About

The George L. Carder House is a Federal-style, two-story brick house, built about 1833. Constructed on land owned by George L. Carder, the house was built for a prosperous middling Rappahannock County farming family. The documentary history associated with the Carder House has much to say about the organization of prosperous but unpretentious Virginia households and farms of the antebellum period and after. The Carder family's apparent determination to sustain their livelihood without owning slaves, however, distinguishes them from most of their neighbors and is implied by choices they made when planning and building their house. Two of the notable design components of the house include a two-door façade, which offered independent and selective access to the two principal rooms, and an original kitchen built into the cellar. Significant auxiliary buildings on the George L. Carder House property include a one-room log dwelling, a log shed, and a wood-framed barn. Now known as Boxwood Hill, the Carder House property was, at its largest, a 300 acre farm, and at the time of its listing in the registers, it was just under 4 acres in size.