Cherry Walk, Dunbrooke Road (Route 620), 2.25 miles north of Richmond Highway (U.S. Route 360), Millers Tavern, Essex County, Virginia

Significance: Erected largely between 1810 and 1830, Cherry Walk is representative of the well-crafted Chesapeake region farmstead. With prim farmer's house and large collection of carefully constructed support buildings, is a remarkably intact and complete example of the sort of farmsteads that successful landowners below the level of "grandee" strove to create in the decades after the Revolutionary War. It encompasses a fine ca. 1810 brick house and numerous outbuildings including a kitchen, smokehouse, two dairies, and a privy within close proximity to the house; as well as a barn, blacksmith shop, and corncrib. The most significant buildings within the farm complex were built by Carter Croxton, who owned the land from the time he inherited the 177 acre farm from his father in 1775 until his death in 1849. Croxton was among the Chesapeake landowners just below the gentry level who progressively enlarged his holdings through much of his adult life; his remaining, skillfully crafted buildings are an expression of his success.

Built ca. 1810, the house at Cherry Walk forms the centerpiece of the farmstead. It is a center-passage, single-room deep Flemish-bond brick dwelling of one-and-a-half stories with a dormered gambrel roof and brick end chimneys. It sits on a high cellar that likely originally contained a kitchen in one of the ground-floor rooms. Its asymmetrical four-bay facade reflects the larger size of the hall to the north and a wide passage on which the doors are centered. Between about 1810 and 1830, Croxton erected a connected group of frame buildings including two dairies and a smokehouse. Along with the separate kitchen, the dairy and smokehouse complex provided for the vital storage and preparation of food at Cherry Walk. Erected about the same time is the privy, which is finished inside with plaster walls, wood trim, and a four-hole seat.

The Broaddus family, the next generation to occupy Cherry Walk, built the kitchen early in the third quarter of the nineteenth century. The one-and-a-half story frame structure with a gable roof and board-and-batten siding has a large brick fireplace with an exterior brick chimney on the west end. It represents a blending of old and new building traditions, mixing framing types from earlier Chesapeake structures with later nineteenth-century systems for joining eaves and joists and attaching siding. Erected after ca. 1845, the corn crib is also framed with walls made of circular-sawn planks held together with square saddle notches at the corners. The barn was erected during the early nineteenth century with additions in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is a sizable two-story building whose core is an early 15'-9" x 20'-10" single-story granary, with additions at the sides, rear, and upper level. Finally, the blacksmith shop was erected in the nineteenth century, but largely rebuilt during the early twentieth. While still containing its forge, this low, rectangular frame building is the least substantially built of the Cherry Walk outbuildings.
Survey number: HABS VA-1517
Building/structure dates: ca. 1810 Initial Construction
National Register of Historic Places NRIS Number: 83003280