Peterson and Mustard's Hermitage Farm

Peterson & Mustard's Hermitage Farm is a splendidly sited and preserved, for- mally unusual version of the "peach house" type, a regional variation of the Greek Revival and Italianate styles. The type was broadly associated with agricultural prosperity enjoyed in Delaware through much of the nineteenth century, prosperity based in part on a booming business in peaches. It is an imposing, angular style, characterized by broad, often extra-tall facades and nearly flat roofs. The refined but summary forms of Hermitage Farmhouse repre- sent both a narrowing and a flattening of the usually more portentous peach house facade. This modesty may be the key to the historical situation the house so handsomely evokes. It was probably built or remodeled as the main tenant bulle house for a recently enlarged and consolidated farm, rather than as the resi- dence of the actual landowner. In such an instance, less grandiloquent forms may have seemed most suitable. In any case, it has been a tenant house since its ownership by tanyard and land owners John Mustard and Alexander Peterson, who put together this island-like tract in 1863. As such it stands as an image of the forms of prosperity, trickling down to the relatively less prosperous. In the building up of the countryside in the mid-to-late nineteenth century, a substantial tenant farmer could live in more spacious and elegant conditions than most landowners had done in the previous century. The property is embodies the distinctive characteristics of a type, period, or method of construction.

The peach house type, it should be stressed, was associated with the peach prosperity rather than in every case with actual orchards. The style can pro- duce effects of great mass without substantially increasing interior space over that of an ordinary, gabled house. These emphatic facades obviously appealed to many of the peach barons whose fortunes flourished during the decades of the peach prosperity. But if historian John Thomas Scharf is accurate in counting three-quarters of the land around Smyrna in peaches in the late 1850s, it is clear that many peach growers built in other styles, and it is probable that some non-peach-growers built "peach houses." Still, as an architectural expression of a prosperity that lasted long and which no doubt seemed firmly grounded before it began to collapse under the peach blights of the 1870s, the boxy and slightly boastful peach house can hardly be improved upon.

The peach house type was always more popular in New Castle County than in Kent. It achieved its greatest density in the Hundreds flanking the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal. It is quite unusual in Duck Creek and Kenton Hundreds. And it is very noticeable that of the two principal examples, one was Peterson & Mustard's Hermitage Farm, and the other, the Stevens house six or seven miles west, was next-door to a farm owned in 1868 by this same set of partners.

The close similarities between the two suggest that one may have prompted the other, and that they may have been the products of the same builder. The dif- ferences are equally interesting. Hermitage Farm, with its service wing remodeled to match the front, and its more elaborate brackets, window treatments and porch is far finer in detail than the Stevens house. At the same time, it is radically truncated, almost miniaturized, in mass. Its width is clipped from five bays to three, its porch from three bays to one-and-a-half. The row of attic lights in a parapet-like wall is shaved off entirely. This scaling down of the classic peach house facade may, when we are able to put it in a wider context, offer us clues to the evolution of the type from what appear to be essentially late Georgian and Greek Revival roots to a more ostentatious Italianate manner. At present, and in this particular case, the use of this variant is the more interesting because it can probably be associated with a social function--with a reduction in pretentiousness appropriate to a tenant house.

It is not certain, but it is likely, that the house was built by the Smyrna business partnership of Peterson & Mustard, under whose ownership it appears in the 1868 Beers' Atlas of Delaware. The tree-and-creek-lined tract of land which they consolidated in 1863 was previously fragmented into four parcels with three owners. There had been at least one mansion house upon it, in about the loca- tion of the present house, when Philip Denney's estate was divided in 1859. Even allowing for schematization on the part of the nineteenth-century draftsman, the gabled, end-chimneyed representation on the Denny plot is difficult to recognize as the present peach house. It seems more likely that Denney's house was remodeled as service wing to a new house built by Peterson & Mustard. It would have been a very fine tenant house--if it was not built as one, it shortly became one--but then it was a very fine farm, especially in the almost idyllic, insulated setting evoked by the name given in it in the 1860s. That the land was tenanted from 1860 on is not in question. Mathias Jerman, who acquired it from the Denny estate, was a Smyrna clergyman. John Mustard and Alexander Peterson were partners in a tannery that thrived at Smyrna Landing, but at the time they bought this land, Peterson lived in Philadelphia and Mustard had a fine house in Smyrna. The supposition that the partners made substantial improvements to the land is strengthened by the fact that when Mustard sold his half-interest in the farm to his partner in 1868, he received almost exactly the same amount that the two had paid for the full interest five years before $9,300 as compared to $9,200 in 1863. The value had slightly more than doubled. When Peterson died in 1869, the farm passed to his children, one of whom was Emily Corbit of Odessa; thence to her sons and through several subsequent owners to the present landlord in 1949. The house remains as a fine, well-tended tenant house today, still set in undivided fields, though no longer tenanted by the farmer of them.

The level of significance checked in item 10 is state. This choice was made for two reasons: first, for the unusual integrity of the house and its setting, and second, for the extra-local importance of the "peach house" style of which this is an exceptionally attractive and well-preserved example. Few farms in Delaware can surpass Hermitage Farm for visual integrity; and the house is an important addition to the list of examples to be considered when it becomes possible to look closely at the evolution and associations of the Delaware peach house.