Evington's Caryswood house an uncommon abode

If a house had a personality, the one called Caryswood would be gregarious.

In its 165-year history, the Evington house absorbed the personalities of previous inhabitants and still draws back those with fond memories.

Caryswood, now owned by Marie and Addison Mason, was recently named to the Virginia Register of Historic Places, one of about 15 private homes in Campbell County. The Masons still are going through the process to have the house named to the national register.

While its architecture is what merited the listing on the historic register, the community’s connection to Caryswood is what sets it apart.

The Masons bought the house on 15 acres off Virginia 24 in 1986 and over the years became close with descendents of the family who built it.

“I call it the house’s family,” Marie Mason said. “We just really feel that way. They are family.”

The house was built around 1855 for military officer and politician Robert Chancellor Saunders and his wife Caryetta Davis. Saunders named the place Caryswood after his wife and all the trees throughout the property. Caryswood stayed in the Saunders family for more than a century.

The Saunders had 13 children, some of whom died as babies. Three daughters — Mary Jane, Elizabeth and Susan — and son John lived in the house well into the 20th century.

The three sisters were known throughout the countryside for their hospitality and big personalities. “They were southern women, but you had to be a strong southern woman,” Marie Mason said.

The sisters hired neighborhood children to help with chores, and for a time, had their own servants who made spoon bread for breakfast every morning and drove them places.

Their antebellum home is one of the earliest-known examples of the Italianate style in Campbell County and has a special type of siding that is smooth, said Scott Smith, a architectural historian who helped the Masons with the process to get the property designated on the historic register. That siding commonly is found on Nantucket or certain parts of the Outer Banks.

Back in the early 19th century, there were few architects to design houses, so builders used pattern books to figure out how to create certain aspects. As time progressed, the books became more elaborate. “It’s very likely this concept came from one of those books,” Smith said. “We just weren’t able to find the exact one.”

There are vaulted ceilings, a tin roof and even a screen roof hatch that, when opened, creates an air current through the house during the summer. Even now, the Masons have no air conditioning and heat using a woodstove.

Over the years, there were a few additions and renovations, including around 1900, a back porch was enclosed and turned into a bathroom. Another bathroom later was created over it, with the slanting roof as the new floor. The kitchen, which was once an outbuilding, was ultimately connected by enclosing part of the back porch.

Still, despite the age of the homeand number of owners, few changes were made to the overall structure. “When you’re picking things out for the national register, that’s really one of the first things you look for, how much it’s changed,” Smith said.

For those that knew Caryswood, even for just a short time, the memory seems to last. Every year, a couple of people who knew the home years ago will stop by just the see what the house looks like today. Some are strangers to the Masons, just passing through on trips elsewhere.

“They don’t have a lot of time,” Marie Mason said. “They’re just like, ‘lets go see Caryswood. We can at least go in the yard.”

The Masons feel a stewardship and appreciation to the history of the house, which is decorated top to bottom with antiques.

“We wanted it to just feel like you’re going back in time because that’s what we enjoy,” she said. “So many people come really hoping, I think, to see something like they saw when they were little or years ago.”

Through talking with so many who remember the house and the Saunders sisters, the Masons learned many stories about life in the house. In the early 20th century, for example, students from the University of Virginia would travel down during summer breaks and spend weeks at the house. They would play croquet or tennis on a grass court.

Last summer, a man dropped by and told the Masons how he spent several weeks at the home as a child. While there with his grandmother, the man told Marie how the Saunders sisters trained him on how to treat a lady.

“Before every meal, he had to pull the chairs out for all the ladies and seat the ladies and then he could sit down,” Marie said. “He was just totally fascinated to come see the place again.”

Then there were the tea parties. They were legendary, if not exhausting.

Sometimes they were held in the front parlor, where antique furniture still similar to how it would have been in the 1940s. Sometimes the parties were held in the formal garden in the front yard. The sisters had servants wear white and carry tea and treats to the garden, which was surrounded by giant crepe myrtle trees and rose bushes.

And every Sunday, the sisters invited the entire neighborhood over after church. One story goes, Marie said, that one sister joked about putting a sign on at the road that said Caryswood was closed.

“Hearing the stories,” Smith said, “it seems to me that Caryswood, up until 1960, operated as a 19th-century house in that it was a community center that people who maybe weren’t family … came and felt like it was their home, too.”

Marie and Addison Mason, pose in the Caryswood house, located off Virginia 24.