Pemberton Hall embodies a broad history of Chesapeake settlement from the original Pemberton land patent in 1680 into the early Federal period, and the story of the Pemberton and Handy families reflects the complex settlement of Maryland's Eastern Shore. Overlooking the Wicomico River on land Isaac Handy and his wife Anne Dashiell purchased from Joseph Pemberton in 1726, the two-story gambrel-roofed house was completed in 1741 as an example of eighteenth-century lower Eastern Shore architecture, distinguished by Flemish bond brickwork with glazed header patterning, plastered cove cornices, and extensive original eighteenth-century interior woodwork and detail; an east end kitchen wing added circa 1785 was later reconstructed on its original foundation after collapsing. Isaac Handy, a sizable landowner, merchant-planter, ship captain, Justice of the Peace, Maryland militia colonel, member of the Maryland Provincial Assembly, and one of the founders of Salisbury in 1732 on land then known as Handy's Landing, built the house. Seventeen enslaved persons were listed in his 1763 probate inventory, reflecting the dependence of the Eastern Shore economy on enslaved labor and the central role of enslaved Africans and African Americans in Maryland's history from the colony's founding in 1634 until slavery was abolished in 1864. Henry Handy, the youngest of Isaac and Anne's eleven children, inherited Pemberton at age 16, married Jane Winder in 1770, served as an ensign in the Salisbury Company in the Salisbury Battalion of Militia in Somerset County in 1778, and supplied wheat for military use in 1781 during the Revolutionary War. Pemberton remained in the Handy family until Jehu Parsons purchased it in 1835. Pemberton's wharf at Mulberry Landing on the Wicomico River is the earliest documented bulkhead-style wharf in the country. After the plantation house became derelict and threatened with destruction, restoration efforts begun in 1964 helped preserve the hall and its two acres, now surrounded by the 262-acre Pemberton Historical Park, which retains three of the original plantation boundaries of 1750.
