National Register Listing

George Farmhouse

E of Smyrna off DE 6, Smyrna, DE

The George Farmhouse is an astonishing expression on the Delaware landscape, several decades late, of a flamboyant late Victorian style that would have been startling there even in its heyday. The Queen Anne in Delaware is not a country style. The turreted house rising above the wheat or corn is very rare. To the extent that it occurs in the towns, it is generally an 1890s phenomenon. The George house may have been built as late as 1920; it could therefore be expressive of the optimistic economic climate of post-war Delaware, as well as of the prosperity and decided tastes of the family who built it. Also, because it was built out from the core of an earlier and itself very interesting frame farmhouse, it expresses in an especially exuberant manner a habit of additive building which is a recurrent 'theme in the architectural history of the state. The retardataire stylistic quality is especially noticeable where a manner we consider quintessentially Victorian is encroaching upon a period we begin to feel is modern. But it is very typical of Delaware. Similarly, the conservation of materials and styles is as common on the Delaware landscape as the occurrence of such a flamboyant farmhouse is idiosyncratic. This remarkable remodeling, then, combines the archetypal and the unique, and both aspects are illuminating to study of the architecture of the state. The George house is therefore nominated to the National Register under criterion C for significance, as it embodies in unusual ways the distinctive characteristics of a type, period, or method of construction.

The archetypal aspects of this building are embodied in the earlier frame farmhouse and kitchen wing, and in what has been done with them. They are archetypal because their forms--at least their exterior forms--are extremely common in the Delaware countryside. They are archetypal also because they themselves almost certainly represent an additive building process, and because they eventually became units in a later, whole-hog remodeling. This too is extremely common in Delaware. The man who counted this farm among his tenanted landholdings in the late-nineteenth century, G. W. Cummins, undertook a similarly ambitious remodeling in his inflation of his residence Woodlawn from a five-bay, single-pile dwelling, to a double-pile structure with a full temple front. Such recycling is conservative of money and materials, even when it is not conservative in style. Usually, it is both. The builder of Woodlawn in 1853 was not too much more behind the first wave of the Greek Revival than the builder of the George house was behind the Queen Anne.

The date of construction of the Queen Anne section is not ascertain, though there appears to be no question that it was built by Edmund and Linnie George, who in 1908 bought what had once been Cummins' "Carroll Farm". William H. George, Jr., grandson of this couple and present owner of the farm, was born there in the late 'twenties; he repeats a family story that his grandfather saw something he liked on his way to Florida one winter, and that is what he decided to build. This can hardly have been earlier than the early 'teens, at which point the assessed value of the Georges' land remained less than the $9,000 they had paid for it. It may well have been as late as 1920, after which time the value of the 194-acre farm rose to $12,000; it would rise no higher in the next several decades. Kent County tax records for the 'teens are unfortunately in a fragmentary state, which makes it impossible to date the house more precisely on the basis of them.

In any case, the house is sufficiently late to be considered a minor survival of the Queen Anne style. Buildings of this adamantly asymmetrical and eclectic character were of course appearing by 1880. Such local examples as the splendid Richardson house in Dover or the Phillips building in Smyrna date ca. 1890. The George house shows its lateness, or the lateness of its model somewhere on the route to Florida, in its classicizing tendencies: the use of details such as Ionic columns, the tendency to firm up and reign in the asymmetry of the facade. These are qualities generally characteristic of the late Queen Anne, as it responded to an increasing taste for restraint and simplification near the beginning of the twentieth century. The advanced date of the house is evident too in such details as the very angular, Prairie-style ornament of the leaded glass panels above the living room windows, and in a certain dryness of composition which suggests an attempt to copy an imperfectly remembered, imperfectly familiar form.

More striking than the use of the style in the twentieth century, however, is its use in the open landscape. Queen Anne architecture never really took in Delaware, especially downstate Delaware, to the extent that it did in other places. The more balanced picturesqueness of the Greek and Gothic Revivals, Italianate and Second Empire, appear to have been more appealing. Examples of Queen Anne do share Victorian Delaware streetscapes with representatives of these other styles, but it is streetscapes, not landscapes, that they share. And while picturesque houses of any description are somewhat unusual in rural Delaware, a full-blown Queen Anne farmhouse is a truly striking exception. The result is that the George house makes an exceptionally striking architectural statement on the landscape of Duck Creek Hundred.

Local significance of the building:
Listed in National Register of Historic Places in 1982.