in effect a continuation of Jacocks Lane. It is surrounded by a field planted in corn during 1997.

The original section of the Jacocks House was erected ca. 1815 for Joshua S. Whedbee (ca. 1790-1834), who had purchased the property in August 1814. As shown on Exhibit A, it was a two-story, single-pile, three-bay-wide dwelling with rear shed rooms. A pair of exterior brick chimneys anchored the northwest elevation; only the front chimney survives. As indicated by ghost marks in the second story floor, the house followed a side-passage plan with the stair rising along the outside (southeast) wall of the nine-foot-five-inch wide passage. The stair began in the rear shed, ascending with the slope of the shed roof that sheltered the rear shed in a straight flight to the center of the present upstairs hall. Further confirmation of this scenario includes the unbroken panel of wainscot between the two doors in the northeast wall of the present hall that is identical to wainscots in the front and rear rooms in the ca. 1815 section, and ghost marks of a former exterior boxed cornice at what was the rear of the original one-room-deep second story section of the ca. 1815 house. With the exception of the parlor mantel, all of the original late-Federal interior woodwork remains in place, including mitered three-part moldings, raised-panel wainscots with reeded stiles, and, upstairs, a diminutive tripartite mantel. The parlor mantel was very possibly moved during a subsequent expansion to the second-story southeast bedroom, where it was updated into current Greek Revival fashion. The ca. 1815 house apparently had a full width shed porch across the front, as indicated by sheathed boards on the first story of the present facade with weatherboards above.

The second house, the house that largely stands today, is the result of an expansion of Whedbee's house undertaken ca. 1838 by Jonathan Hill Jacocks (1792-1847). This building campaign incorporated the original dwelling into a much larger center-passage-plan Greek Revival plantation seat. The original rear shed rooms were raised to two stories in height and sheltered by an extension of the rear roof. This enabled the earlier stair to be replaced by a graceful stair rising from the front of the new center-passage to an intermediate landing. The two-story center-hall-plan house was further enlarged on the rear by a two-story ell flanked by porches, one-story on the southeast and double-tier beneath an engaged roof on the northwest. The ca. 1838 house was finished with popular Greek Revival elements, including symmetrical moldings with mitered cornerblocks, stylish mantels, and a handsome stair with wave brackets. The porch of the ca. 1838 house was a full-facade extension of the ca. 1815 one-story shed-roofed porch, as indicated by a continuation of the sheathed boards on the first story with weatherboards on the second story above. The facade was further updated, most likely in 1847-1848, with the addition of a stylish two-story portico across the six-bay facade that was sheltered by a shed-roof extension of the main gable roof. The new porch facade retained the distinction between sheathing and weatherboarding on the two stories.

As it has stood since 1847-1848, the Jonathan Hill Jacocks House is an impressively-scaled two-story six-bay dwelling following an L-plan configuration. Front and rear northwest porches are engaged beneath extensions of the gable roofs, all being covered with standing-seam tin. The house's dominant feature is a two-story portico that spans nearly the full width of the front (northeast). It is carried by six classically-proportioned Doric pillars that rise from molded bases to support a semi-engaged roof, with a break in the porch's shed-roofline in the manner of a double-slope engaged roof indicating that the portico was added later, most likely in 1847-1848. These pillars are not evenly spaced, with the four pillars framing the older section on the right being closer than those on the left; to have strictly followed a spacing of one pillar between each door or window bay would have yielded a visually-awkward odd number of pillars.

The central entrance is accentuated by sidelights and a trabeated seven-pane transom, all enframed by simple symmetrically-molded architraves with square medallions at the intersections. The single-leaf door is a partially-glazed Craftsman one added during the 1920s or 1930s. Windows on the facade and throughout the house contain nine-over-nine sash on the first story and six-over-six sash on the second story. The older windows to the northwest (right) of the entrance are enframed by simple flat surrounds while those on the southeast (left) of the entrance are simply accented with molded backbands and ovolo sills. Accentuating the finished character of the porch is the use of flush boards to sheath the first story. Plain weatherboards cover the rest of the house with the exception of a limited area on the older north elevation where beaded weatherboards survive from the ca. 1815 Whedbee House.

