Patrick Henry House

When Patrick Henry purchased Red Hill in 1794, a modest four-room, one-and-a-half story dwelling built shortly before the Revolutionary War stood on this site. After his death, the house passed to his youngest son, John, who inherited the western portion of the Red Hill plantation. In 1833, John Henry and his wife, Elvira, expanded the house and turned its front toward the Staunton River valley. Their son William Wirt Henry later inherited Red Hill, lived most of the year in Richmond, and employed an overseer to manage the plantation, and the estate eventually passed to his daughter Lucy Henry Harrison. Around 1910, Lucy Henry Harrison hired Philadelphia architect Charles Barton Keen to enlarge the house to eighteen rooms, but in 1919 the house burned to the ground. After her death in 1944, the Patrick Henry Memorial Foundation was formed, and through the philanthropy of Eugene B. Casey the house was reconstructed in 1957 with Stanhope Johnson of Lynchburg, who had assisted Charles Barton Keen in the 1910 expansion, serving as architect. A brick outline at ground level marks portions of the 1833 and 1911 additions to Henry's dwelling. An archaeological study in 2001 found an expanse of cobblestones on the river-facing side of the house that likely marks the foundation of a greenhouse built by John and Elvira Henry, confirming a description by Patrick Henry's great-granddaughter Elvira Henry Miller, who remembered a large greenhouse toward the river where chamber windows looked onto orange and lemon trees and cape jasmines, and many of the plants she propagated there are still seen at Red Hill today.

Virginia · United States