The Maull House — where Napoleon’s shipwrecked brother was given dinner

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

A small building that outlasted the grand ones

The Maull House is not imposing and never was. It measures roughly thirty feet by sixteen — one and a half storeys with an attic, a gambrel roof, and a frame sheathed in cypress, the rot-resistant timber that coastal Delaware builders reached for when they expected weather. A rear wing was added around 1890, and that is very nearly the whole architectural story.

Its distinction is not size but survival in place. Lewes has older-sounding claims and grander houses, but many of them have been moved, heavily rebuilt, or both — several of the town’s finest buildings were relocated wholesale in the twentieth century to save them. The Maull House is recorded as the oldest building in Lewes still standing on its original site and the one least altered since. Dated to about 1730, it has simply stayed put for close to three centuries.

Its position explains its shape. It faces Pilottown Road, the strip of waterfront where the Delaware Bay and River pilots lived, and beside it runs a section of what is now the Lewes and Rehoboth Canal, where a dock for pilots’ boats would have sat. This was a working house on a working shore, not a merchant’s statement.

The night Jerome Bonaparte came ashore

In 1803 Jerome Bonaparte — the youngest brother of Napoleon — was shipwrecked off Lewes with his new American bride, Betsy Patterson of Baltimore. The couple were entertained at the Maull House.

The marriage itself was a scandal in two countries: Napoleon refused to recognise it, pressed for annulment, and eventually had his brother married off to a German princess instead. Betsy Patterson never got her title. Whatever else the house has seen, it briefly held one of the more awkward couples in Atlantic society, brought to the door by nothing more romantic than bad weather off Cape Henlopen.

The governor who lasted two months

The family gave Delaware a governor, and gave him one of the shortest tenures in the state’s history. Joseph Maull (1781–1846) took office on 2 March 1846 and died on 3 May 1846, sixty-two days later.

He was a physician by profession and reached the governorship as Speaker of the Senate, succeeding on the resignation of his predecessor rather than by election to the office. It is a reminder of how thin the political class of a small state was: the same handful of families supplied the pilots, the doctors, the legislators and occasionally the governor, and they lived in houses like this one.

How it survived, and who has it now

The house stayed in the Maull family until 1957 — well over two centuries of continuous family ownership, which is the least glamorous and most effective form of historic preservation there is. In 1962 it was acquired by the Colonel David Hall Chapter of the National Society Daughters of the American Revolution, who hold it still.

It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1970, with a boundary increase in 1978, and it was documented by the Historic American Buildings Survey as HABS No. DE-13, which is why measured drawings and photographs of it exist in the Library of Congress. Opening is limited and organised by the DAR chapter rather than by the Lewes Historical Society; check before you make a special trip.

From the original page at this address

“Quaint with a capital ‘Q’ describes the Maull House, one of the many small wonders that dot Lewes, the historic Sussex County, Delaware, town. Resting on the very spot where it was built in the 1730s, about mid-way of Pilotown Road, this specimen of early domestic architecture faces the future with pride.”

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