Dr. Burton’s House — what is left of a 134-acre patent

Written August 2026 · Sources last checked 2 August 2026 · Corrections: hello@lewestown.com

A patent, and what happened to it

In 1675 a patent of 134 acres was granted here to one of the earliest settlers of the Lewes area. By the time Mrs. Brittingham wrote about the property in the 1990s, what remained attached to the house was a single acre at the north end of Second Street.

That reduction from 134 acres to one is the ordinary history of an American colonial town told in a single parcel. A seventeenth-century patent was an agricultural holding on the edge of a struggling settlement. As Lewes filled in — as streets were surveyed, lots sold, estates divided among heirs, and farmland absorbed into a grid — the land was sold away in pieces around a house that stayed. What survives is not the estate but its address.

The Burton name runs deep in Sussex County and attaches to several properties in and around Lewes, which is a standing hazard for anyone researching them. A Cornelius Burton House is separately identified among the notable buildings of the Lewes Historic District, and the Burton-Ingram House on Shipcarpenter Street is a different building again, now part of the Lewes Historical Society campus. Be careful which Burton you are reading about.

The building itself

The house is described as stately, and by the standards of early Lewes domestic building it is: this is not a pilot’s cottage like the Maull House but a substantial dwelling, reckoned at over two centuries old when written about in the 1990s, which places its construction broadly in the eighteenth century.

We have not seen a dendrochronological study or a National Register nomination for this specific building, and we are not going to convert “over two centuries old” into a construction date it will not support. Lewes has been burned by confident dating before — the argument over the Ryves Holt House is the local example — and the honest position here is that the building is old, its land is documented from 1675, and the precise year is not established on the evidence we have.

Where it sits

Shipcarpenter Street is the spine of historic Lewes, and 112 stands at the north end of the old town, near where Second Street runs out. The name of the street is not decorative: this was where the shipwrights lived and worked, in a port whose economy was pilotage, fishing and the sea.

The Lewes Historical Society’s campus at Shipcarpenter and Third is a few steps away, and much of the surrounding fabric falls within the Lewes Historic District, which was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1977 and takes in 122 contributing buildings across most of the seventeenth-century town and part of Pilot Town.

From the original page at this address

“Dr. Burton’s House stands in historic Lewes, Delaware, on land which has shrunk from the 134-acre patent granted in 1675 to the area’s earliest settler, to a single-acre lot at the north end of Second Street.”

Hazel D. Brittingham, “Dr. Burton’s House”, Lewestown Publishers, 1997. © Copyright 1997 Hazel D. Brittingham. Short extract quoted for commentary; the full original is at the Internet Archive.