Raymond Neck Historic District

The Raymond Neck Historic District preserves on the landscape the architectural forms and spatial relationships of the nineteenth-century rebuilding of Duck Creek Hundred, wherein modest eighteenth-century mansions and tenant houses were enlarged or replaced with much more massive and substantial dwellings. Much of the architecturally rich landscape of the Hundred expresses this economic and architectural evolution. But because of the proximity and alignment of these three houses, and the resulting repetition on the landscape of their red-brick, end-chimneyed, ell-planned forms, this district makes its point in a clearer, more compact, and more compelling way than is ready to be found elsewhere in the state. Moreover, the particular histories of these farms, and of the prominent and anonymous people whose capital and labor built them, are illustrative of more than a range of building options. They also illustrate a number of developments in geographical and social relationships, and in the landscape and architectural forms that support them.
Among these are the rapid division of the original land grants into smaller tenanted and mansion farms, and the shifting orientation from the river to the land as the primary mode of transportation. Documentary sources record the overlapping of economic and political influence often enjoyed by the men who prospered on these farms, and the landscape preserves the changes they effected on it.

Documentary sources also suggest, if obliquely, the role of slave labor in building the prosperity that made these comfortable houses, and the relative obscurity of the women who lived and worked in them. Finally, the houses and what remains of the outbuildings illustrate the variable economics of building order; the use of architectural form and style to express status and attitude; the evolving domestic arrangements that saw the provision and the eventual attrition of servants' quarters; and the functions of outbuildings gradually absorbed into the house.

The western end of Whitehall Neck has been known as Raymond's Neck since the early nineteenth century and is so identified on modern maps. Much of Whitehall Neck, and all of these three farms, was part of a 1000-acre grant made by the Penn proprietorship to Francis Whitwell in 1675, north of what was then called "the South West branch of Duck Creek." The landscape at that time would have been a much more uniformly wooded plain, and but very sparsely settled; when Kent County was divided off from the jurisdiction of the Whorekill Court in Sussex County in 1680, was to serve the 99 citizens recently located in a census from "ye upper part of Cedar Creek to ye upper part of Duck Creek." Whitwell's tract he named Whitwell's Chance. There is also a reference to a tract "Benefield," and Whitwell may have received a second grant on the south side of the stream and still another in the western part of the Hundred. In any case, he built a house called Whitehall above his own landing, several miles east of the present district.

The remains of these early uses of the land have not been located. The same orientation to the river, however, survives in the early documents relating to the Raymond Farm. The road to Raymond's Landing is a common geographical reference in the deed descriptions of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The road would have been an extension, now absorbed in the fields, of the lane that still leads from the county road to the house. By the time the main block of the house was built in the 1820s, the land orientation was the important one, and the house faced north. So do the two other houses in the district, which were built from the ground in the nineteenth century. But the original section of the Raymond house probably took its orientation at least as much from the water as the land, with the entrance facing east or west and the outbuildings arranged, as they still are, to the north. Members of the Raymond Family were, by the 1740s, among those who had begun acquiring land parceled out from the original large tracts, or smaller tracts of land previously ungranted. Jonathan Raymond is the first to appear in the land records, accumulating land by a patent and through the medium of Sheriff's sales. Raymond himself served terms as County Sheriff during this period.

This convergence of political office with the acquisition and profitable exploitation of the land appears again and again. James Raymond, who owned the Raymond plantation from 1775 to 1817, was one of the wealthier men in the Hundred and repeatedly held political office: Privy Councilor of Delaware in 1779, multiple terms as Kent County Senator and Representative in the Delaware Assembly, the '80s and '90s. His son John Raymond was also elected to multiple terms in the House. He probably built the five-bay mansion house that stands today at about the time of his greatest political visibility, for in 1831 he was a Kent County delegate to the convention to revise Delaware's constitution, and in 1833 was made Speaker of the House. Jacob Stout, who acquired the farm after John Raymond's death in 1843, and who owned the Wilson Farm as well during those years, was even more imposing. He was president of the Bank of Smyrna during the 40s, and a director of it for many more years. He was a frequent member of the General Assembly, and in fact, his position as Speaker of the Senate propelled him into the 21st Governorship of Delaware in 1820-21, when the man who had been elected to the office died. Stout was thereafter variously referred to as Governor and Judge, since for some years after his term as governor he sat on the Court of Common Pleas.