Each end elevation is anchored by an exterior-end chimney raised in five-to-one American bond brick, with paved double shoulders and reworked stack and capital on the northwest and paved single shoulders on the southeast. The southeast chimney is notable for the survival in place of the wooden form employed in the construction of the relieving arch on the interior of its base. These wooden forms usually either were removed by. the masons or deteriorated over time; its survival indicates not only the solid and dry environs of the chimney but affords a rare opportunity to document such a construction apparatus. The northwest chimney is flanked by narrow windows containing six-over-six sash on the first story and four-over-four sash on the upper story, while the south chimney is flanked by full-sized nine-over-nine and six-over-six sash windows. While the complex and unusual room arrangement in the ell might suggest either a two-phase construction of the southeastern block or perhaps a separate structure pulled up to and incorporated into the ell, an inspection of the brick piers indicates that the entire southeast block--the front parlor and two rooms of the ell--were built at the same time. The only double set of foundation piers are situated where the original ca. 1815 house and the ca. 1838 addition join each other.

The rear ell is finished much like the front section, and its expansive size is indicated by the five, second-story windows spaced evenly along the southeast elevation. The first-story of this elevation is sheltered by a deep one-story porch carried by replacement pillars supporting a shed roof; approximately one-fourth of this porch was enclosed on the northeast (front) before 1940 for the house's only bathroom. This southeast porch is complemented by a commodious double-tier porch on the northwest side of the ell that provides the exterior with its most forceful illustration of austere Greek Revival styling. Just three-bays wide, the engaged porch is carried by unfluted Doric pillars having simple molded capitals and bases. The only balustrade is found on the second floor, where a rounded handrail is supported by slender rectangular-in-section balusters. Of note on the porch is that the second story floor has beaded joists, that the second story is of markedly diminished height, and that the exterior siding on both levels consists of flush boards. Access to the house from the rear porch is through original doors to the rear of the center-passage and to the hall in the ell. Both doors are composed of five raised panels arranged with three horizontal panels placed atop two vertical panels; similar doors are seen throughout the house. The door surrounds are mitered with three broad, flat sections, with the only applied molding being a crisp but modest backband. The door to the ell hall is surmounted by a three-pane transom.

The plastered interior follows a center-passage plan that is spacious and appropriately proportioned. Circulation is facilitated by a hall that is an ample nine feet, five inches wide and twenty-six feet deep. While the front of the hall communicates with the formal front parlors and gives rise to a graceful stair, the rear of the hall provides access directly to the rear porch and to a side hall that permits access to both rooms in the ell, an enclosed rear stair, and a side entrance to the rear porch. The front stair rises to an intermediate stair landing that extends the full width of the hall, from which it makes an 180-degree turn to continue to the second story hall while a short, three-step side stair provides entry from the landing into the the shed room bedroom. The stair exhibits elements identified with local builder James Leigh, primarily the monkey-paw cap to the primary newell and the simplified stair scrolls that decorate the ends of the open stinger. Delicately proportioned rectangular-in-section balusters support a rounded handrail that is ramped where it meets the landing's simple tapered newels. The stair's subtle but sophisticated finish includes paneled fascia's of the landing. Woodwork in the hall includes Federal-style flat-paneled wainscots on which the central stile of each section is reeded, molded baseboards and chair rails, mitered three-part door and window surrounds, an entrance surround similar to that on the exterior, and clothes rails with beaded edges and curvilinear metal hooks. The paneled summer beam transecting the hall has hanging from its center an ornamental hand-wrought iron hook that probably originally held an oil lamp.

The northwest (front) parlor is the earliest of the parlors, being the largest and main room in the original ca. 1815 house. Original woodwork includes the house's finest wainscots composed of raised panels with inverted corners, a beaded stile in the center of the long front (northeast) wall, and the same molded baseboard and chair rail as in the hall, with the chair rail here forming a continuous sill beneath the front windows. The mantel is an extremely plain pilaster-and-frieze form Greek Revival replacement for what undoubtedly was the finest Federal-style woodwork in the house. This mantel may have been relocated to the new upstairs front (northeast) bedroom in the ca. 1838 wing, where it was outfitted with a peaked back panel that updated it into current Greek Revival fashion. The focus of the room, however, is a distinctive combination of folding and pocket doors leading to the rear room, combining the two rooms for a more commodious space for entertaining; these doors were added ca. 1838 as they match the form and moldings of the five-panel Greek Revival doors seen elsewhere in the house. Composed of three tiers of largely square raised panels above a single tier of elongated vertical raised panels, the doors are divided so that each leaf of a central double-leaf door is connected to an eight-panel pocket door. The result is an ingenious method of making each room more useful and easily accessed. The mantel in the smaller rear room is a severely-plain Greek Revival pilaster-and-frieze form mantel as well. Simple moldings and flat-paneled wainscoting like that in the hall but without a reeded central stile complete the room. Relfe family photographs from the 1890s illustrate a small, one-story one-room wing extending northwestward from this rear room. Family tradition relates that this room had been added as the medical office of Dr. Robert Crawley Jenkins, who married Jacocks's widow in 1850 and resided in the house until his death ca. 1882. This room had been removed by 1940 when additional photographs record its absence. Its former existence is noted only by the removal of the chimney and the closure of the elongated window to the southwest (rear) of the former chimney. Whether this window had been modified as a door into the side wing, or whether the side wing even had interior access, has not been determined.

