National Register Listing

Moore House

511 W. Mt. Vernon St., Smyrna, DE

The 1869 Moore house is the most handsome and least altered dwelling in "Spruance City," a nineteenth-century subdivision plotted on unincorporated land between the nearly contiguous towns of Smyrna and Clayton. The house carries a conspicuously unusual "house-on-house" plan within an elegantly decorated shell, with thickly applied brackets, distinctive diamond-shaped windows, and a running porch around an asymmetrical facade. These picturesque forms are unusual among Delaware houses of this size and period; a far commoner choice was an unbroken, symmetrical, three- or five-bay facade on a boxy single-pile house. Together. with the extra-large lot and intact suburban outbuildings, the Moore house. illustrates with remarkable effectiveness the response of an independent working-class family to the suburban ideal promoted by the nineteenth-century landscape movement. The conspicuous shape and surface treatment probably also served as a kind of occupational advertisement for the owner, for Robert Moore was listed in the 1870 census as a house carpenter. Mary Moore's occupation is reflected here as well, for she was listed as keeping a house. The property is nominated to the National Register as it embodies the distinctive characteristics of a type, period, or method of construction.

Robert and Mary Moore bought their pair of 50-foot-wide lots, on what was then called Font Hill Avenue, from John S. Spruance in May of 1868. In 1902 Isaac Joslin acquired the house in settlement of a debt from the Moores and added to the parcel two 50 lots to the west and the 100 corner lot to the east. These lots remain unbuilt to this day, devoted to open lawn and fruit and berry plantings, and they contribute a great deal to the image of the independent suburban homestead projected by the house and outbuildings on Moore's initial lots. By 1869, Robert Moore's worth as reflected in the tax rolls had jumped from the $320 in personal property reported there in previous years, to include $1700 in real estate. This figure certainly represents the "two-story frame dwelling and stable in Spruance City, in tenure of self," which were spelled out in the rolls a few years later.

Spruance City, then, was already at least partially subdivided at least a year and a half before James W. Spruance publicly advertised lots in his "newly named Spruance City" in December of 1869. He was charging $100 apiece for lots to be distributed by random drawing; the Moores had paid $250 for, presumably, their choice of available double-wide parcels. James Spruance was a sufficiently astute promoter to include Font Hill, the mansion house for the 200-acre tract he was subdividing, among the otherwise empty lots to be drawn for by the $100 ticket-holders. According to George Caley's local history of the Smyrna-Clayton area, 140 persons had bought at least one ticket before the drawing on February 15, 1870.

Despite Spruance's inventiveness in marketing a tract that had found no buyer when put up for sale as a mansion farm 15 years earlier, his fortunes eventually failed. By 1882, a deed of trust to John Hoffecker declared that "the said John W. Spruance, owing to sundry misfortunes, is unable to discharge his debts and is willing to convey all his real estate for the benefit of his creditors." This included his unsold lots in Spruance City. But despite the misfortunes of its developer, the subdivision itself remains as a modest monument to the attractions, both practical and aesthetic, of block-deep lots at relatively low prices, just outside the limits of a town but within easy reach of the town's conveniences. The Moore house, for example, is within 150 feet of the Smyrna town line, and little more than a block from the site of the ticket office of the Smynra Railroad, which branched at Clayton from Delaware and the Delaware and Maryland lines.

The house of the Moore family conveys with special effectiveness the historic circumstances of its site and the way of life of its early owners. It does this by means of the landscaped space around it; by its retention of historic outbuildings (the frame stable for the horse that would have gotten the family to town, the retired outhouse the family would have used); and by the well-preserved, picturesque forms of the dwelling house itself.

The level of significance claimed for the Moore house is local. The property has unusual, if not unique, features which make it of interest to the architectural and social history of the state as a whole. However, our ongoing inventory does not yet provide readily accessible information on the exact distribution of the house-on-house form, or contextual information on other, perhaps similar, nineteenth-century subdivisions in Delaware. The significance of the house, therefore, seems most appropriately discussed in the local context of Smyrna-Clayton and Duck Creek Hundred.

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