And he accumulated very large quantities of land, very often through the mechanism of the sheriff's sale. James H. Hoffecker, the builder of the 1820 Hoffecker house, also sat in the Delaware Assembly. In 1848 he was State Senator from Kent County, in 1864 State Representative; while in the lower house, he had the opportunity to vote with the minority for the abolition of slavery. The builder of the Wilson house was likely the same Robert Wilson who was Treasurer of Kent County in 1871-3, and perhaps the State representative of 1896 and State News editor of 1901.

The impression created by this litany of positions is that of a more-or-less seamless system of prosperity and power, in which relatively few names repeatedly recur. The system left its image on the landscape not only in fine houses but in fertile cleared fields and in even more ambitious alterations of the topography. A historian of the 1880s reported of Duck Creek Hundred that where there had been continuous woods, "Great crops of wheat are grown, and in Raymond's and Whitehall Necks, near the town of Leipsic, the wheat average is equal to any section of the U.S." Historian Scharf continued that "a large part of the land near the bay and creek was formerly marsh, of which much has been drained and reclaimed." It is not surprising that the names of these wealthy and influential landowners also appear in references to these topographical undertakings.

For example, In 1816 James Raymond was first named among a group of landholders who applied for a permit to bank and drain some marshlands contiguous to their properties. Raymond's Pool, at the head of Raymond's Gut within the borders of Bombay Hook Refuge east of the district, probably recollects this project. Similarly, Jacob Stout is recorded as having shortened the course of Little Duck or Leipsic Creek by having it cut through to the bay in 1820.

The earliest known occupant of a substantial house on the mansion farm of the Raymonds was Jonathan's brother or cousin John, who died in debt in 1772. The documents pertaining to the settlement of this estate refer to Raymond's "old brick mansion house." It can be surmised that this was a one-room-planned, large-hearted, story-and-a-half house, dating probably from the mid-eighteenth century, which formed the first unit of the service wing lost in the 1938 fire. After his death John Raymond's plantation, which then included among other acreage the land to the east which would eventually become the Hoffecker farm, passed into the ownership of James Raymond, probably his nephew.

The eighteenth-century reality that a house in brick was a substantial one, even if it was only a one-room plan, is reinforced by the fact that a relatively wealthy and important Federal period landowner such as James Raymond apparently contented himself with adding a single room, and perhaps lifting the roof on the old brick mansion house. Depictions on survey plots up until 1819 show the house with three windows across the upper story, two windows, and two doors below. Also, the inventory taken after James Raymond's death does not itemize by room the objects in an apparently small house and has him in possession of only two sets of andirons. So it appears virtually certain that the present five-bay, two-story, double-chimneyed main block was the contribution of still another John Raymond, James' son, who inherited it from a short-lived brother in 1818, and that he is the "JR" commemorated in glazed headers in the gable. It is valuable to recognize in looking at the landscape of today that the modest brick house which later became a service wing was, almost until the second quarter of the nineteenth century, the most imposing structure in view as one looked east over Raymond's Neck. It was the mansion house, not only to the home plantation but to a loosely grouped collection of tenant farms, marsh tracts, and woodlots that brought James Raymond's assessed worth in 1797 to over 8000.