The southeast (front) parlor is the most stylish in the house, displaying a notable but reserved Greek Revival finish. The focus is a handsome mantel that combines elements adopted from designs popularized by Boston-architect Asher Benjamin, whose work the builder James Leigh utilized at Land's End and . The firebox is framed by broad symmetrical Greek Revival moldings with corner blocks composed of mitered segments. Above the center of the opening is a tall raised panel flanked on the upper part of each side by an elongated panel that connects with a single Greek fret motif poised above the mitered cornerblocks. Surmounting the entire composition is a straight shallow shelf embellished with dentils and other simple moldings. The room is exceptionally well-lit, containing five, nine-over-nine sash windows on the outer two walls that are finished in typical Greek Revival fashion with paneled aprons encased by symmetrical moldings with cornerblocks. The moldings repeat at the two, five-panel doors. A simple baseboard completes the room.

The ell has a complex interior configuration containing two rooms and a small rear hall. The hall extends along the northwestern side of the most forward (northeastern) of the rooms and connects to the rear of the main hall. This secondary hall provides communication not only to the front and rear rooms of the ell but to the rear porch and an awkwardly placed rear stair. This enclosed stair does not rise along a wall, but instead from near the front of the hall in a dog-leg flight into the middle of the front ell room; there the stair makes a quarter-turn to the right and continues to a landing near the middle of the room above. On the first story most of the undersides of this intruding stairs are enclosed by a commodious walk-in stair closet that contains a horizontal three-pane window facing one of the exterior windows; such a window is called a "rob light" because it robs light from one source to illuminate another space.

A portion of the intermediate stair landing is cantilevered into the downstairs room, creating a most unusual feature. While it is obvious why such a configuration is necessary given the placement of the stair, what remains baffling is why the stair was placed in such an unusual location in the first place. This front ell room is entirely sheathed with flush horizontal boards--some more than eleven inches wide--and it is the only room in the house so finished. Complicating the understanding of this room is the existence of seams in the floor and ceiling that suggest the former existence of a wall, perhaps one that partitioned the room into a smaller stair room with some sort of partially-enclosed passage between rear porches. The selective removal of boards during rehabilitation should provide clues to help determine the original configuration and function of this confusing room. While this stair room originally opened onto the one-story porch on the southeast, it now opens onto a bathroom added before 1940. Also of note in this room is the existence of louvered transom openings above the doors to the hall and to the rear porch, the latter being closed since the addition of the bathroom onto the porch before 1940.

While the hall transom is definitely original, investigation will need to be undertaken during rehabilitation to determine the age of the transom onto the former porch. The rear hall contains a sizeable built-in china closet at the front end of the hall and a delightfully diminutive raised-two-panel door to the stair closet beneath the main stair. To the right of this closet door is a small secret cupboard accessed by a deceptively-detailed sliding panel of a sheathed wainscot.

The rear of the first-story ell is occupied by the brightest and largest room in the house, a commodious space that is nineteen feet, six inches wide and seventeen feet, seven inches deep. It is illuminated by two windows each to the rear and northwest (onto the lower story of the double-tier porch) and a door and window onto the one-story southeast porch. During the historic period of the house it was probably utilized as the main dining room because of its size and proximity to a separate kitchen (now lost). While the interior-end placement of the chimney emphasizes the mantel, the mantelpiece itself has been removed. Finishing woodwork includes flush sheathed wainscots with the molded chair rail doubling as a continuous sill beneath the windows, the same five-panel doors as seen throughout the downstairs, and the only, albeit simple, crown molding seen in the entire dwelling.

