Pear Valley: A Yeoman's Cottage on the Eastern Shore

On Virginia's southern Eastern Shore, Pear Valley is one of the rarest surviving buildings in the Chesapeake region, an early eighteenth-century yeoman planter's cottage, built sometime between seventeen twenty and seventeen fifty. The house is a textbook of vernacular design: a single-chamber wood frame structure with a massive pyramidal chimney that dominates the roofline. Most colonial-era farmhouses this modest were rebuilt or demolished within a generation or two. That Pear Valley survived largely intact makes it nationally significant as a window into the ordinary domestic world of Tidewater Virginia before the plantation house became the dominant architectural image of the region.