It is also valuable to remember something that is mentioned too seldom, and that is the contribution to these kinds of achievements of women and slaves. People in these categories appear infrequently in the documents, which refer primarily to relationships among landowners and between owners and tenants. the briefest consideration of the labor-intensive domestic and agricultural activities required on these farms will remind us that their prosperity rested on a considerable amount of uncongratulated labor. White women, though obviously more privileged than slaves, generally appear in the land records only as the wives of men and subsidiary parties to their transactions. Slaves, because they were more literally property, are listed in the tax rolls by name, sex, age and assessed value. In the 1800 census, James Raymond's household included, besides six men and boys, two women and a girl, and three "other free persons." It also included eight slaves. This was as many as were reported for any household in the Neck, except for an anomalous-looking entry of 46 slaves for Joseph Porter; this must either be an error or reflect the activities of a trader or contractor of slave labor. In any case, the labor of these people of color, like that of the white women of the household, would have been an extremely important element in prosperity too easily subsumed under the name of the head of a household. These same considerations hold true for the Hoffecker farm, which became a substantial mansion farm, tenanted by the owner, around 1820. The Wilson house is post-Civil War and so dates from a period of changed conditions, at least for Blacks. However, it remains important to recognize the degree to which these structures and complexes reflect the accomplishments of more than a single person.

James Hoffecker acquired the land to the east of the Raymond house in 1818 and a brick house "lately built," appears on a survey plot dated 1821. Also shown was the site of a small log house, by then demolished and said a few years earlier to have stood "in bad repair." This very modest dwelling, in use at a time when most tenant houses listed in the tax rolls were framed, appears to have been the principal dwelling on this land during its years as a tenant farm, after it was divided off from John Raymond's mansion farm in the 1770s settlement of his estate. Thus, we can set a small log house beyond the small brick mansion house of the Raymonds, in our mental image of the early-nineteenth-century appearance of the district. The two-story, four-bay brick house built by Hoffecker represented a quantum leap in substantiality and mass. It is also a nice rural reflection of the style appropriate to its period, for Federal forms were still current in Delaware in the 1820s. There is a general appearance of symmetry in the end-chimneyed gabled form, but an obvious relaxation of it in the broadening of the sitting room to two bays in width (or the narrowing of the parlor to one) and the consequent off-centering of the hall.

The smoothness of the forms of the Hoffecker house may reflect a version of Adamesque refinement of burlier Georgian forms. Or it may reflect, at least in part, the relative modesty of this house. Such an economic interpretation is favored by a comparison with the Raymond house main block. This was probably constructed a few years later, perhaps toward the end of a decade in which John Raymond's assessed worth and political prominence markedly increased. To judge from the close similarities between the forms of the two houses, it was probably put up by the same builder as the Hoffecker house. The Raymond house also has a certain smoothness of surface, and the sleek little fan-lighted entry and foliated ceiling medallion are certainly in good Federal style. But the extras that produced a very pretentious country house for the Raymonds tend to be conservatisms: the re-evocation of high Georgian symmetry in the widening of the parlor, and woodwork which is not lightened in the Adamesque manner but rather heavily enriched with classical detail. When compared to the smaller and less formal house raised by the Hoffeckers a short time before, the effect may have been a reaffirmation of the dominant position of the Raymond family on the Neck. This is especially true since the five-bay Raymond house would have had an extensive service wing, representing the whole original dwelling. The brick service wing of the Hoffecker house, as noted in the description, was most likely a later addition. In the 1820s, a modest frame kitchen probably stood behind the new main block. These two houses, then, seem to represent two of the options for building order: the Raymond house an additive composition built up from the service elements, and the Hoffecker house an additive composition that began with the main block and replaced temporary service elements over the course of time.

The Wilson house represents still a third option. This unusual structure dates almost half a century later. The property had been associated with the Stout family almost continuously since the mid-eighteenth century, and there had most likely been tenant houses upon it. But no record has been found of a substantial building there until Robert Wilson's "Hebron," shown in the 1868 Beers' Atlas. The house itself is sill-dated and initialed, R. W. 1867. What is remarkable about the structure is that while the physical evidence makes it quite certain that it was built all of a piece, its forms replicate the kind of additive building process that produced the Raymond and Hoffecker houses. It reflects its much later date in the picturesque deep eaves which the end chimneys punch through and in the eclectic amalgam of Greek Revival and Italianate detail. It might in fact be argued that the exact symmetry of the principal section is a response to currents within those styles. But in the current context, and with a service wing disposed of as it is, the house seems more a response to the traditional configuration of other, earlier houses built in this substantial red brick in the Hundred and in the neighborhood. The Wilson house is fully symmetrical, though with an empty "stairhall," and equipped with a balanced parlor and sitting room, though these seem to be fitted for stoves or coal grates rather than wood fires. Most surprisingly, the service wings con- tain separate stairs and chimney stacks in the dining room and kitchen. The separate stacks are particularly inexplicable in a single building campaign, where masonry costs could have been cut by setting the hearths of the two rooms back to back. However, the physical evidence of the house convincingly suggests that a single campaign is what produced it. The builder produced, as well, the near-perfect image of a two- or three-stage composition.

