National Register Listing

Macomb Farm

a.k.a. Thomas Irons House

Long Point Rd. off DE 8, Dover, DE

The Macomb Farm is significant as a specimen of eighteenth-century Kent County brickwork executed to a high standard of craftsmanship. The floorplan and interior trim, while they are anomalies, deserve attention. In connection with two crucial Delaware figures of the Revolution, Judge Irons and Eleazer Macomb, the property has a measure of historical significance.

Judge Thomas Irons (1708-1784), bought the property now known as the Macomb farm before 1768. He left it to his grandson and namesake, Thomas I. Macomb, in his will. Although Judge Irons' farm was at least 445 acres the house now stands on a four-acre lot, owned by non-farmers.

Irons was the judge of the Kent Couty Court of Common Pleas, and the father-in-law of Eleazer Macomb, one of the commissioners who built the State House in Dover. Eleazer Macomb held military command and civil office during the Revolution and became State Auditor after the war; he was a banker and ship owner in Wilmington from 1792 until his death in 1798. His son, Thomas Irons Macomb, remained on the Little Creek Hundred farm until his death. His niece, the wife of Robert Frame, inherited the property in 1836. During much of the nineteenth century, the house was occupied by tenants; in 1854, it was described as being in "tolerable repair." This tenant-farm status may have helped to save the building from the ravages of modernization until 1940 when the large staircase was installed in the rear parlor.

In the hands of its present owners, the house has been modernized, but in a manner consistent with its historic fabric.

Local significance of the building:
Listed in National Register of Historic Places in 1974.