Outlying Buildings

The outlying buildings surround the Great House. Each building except for the Gristmill is within eyeshot and easy walking distance. The Gristmill is about 2 miles from the Great House.

Place your mouse over the building to get more details.

Payne Memorial Cabin

Payne Memorial Cabin: On a rise overlooking the Great House and the vista to the Potomac River is the Payne Memorial Cabin which was built in 1941 to honor a man who had given long and loyal service to Stratford. The single-room, hand-hewn poplar cabin with wood lath chimney represents the nineteenth-century slave cabin in which William Wesley Payne (1875-1954) was born. It is believed that members of the Payne family lived and worked at Stratford in the eighteenth century.

Northwest Outhouse

Northwest Outhouse: One room with a brick floor, this structure on the northwest is smaller and simpler than those on the south. Completed after the Great House and southern out houses, it is now furnished as an overseer's office.

Northeast Outhouse

Northeast Outhouse: This building may have been used for porting and propating plants. The large windows have a southern exposure which would have made it ideal for such a purpose. At one time this structure may be served as a "lumber room," a term used in the eighteenth century for a general storage area.

Gardens and Grounds

Great House

Smokehouse

Smokehouse: Across the Kitchen Yard from the Southeast Out House is the Smokehouse. Here meat was salted and preserved in meat boxes made from hollowed-out tree trunks, and hams were cured over smoldering hickory fires.

Burial Vault

Burial Vault: Beyond the reconstructed ha-ha wall at the east end of the garden is the Burial Vault. The structure was designed by Fiske Kimball in 1936 and built over Lee family vaults that were revealed in the excavations of the 1930s.

Coach House & Stable

Coach House and Stable

The Coach House and Stable area - a crowded and busy male domain - was a necessary and important component of eighteenth-century plantations when coaches were the sole means of transportation by land. Obvious changes in the brickwork of this very long structure indicate several building periods. The west end of the building near the deep ravine did not survive to this century. The edges of the ravine were shored up and additional coach house bays were reconstructed in the 1930s to return the coach house to its former length. Putlog holes for scaffolding were left unfilled in the eighteenth century.

The coach house bays are filled with a variety of nineteenth-century wheeled vehicles. The Bremo Coach, which carried General Lafayette on his trip to Monticello in 1825, and a Landaulette, a fashionable conveyance much enjoyed by the ladies, are included in the collection. The tack room, located in one of the bays, contains equipage - a four-in-hand whip, bridles and harnesses, trees and saddles.

The building between the Coach House and Southwest Out House was previously used as a stable and was missing from the Stratford landscape by the 19th century. Crudely sketched in the 1801 insurance inventory, this building was brick with a clipped gable roof covered with wood shingles and no chimney. The current building is a reconstruction built on original foundations.

Southwest Outhouse

Outside View

Various insurance documents refer to this building, constructed around 1742, as servants house, servants hall and workshop. Restoration is currently being conducted in the interior spaces. The building will reopen to the public in April 2010 after almost two years of research, restoration, and refurnishing.

When reopened, this building will also serve as an introductory exhibit space to the Stratford plantation and its economic diversity. Here visitors will learn about tobacco cultivation and the enslaved, indentured, and hired workers who toiled on the plantation.

Inside View

Curatorial research indicates that, like many plantation service structures, this building may have changed function as needed. An 1801 insurance document listing this building as a "work shop" will be our main focus when we refurnish the interior spaces this winter. Archaeology done in the adjacent west yard indicates that this side of the plantation was used for brick making, animal butchery, and the architectural trades. We are currently researching carpentry and other 18th-century woodworking trades and will install a work shop back in this space.

In the nineteenth century, this building may have been the coachman's living quarters. In the plaster over the large fireplace in the main room is a painting of a horse. Local legend attributes this fresco to the coachman's daughter, Sally Payne. Conservation of this mural and the surrounding wall is currently underway by Scott Nolley, a conservator from Richmond, Virginia.

Southeast Outhouse

In use year round, the kitchen was one of the liveliest buildings on the plantation. The fireplace is large enough to roast a whole ox and to warm the huge copper and brass vessels gleaming on the hearth. Among the many utensils seldom seen today are a medicinal still and a spit jack that could be wound to turn the roasting spit automatically.

Outside the kitchen, the well is only a few steps from the door and kindling is conveniently stacked. Included among the many kitchen yard activities were candle dipping, soap making and laundry chores.

Laundry

Although now furnished as a wash house, the room adjoining the kitchen may well have been a larder or dairy. Various types of irons were used for pressing ruffles and flat sections of clothing. The reel for dipping candles was an important tool, since hundreds of candles were required to light the Great House throughout the year.

Reconstructed Slave Quarters

These two stone buildings were reconstructed in 1939. Thought to have been originally built in the late eighteenth century, the buildings would have housed the enslaved men, women and children who worked in or around the Great House. Because of their proximity to the Great House, the quarters were constructed of stone for improved appearance and to lessen the danger of fire.

Simple beds and chairs were the principle items of furniture. Nearby, slaves cultivated small garden plots where they grew vegetables to supplement their diet and to sell or trade for services. Many such quarters - although not as well built - were scattered about the plantation to shelter the more than two hundred indentured servants and slaves who lived and worked at Stratford.