The Rabbit’s Ferry House — a farmhouse that came to town

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

An ordinary building, which is the point

The Rabbit’s Ferry House is a small farmhouse, and it was brought to the Historical Society site at the corner of Shipcarpenter and Third along with the other buildings assembled there from 1962 onward, to preserve it and to share local heritage.

Survivorship bias is the great distortion in architectural history. The buildings that last are disproportionately the large, the expensive and the loved: brick instead of frame, a merchant’s house instead of a labourer’s, a church instead of a barn. Almost everything ordinary people actually lived in has gone. A small rural frame farmhouse, preserved deliberately, is therefore more informative about how most people in early Sussex County lived than any of the grand houses in town.

What such a building shows is scale. Rooms are small, ceilings low, windows few; heat comes from one hearth and light from the sun. The distance between this and the Burton-Ingram House a few paces away is the distance between most people and the few.

The name

Rabbit’s Ferry is a locality name from the countryside outside Lewes, and the house carries it from where it stood rather than from anything about the building. Sussex County is full of such names — a ferry, a crossroads, a mill, a family — attached to places that no longer have the thing they were named for.

We have not found a documented origin for the ferry itself, and we are not going to invent an explanation for a name that is more entertaining without one. If you know the derivation from a primary source, we would be glad to add it with a citation.

Seeing it

The house stands within the Historical Society’s campus rather than on its own site, so visiting is a matter of the Society’s opening arrangements rather than a walk past. The campus is inside the compact historic district and a few minutes on foot from the Zwaanendael Museum, the Cannonball House and the Ryves Holt House.

Because it has been relocated, remember what you are looking at: an authentic early building in an inauthentic setting. That is a fair trade for its survival, but it is a trade.

From the original page at this address

“The buildings comprising the Historic Complex of the Lewes Historical Society, corner of Shipcarpenter and Third Streets, Lewes, Delaware, have been brought to the site since 1962 as a means of preserving them and sharing local heritage with generations to come.”

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