National Register Listing

Colston, Edward, House

a.k.a. Medway

1598 Tice Rd., Falling Waters, WV

This property is part of the eighteenth-century Maidstone Manor property, granted to Lord Fairfax by the British Crown. Lord Fairfax set up two manors in present-day Berkeley County: Swan Pond manor and Maidstone manor. Between 1795 and 1800, Raleigh Colston purchased portions of Maidstone Manor from Lord Fairfax's heirs. In turn, he deeded lots to his children, including Edward Colston. It is believed that Edward Colston built the present house shortly after receiving the property from his father in 1798. The house and farm acquired the name Medway soon after, due to its distance midway between the two historic Colston family houses of Maidstone Manor and Honeywood.

The Edward Colston House is a rare late-eighteenth-century, weatherboarded frame house in Berkeley County. Beginning in the 1730s, Berkeley County's earliest settlers established a long tradition of log or stone construction for residential architecture. Often, an original vernacular log house was enlarged by the addition of a larger stone wing, usually in the Georgian style. Examples of these log-stone houses in Berkeley County include the Hayes-Pitzer House, the Rees House, and the Hughes-Cunningham House, all listed in the National Register (West Virginia Division of Culture and History 2000:6- 10). By the 1790s, brick construction was becoming increasingly popular, and eventually overtook both stone and log in popularity for the most substantial Berkeley County houses. Wood-frame construction for domestic buildings was much rarer during the eighteenth century and it is believed that there is no other late-eighteenth/early- nineteenth-century wood-framed house in Berkeley County listed in the National Register.

The Edward Colston House represents the transition during the 1790s and early 1800s from the Georgian style to the early Federal period in Berkeley County's domestic architecture. Features of the Georgian style include the side gable roof, 12/12 double-hung windows on the first story with their thick molded muntins, the wide stair hall on the interior, and the use of blind or false windows on the west gable. Blind windows were used during the Georgian period to retain a symmetrical appearance across a façade when a chimney or staircase made a working window impractical. Their use on an entire elevation at the Edward Colston House, on the other side of the wall from the wide interior stairway, is especially unusual. Elements of the Federal style as seen on this house include the use of smaller 12/8 windows on the second story to create a greater illusion of height, the delicate tracery within the rectangular door transom, the paneled door with its crosettes and corner blocks, and the design of the fireplace mantel in the dining room.

Edward Colston resided for most of his life at Honeywood, the Rawleigh Colston home in Berkeley County he inherited from his father in 1823. The younger Colston died in 1851. In February 1858, Honeywood burned and his widow Sarah Jane Colston and her family moved to Edward Colston/Medway farm in April 1858.

The Colston family suffered heavily during the Civil War, and by 1870, Sarah Jane Colston was residing in Martinsburg with her son William B. Colston. As a result of a lawsuit, the 350-acre Medway Farm was sold in December 1875 to members of the Tice family.

Much valuable information on the historic appearance of the main house and the agricultural history of the Colston farm is contained in testimony given in connection with a suit filed in 1911 by John, David, Milton, Catherine, and Preston Virginia Tice against their brother Calvin R. Tice and his wife Sarah. According to Calvin Tice, after the death of their father in 1866, Calvin Tice had lived with his mother and brothers in Washington County, Maryland until 1873, when he moved to the 350-acre farm in Berkeley County, West Virginia formerly owned by Edward Colston. According to Tice, brothers Milton and John had worked on the farm for several years, with much of the crops and livestock regularly sold to the C&O Canal Towage Company.

Calvin Tice further identified several improvements he had made to the farm beginning in 1882, including a new barn, a hog pen, a corn house, a machine shed, and a chicken house. The dimensions of the barn were given as 100 feet by 54 feet, a corn house 47 feet by 7 feet, a machine shed 20 feet by 30 feet, and a chicken house 20 feet by 15 feet. None of these outbuildings are still extant. A Tice family photograph dates from the late 1890s, and shows the main house, along with a small gable-roofed outbuilding, probably a kitchen, a short distance to the east. No other outbuildings are shown in this photograph.

Calvin Tice claimed that because his wife's health was poor, he desired to move her from the main house, which he described as weatherboarded and containing three rooms on the first floor and four on the second floor. He claimed that the house was old when he moved in in 1873 and was only in fair condition. With money from his wife's inheritance, they built a new house and rented out the old house as a tenant house.

In their suit, the other family members objected to the numerous improvements made to the farm, despite the fact that they each owned a 1/6 interest in the farm. They claimed that they received no income from the farm and had not been consulted on nor approved the construction of the new buildings, including the new farmhouse.

At the conclusion of the lawsuit, three Berkeley County Special Commissioners sold the farm to Calvin R. Tice for $10,413. Tice died in 1925 and left the farm to his wife Sarah. The farm belonged to various Tice family descendants until 1966 when the farm was sold to Bentley and Juanita Dove for $56,000. On 8 March 1972, a 7.51-acre portion of Medway Farm, containing only the main house built by Edward Colston, was sold to the present owner Mary M. Baer.

Local significance of the building:
Listed in National Register of Historic Places in 2003.