The mansion is built in the center of a square parterre, a service building being located at each corner of the square. Flanking the entrance forecourt are the kitchen and library, 1½-story brick structures with jerkin-head roofs. At the rear corners are a school and office, with hip roofs. Outside the square are balanced brick buildings: a stable on one side and smokehouse on the other. Seven of the 12 original structures that were still standing in 1929 have been restored. They provide an excellent picture of plantation life in the 18th century. Farther removed from the house, near the wharf on the river, is the reconstructed mill.
In 1929 the Robert E. Lee Memorial Foundation, Inc., acquired the mansion and 1,100 acres. Besides reconstructing the exterior stairs, the foundation restored the library and library closet in the west wing, as well as the dining room and service alcove in the east wing, to their 18th-century appearance. The east and west corridors, parlor in the west wing, Robert E. Lee’s birthplace room, and an adjoining bedroom in the east wing were left as they appeared about 1800. The formal garden, just east of the mansion, has also been restored. The foundation today operates Stratford Hall as a historic house museum.
Tuckahoe, Virginia ∆
Location: Goochland County, on the south side of Va. 650, about 13 miles west of Richmond.
Tuckahoe, situated along the James River, was the boyhood home of Thomas Jefferson for 7 years and the place where he obtained his elementary education. The mansion, outbuildings, and surrounding gardens and lands constitute an outstanding example of a Southern colonial plantation.
Tuckahoe.
The land on which Tuckahoe stands was patented in 1695 by William Randolph. His son Thomas inherited the plantation and built the north wing of the mansion about 1712. Sometime between 1730 and 1745, William Randolph II enlarged the residence to its present proportions. When Randolph died in 1745, Peter Jefferson moved his family, including 2-year-old Thomas, from Shadwell to Tuckahoe to fulfill a promise Peter had made to Randolph, his wife’s cousin, to act as guardian of his son, Thomas Mann Randolph. In 1752 the Jeffersons returned to Shadwell.
Like Stratford Hall, the house is an outstanding and rare example of an H-shaped structure of early Georgian style in the Colonies. It is a large, two-story frame structure lined with brick nogging and exterior weatherboarded walls, except for the two solid brick ends of the south wing. Two long gabled wings are connected by a broad central block. Tall slender chimneys accentuate the narrow gable ends and the marked verticality of the structure, which is further enhanced by the high brick foundations. The chimneys in the frame ends of the north wing project, but those in the south brick ends are flush with the walls. The second-floor level is marked by a wooden belt course and the roofline by a modillioned cornice.