Sunnyside, also known as the Duke House, is a historic home located at

Charlottesville, Virginia Charlottesville, colloquially known as C'ville, is an independent city in the Commonwealth of Virginia. It is the county seat of Albemarle County, which surrounds the city, though the two are separate legal entities. It is named after Queen Ch ...

. The original section was built about 1800, as a -story, two room log dwelling. It was expanded and remodeled in 1858, as a

Gothic Revival Gothic Revival (also referred to as Victorian Gothic, neo-Gothic, or Gothick) is an architectural movement that began in the late 1740s in England. The movement gained momentum and expanded in the first half of the 19th century, as increasingly ...

style dwelling after

Washington Irving Washington Irving (April 3, 1783 – November 28, 1859) was an American short-story writer, essayist, biographer, historian, and diplomat of the early 19th century. He is best known for his short stories "Rip Van Winkle" (1819) and " The Legen ...

's Gothic Revival home, also called Sunnyside. The house features scroll-sawn

bargeboard Bargeboard (probably from Medieval Latin ''bargus'', or ''barcus'', a scaffold, and not from the now obsolete synonym "vergeboard") or rake fascia is a board fastened to each projecting gable of a roof to give it strength and protection, and to ...

s, arched windows and doors, and a

fieldstone Fieldstone is a naturally occurring type of stone, which lies at or near the surface of the Earth. Fieldstone is a nuisance for farmers seeking to expand their land under cultivation, but at some point it began to be used as a construction mate ...

chimney with stepped weatherings and capped corbelled stacks topped with two octagonal chimney pots. The house was built by John Altphin around 1800 in the rural outskirts of Charlottesville, which was only incorporated as a town of less than 300 people in 1801. The house passed through multiple owners before its major transformation in the 1850s. The longest-tenured owners of the property were the Duke family, after

Confederate Confederacy or confederate may refer to: States or communities * Confederate state or confederation, a union of sovereign groups or communities * Confederate States of America, a confederation of secessionist American states that existed between 1 ...

officer

Richard Thomas Walker Duke Richard Thomas Walker Duke Sr. (June 6, 1822 – July 2, 1898) was a nineteenth-century congressman and lawyer from Virginia. Early and family life Born near Charlottesville, Virginia to Elizabeth Morris Kendrick (August 23, 1802 in Lancaster, ...

purchased the property in 1863. Duke's descendants continued to live at Sunnyside until the University of Virginia acquired the property in 1963. It was listed on the

National Register of Historic Places The National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) is the United States federal government's official list of districts, sites, buildings, structures and objects deemed worthy of preservation for their historical significance or "great artistic v ...

in 2003.

References

Houses on the National Register of Historic Places in Virginia Carpenter Gothic houses in Virginia Houses completed in 1858 Houses in Charlottesville, Virginia National Register of Historic Places in Charlottesville, Virginia {{CharlottesvilleVA-NRHP-stub