The Adam Thoroughgood House: Brick, Ambition, and Colonial Memory

Near the southern end of this corridor, close to the Virginia Beach shoreline, stands a small brick house that has been called one of the oldest surviving colonial residences in the United States. The Adam Thoroughgood House carries a famous name and a complicated history, and both are worth knowing.

Adam Thorowgood himself was a remarkable figure. He arrived in Virginia in the early sixteen twenties as an indentured servant, worked off his contract, returned to England, recruited one hundred and five settlers, and came back to Virginia in sixteen twenty-eight as a free man with a substantial land patent, over five thousand acres on the Lynnhaven River in what is now Virginia Beach, granted in the mid sixteen thirties. He rose to become a justice, a burgess, and one of the leading planters of Lower Norfolk County before dying in sixteen forty.

Here is where the history gets more precise than the legend. For many years the house was dated to the sixteen forties and attributed directly to Adam himself. Careful dendrochronological and architectural analysis has since placed the construction considerably later, around seventeen ten to seventeen twenty, built by a later descendant of Adam. The house stands on land Adam originally patented, which explains the enduring family name on the building.

What remains undisputed is the house's architectural importance. It illustrates the transition from Virginia's early impermanent frontier structures to the more permanent, if still modest, brick gentry houses of the early eighteenth century. The massive central chimney, the tiny casement windows, the steeply pitched roofline, all mark a building that sits at the threshold between medieval English building tradition and the emerging colonial American vernacular.

The City of Virginia Beach acquired the property in two thousand three, and the house has been a museum since nineteen fifty-seven. A National Historic Landmark, it rewards the detour for anyone interested in how the English colonies slowly stopped looking like England.