Photo by Amy Condra
Old Mill Cottage, owned by Bill and Grace King, was built around 1920 as a one-room hunting cabin on Genito Creek. The cabin still boasts its original slate roof, heart pine flooring and stone chimney, as well as extensive rennovations throughout the building and the grounds.

0 Comments Email Article Tweet This Share

As the brilliant pink and purple shades of summer begin to fade, our county’s fields and hills are slowly building toward the blazing hues of fall.

We’re not quite there yet, though. So while you wait for the leaves to turn orange and red, why not enter the houses set beyond the landscapes?

In just a few weeks, it will be time to join the Goochland County Historical Society’s 2008 House Tour, the Society’s 25th tour since 1979.

Co-chaired by Rachel Parker and Audrey Eggleston, this year’s tour will be on Oct. 11 and will be celebrating the stately homes built in Crozier, an area that the 2003 Survey of Historic Architecture in Goochland County states is “potentially eligible for listing in the National Register of Historic Places as one of the county’s most intact rural villages.”

Featuring five homes and one restaurant, the tour’s attractions will include First Union School, Old Mill Cottage, The Mitchell Homeplace, The Forest, RiversBend and Tanglewood Ordinary.

A few highlights of each of these properties include the schools’ legacy of educating the community, The Homeplace’s Doric columns, The Forest’s accurate reproduction of a 1750 Williamsburg house, and RiversBend’s combination of Mississippi Lowland architecture and Jefferson’s Palladian influence.

Lunch will be served at Tanglewood Ordinary, a building that has stood for almost 90 years and which is on the National Register of Historic Places.

For Bill King, Old Mill Cottage is more than just a place to live. Having originally rented the former hunting cottage as a place to get away from things, he ultimately bought the property and began the long journey of restoring it.

“It took a lot of rehabilitation to get it in the shape we needed it,” he said. “It was in pretty rotten shape—the roof was terrible. When it rained, there’d be five buckets on the floor, because the rainwater dripped in!”

With his wife Grace, Bill has revitalized Old Mill Cottage.

The original building was built around 1920. Today, a square floor of heart pine planks marks the simple design.

“It was a little cottage where people lived,” said King. “Over 30 to 40 years, a bedroom, kitchen, living room and outside porch were added on. Much of this was done pretty poorly—it was just, for example, to get a bedroom!”

“I asked Joe Scales, a Soil and Water Conservation officer, to come down and evaluate the area,” added King.

A two-acre pond was added to the land behind the house, as eventually, so was a veranda, an expanded kitchen, stained glass windows, an enclosed breezeway, and several bedrooms, sitting rooms and bathrooms.

And throughout these additions are pieces of historical and artistic signficance, such as an antique church window paned with wavy, hand-blown glass.

There is a sink from the Jefferson Hotel, a mantle piece from a nearby family home, and oak paneling from an old farm off Broad Street.

Even the home’s gardens evoke the past. King’s arboretum, where he grows hundreds of trees with the help of Lee Duncan and Victor Hawk, is called the Old Mill Arboretum, after a mill stone that made its way to Goochland from Floyd County.

“See this ceiling?” asked King. “It came from an old restaurant in Gum Spring, and now it’s been here for 40 years!”

And he added, “Everything we’ve got has a story.”

The Goochland Gazette will, in upcoming issues, be featuring other homes scheduled to be on the House Tour.

Photo by Amy Condra
Tour co-chairs Rachel Parker and Audrey Eggleston stand on either side of Old Mill Cottage owner Bill King.

There are no comments for this entry