Governor's Palace

The word "Palace" was first used for the governor's house about 1714. Whether the term was used as irony in reference to its expense, or simply to designate an official residence is debatable. When all was at last done, however, the building measured up to the name compared to other colonial structures, but not to European palaces. There stood a five-bay Georgian home laid up in Flemish bond with glazed headers and rubbed brick window jambs and lintels. It had three floors of about 3,380 square feet each, a cellar with 11 wine bins, a row of dormers in the roof, and an iron balcony at the central upper window. Just inside the gate – guarded by a stone unicorn on one side and a stone lion on the other – stood two one-and-one-half story brick advance buildings with gabled roofs. They ran perpendicular to the main structure. The structure was a “tastemaker” in Virginia. Virginia planters building their own great houses sought to both emulate and exceed it. For the last two royal governors especially, however, the Palace was a far humbler accommodation than their great houses back home.

Beyond the house was a formal garden in which guests could stand on the mound of earth that covered the icehouse to look into a large, naturalistic park that stretched away to the north. The stable, carriage house, kitchen, scullery, laundry, and an octagonal bathhouse were arranged in service yards beside the advance buildings.