In its present condition, the mansion house at Green Spring Farm cannot be considered to represent any particular period of American architecture. The original core of the building illustrates a design which was typical of the colonial era in Tidewater Virginia. This portion of the house is of brick construction, two stories plus attic and cellar, with the rooms in each end of the house separated by a center hallway. Large chimneys at each end of the house made possible heating by fireplaces in each room.
It seems probable that this structure formed the core of the mansion house when it was occupied by the Moss family (1770’s to 1835). To this core, various outbuildings and dependencies were added; a separate cookhouse or kitchen annex to the main house was one of these related structures, as were the family’s sanitary facilities. Clothes washing, churning, candlemaking, and various other household tasks were also performed in separate buildings. No direct evidence of the appearance of the main house or the various related outbuildings has been discovered; some inferences about these matters may be drawn from the inventory of personal property sold from the farm at auction in 1835 and a drawing of the house on an 1840 survey (figure 2).
Photographs of the south side of the house show the building as it appeared in 1885 (figure 5). At this time, a one-story porch had been built across the entire length of the front. The entry into the house across this porch was open, but on each side of the front door the porch was enclosed, making small rooms approximately 9 by 12 feet in size. From each room a door opened out onto the porch. The porch was roofed with sheet metal, and carved wooden brackets were in the corners of the center section (figure 5). A sidewalk led from the entrance in the center of the ivy-covered front porch straight across the spacious, shaded lawn.
Photographs in 1936 show the front porch removed but with clear signs of its recent presence showing in the whitewash on the front wall of the house (figure 7). At this time, the roof of the main house was sheet metal in place of the earlier use of shingles. However, shingles still constituted the roofing of the dependency on the east end of the house.
The 1885 photographs show a one-story brick addition on the east end of the house. This was a kitchen, built sometime after the main portion of the house but still probably in the first half of the nineteenth century. The notice of sale of the farm following Thomas Moss’s death in 1835 speaks of “a Brick Dwelling, containing eight rooms, Brick Kitchen, Meat House, Servants’ House, ...” and other farm and outbuildings.[86] Of all the buildings mentioned in this notice, the kitchen appears to be the most logical and appropriate use for this addition. Later occupants of the house (1880-1917) used this wing for a kitchen and describe it as not only the center for preparation of food but for numerous other household activities, such as candlemaking.[87]
The arrangement of rooms during the nineteenth century is not known with certainty. The 1839 reference to eight rooms suggests that as originally built the house had four rooms on each floor, with perhaps no effort to use the attic as living space, at least until the time of Fountain Beattie who added dormers to the attic and used this top floor to help accommodate his large family. This inference is strengthened by the fact that prior to the 1940’s the central core of the house was laid out in this manner.