No purpose is apparent for these curious features, except the desire to replicate a traditional form. Perhaps Robert Wilson, who like John Raymond was a substantial landowner, desired like Raymond an especially substantial image-- which seems to have meant a rather conservative one--in the house he had built and marked with his initials. Whether Wilson actually lived in this house, among the various properties identified with him on the Beers' Atlas maps, is not known. But its stylishness and substance, and the fact that it was self-consciously named, dated, and marked, makes it a fair bet that he did.

After the building of the Wilson house and its outbuildings in the 1860s, the architectonic profile of the district would have been much the one that we see today, with two exceptions that need to be borne in mind. Both relate to building density; one is the somewhat decreased density of the scatter of buildings on the land, and the other is the markedly decreased density of the buildings immediately surrounding the mansion houses.

The overall density of large dwellings in the Neck is closely similar to that of the nineteenth century. Few twentieth-century houses have been built. In terms of principal households, the population of Whitehall and Raymond's Necks is not greatly less than it was in at the time of Beers' Atlas, or even in 1800 when the census taker found 24 households. But as a result of changes in family size and structure and in agricultural practice, many fewer people live on the land. This is reflected in empty bedrooms and attics in the big houses, but also in the scarcity of the smaller, frame tenant houses that are probably what is represented by the multiple dots appearing in loose association with the principal residences on the Beers' Atlas map. Mechanized farm equipment allows the landowners and tenants to farm more acres with less human assistance, and on this stretch of landscape small tenant houses have largely disappeared. Outbuilding complexes directly associated with the mansion houses have also atrophied. Both dwelling and storage/processing functions would have been represented in the little villages of functional structures that would have clustered near each one. There would surely have been quarters for field hands; the twenty-member household of James Raymond at the turn of the century, for example, could never have fitted into the small brick mansion house, and even when construction of big front sections with family bedrooms freed attic space in the service wings, it is unlikely that all "dependents" were sheltered under the same roof. There would also have been extensive accommodations for draft and dairy animals; several large barns and granaries remain, though unused, to attest to this function.
Almost as complete as the loss of subsidiary dwelling spaces, however, has been the loss of domestic outbuildings. The functions of privies, smokehouses, icehouses, and summer kitchens have been absorbed into the main houses. The function of carriage houses, sometimes transferred to domestic garages, has here been let lapse. Only a chicken house, the closest outbuilding to the Hoffecker house, remains to recall something of the dooryard clutter of small service buildings.

The Hoffecker house has in general the best approximation of a full set of out-buildings. The fact that the long braced-frame barn is known to have been pegged together by a Leipsic builder early in this century makes it a fine example of the tenaciousness of traditional building technology. The close similarity of the granary to the one at the Wilson farm demonstrates the existence of at least a local lexicon of types. The documentary sources that remind us how simplified is the outline of the district today--for example, a tax roll reference to a "brick dwelling house, barn, stable, cribbs, carriage house, smokehouse, etc., etc."--can only enhance our appreciation of a historic vista which retains, after all, a remarkable number of the elements which characterized it over a century ago.

The level of significance checked in item 10 is state. The architectural forms and historical patterns represented here are for the most part not unique to the area; in fact, the relationships preserved in the district, for example, early orientation to the water, a confluence of economic and political power, and the conservative approach to form, are illustrative of patterns important to the state as a whole. Herein lies part of their wider interest. Even more conducive to that interest, however, is the particularly powerful expression of these and other relationships created by the alignment of these houses on the landscape. They create an exceptional historic vista that is of more than local significance.