Corbit-Sharp House: Delaware's Finest Pre-Revolutionary Mansion

In Odessa, Delaware, a five-bay mansion completed around seventeen seventy-four is considered the finest pre-Revolutionary house in the state. William Corbit was a successful tanner with ambitions to match. His house remained in the Corbit family until nineteen thirty-eight, when Delaware preservationist H.

Rodney Sharp acquired it. Sharp undertook a meticulous restoration guided by a household inventory from Corbit's own time, which listed the contents of the rooms. The Historic Odessa Foundation now manages the property alongside several other eighteenth-century buildings in this remarkably preserved river-port town, which prospered on wheat shipments before the railroads bypassed it and left everything frozen in time.