About

The Southampton County plantation of Sunnyside contains one of southeastern Virginia's most complete groupings of domestic and farm outbuildings. The complex is scattered about an architecturally evolved main residence and includes a schoolmaster's house, dairy, tenant's house, smokehouse, kitchen, various sheds, and a peanut house which together maintain the village-like image that dominated a traditional Virginia plantation. The house itself began as a one-room structure built ca. 1810-11 for Joseph Pope. It was remodeled and enlarged in 1847 and again in 1870 by his son Harrison who was among the county's most ambitious 19th-century planters. The porticoed front section, which combines Greek Revival and Italianate elements, is one of the region's few Reconstruction-period structures with architectural pretension.