The second story largely follows the plan of the first story but with simpler mantels and finish woodwork. The central upstairs hall is divided into the rear hall and a small, unheated room at the front. The northwest bedroom (front) contains a handsome but diminutive Federal style mantel, the entire piece being just four feet, four inches wide and three feet, eight inches tall. It has a broad, simply molded mitered architrave upon which stands a pulvinated frieze and shelf. A beaded chair rail serves as a continuous sill, while clothes rails on each side of the corner entrance are outfitted with metal hooks. The rear (west) bedroom has a more elaborate tripartite mantel heralding the rising influence of Greek Revival design in the house; it displays reeded diamond motifs in the frieze, symmetrically-molded pilasters, and a peaked back board behind the shelf. This room lacks a chair rail.

The rooms in the block added in ca. 1838 along the southeast of the house are distinguished by an unusual room arrangement focusing on the use of the room into which the rear stair opens as a secondary passage hall. The passage hall that lies above the downstairs rear hall is wider than its downstairs counterpart and has a flush-sheathed wainscot and beaded clothes rail with original wooden pegs. The front (northeast) bedroom in the ca. 1838 block is accessed only from the rear stair room, and is smaller than the corresponding downstairs parlor by the size of a narrow trunk room that is entered from the main central hall. This bedroom features a splendid transitional Federal-Greek Revival mantel with robust pilasters, a broken frieze with correspondingly shaped molded shelf exhibiting delicately

reeded panels and diamonds, and a large, almost over-scaled peaked back panel behind the shelf. This mantel is perhaps the ca. 1815 mantel from the original front parlor, being updated with an obviously later back panel. Otherwise, this room is finished with beaded chair rails serving as continuous sills and modest molded surrounds. To the rear, in the front of the ell, is the stair room, with the stair rising into the middle of the room anchored by a square newel and enclosed with rounded handrail supported by rectangular-in-section balusters. This room is also finished with a flush sheathed wainscot having modest Greek Revival moldings. To the northeast (rear) and northwest (interior side) of the stair are closets of ample size and depth to allow walk-in storage. The room has a narrow wing that provides the only second-story access to the rear porch. The rear of the ell, above the downstairs dining room, is occupied by another brightly-lit room containing a pair of windows on each of three exterior walls. Here the interior end chimney sports a charming and diminutive Greek Revival mantel with symmetrically-molded pilasters, paneled frieze, fillet-molded shelf, and peaked back panel. Flanking the mantel and enclosing the adjacent windows are small closets having handsome five-panel doors that are miniature versions of the doors seen primarily throughout the house. Except, oddly enough, in this rear bedroom, where the entrance door has six raised-panels with clipped corners; it is one of the few six-panel doors reused from the ca. 1815 dwelling, with others leading to the front bedrooms. This rear bedroom is also finished with a flush sheathed wainscot with molded chair rail and baseboard.

A rare antebellum plank smokehouse is the only surviving outbuilding from the house's historic period. The building is eighteen feet square and rests upon a three-to-one American bond brick foundation approximately two-and-a-half feet tall; the interior floor is also paved with brick. The only opening, a door, is centered in the southeast facade. The walls are raised of sturdy log planks approximately three inches thick and nine inches tall, with each plank being attached by two round pegs into corner posts that are, in turn, further connected by interior corner braces to the sills. The individual planks are also pegged to a vertical post in the center of each interior wall, to the corner braces, and longitudinally to adjacent planks. The upper third of each exterior wall is covered with weatherboarding, suggesting that the lower walls were covered as well, both for protection from weather and for enhanced smoke retention. Inside, many of the intermediate rafters and hooks survive from which meat was hung to be cured. The gable-front roof, shown in a 1940 Relfe family photograph, collapsed about 1995, and though the building has been unprotected from the elements since, it remains in remarkably sound condition. This roof shape is consistent with comparable buildings in Perquimans and adjoining counties erected during the second quarter of the nineteenth century, a period during which the hip roofs seen on earlier smokehouses were being supplanted by gable-front roofs.

The only other outbuilding is a rudimentary frame gable-front automobile garage probably constructed in the 1930s or 1940s. It is covered with weatherboarding, has a tin roof, and lacks any kind of door. The building was expanded sometime thereafter by an equally plain and shed-roofed addition. It is in a deteriorated condition.

Five sections of fencing totaling about forty-seven feet in length are all that remains of a pleasant blunt-tipped paling fence shown in a 1940 Relfe family photograph enclosing the front and northwest portions of the yard. The simple fence had a wide bottom board, with access provided by a pleasantly-arched gate. While the fence sections are generally in a poor condition, having been stored on the porch since the mid-1980s, restoration plans for the house include the reconstruction of the fence using the existing sections with necessary replacement material.