Archive record
- This address
- http://www.lewestown.com/lewes_history/Ryves_Holt.html
- Originally
- An article on the Ryves Holt House by Hazel D. Brittingham, Lewestown Publishers, 1997
- Original page
- Captures at the Internet Archive
The article below is newly written and independently sourced. It is not Mrs. Brittingham's text. Her original, with her photographs, is at the Internet Archive link above.
The Ryves Holt House — and the honest argument about how old it is
The shingled house at 218 Second Street, Lewes is by long tradition the oldest standing house in Delaware, and among the oldest wooden houses in the United States still on its original foundation. The date on its 1932 marker is 1665. The real answer — somewhere between 1665 and about 1710, depending on which evidence you trust — is a better story than the plaque.
What does the evidence actually say about the date?
Three dates circulate, each with a pedigree. The traditional date, carried on the Delaware Public Archives marker and repeated by generations of guidebooks, is 1665 — which would place the house barely a generation after the destroyed Dutch settlement of Zwaanendael. Dendrochronology performed in the 1980s was widely reported as supporting a seventeenth-century date; published accounts of those results give 1665, and some give 1680.
Against this stands a 1998 study by the Center for Historic Architecture and Design at the University of Delaware, summarized in W. Barksdale Maynard's Buildings of Delaware. It argues the house is unlikely to predate 1685 — the year Philip Russell was licensed to operate a public house on the corner — and might be as late as 1710, on the grounds that the building's style belongs to a later architectural moment. The Lewes Historical Society, which operates the house, now dates it to about 1686. No one disputes what matters most: it is a genuinely seventeenth-or-very-early-eighteenth-century timber building, which in Delaware makes it nearly unique. Maynard notes that in all of Virginia only one pre-1700 wooden house survives; Delaware's claim rests on this one.
Who was Ryves Holt?
The house began as an inn, not a mansion. Its early keeper Philip Russell ran it as an ordinary — a licensed tavern serving travelers arriving at what was then a working port. Ryves Holt (c. 1696–1763) came to Lewes in 1721 as the appointed naval officer for the Port of Lewes, responsible for administering the port's imports, and purchased the house as his residence in 1723. He rose through nearly every office colonial Delaware had to offer: member and repeatedly Speaker of the Assembly of the Three Lower Counties, High Sheriff, and from 1745 until his death in 1763, Chief Justice. The house stayed in his family until 1792, when it was sold by his step-great-grandson Jacob Jones — who as a U.S. Navy commodore in the War of 1812 became a national hero, and is honored today inside the very house his family sold.
How did it survive 350 years?
Partly through continuous, unglamorous use: tavern, family home, and in the nineteenth century the property of the Marshalls, a family of Delaware Bay and River pilots. St. Peter's Episcopal Church, next door, acquired it in 1981; the Lewes Historical Society leased it from 1997 and purchased it in 2005. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1977 as part of the Lewes Historic District, and on 30 December 2014 it was added to First State National Historical Park. It now serves as the Society's visitor center and museum — you can walk in for free and see the framing exposed. Local folklore, cheerfully retold, holds the old inn haunted; that is folklore, and the building's documented history needs no help from it.
The house anchors the compact historic core of Lewes, a few minutes' walk from the Zwaanendael Museum and the Cannonball House. If you are visiting in person, our historic Lewes walking guide covers the practical details.
Hazel Brittingham's original page at this address drew on her decades of deed research in Lewes property records. Her papers, including her Lewes research files, are held at the Hazel Brittingham Collections Center at the Lewes Historical Society. See about Hazel Brittingham.
Where this comes from
- W. Barksdale Maynard, Buildings of Delaware (University of Virginia Press, 2008), pp. 270–271, entry reproduced at SAH Archipedia — including the CHAD/University of Delaware 1998 dating study and the dendrochronology conflict.
- Historic Lewes (Lewes Historical Society), Ryves Holt House Museum — ownership history, the Russells' tavern license, Holt's offices, the c. 1686 dating.
- Delaware Public Archives historical marker SC-A1 (erected 1932) and the 1990 Colonial Dames plaque, transcribed at the Historical Marker Database — the traditional 1665 date, Holt's offices and dates, NRHP listing 1977.
- Wikipedia: Ryves Holt House — the 1680 dendrochronology figure and the 2014 addition to First State National Historical Park.
Where sources disagree — chiefly on the construction date and on whether the dendrochronology gave 1665 or 1680 — this article says so rather than picking a winner.