Chandler Court and Pollard Park Historic District (Additional Documentation)

Chandler Court and Pollard Park form a small planned neighborhood across the street from the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg. Conceived by John Garland Pollard, a law professor who became Virginia governor in 1929, it combines freestanding houses on small lots with shared green spaces: an oval lawn at Chandler Court and a wooded ravine with a stream at Pollard Park. Brick-paved walks cross a sloping private lawn linking the two. The houses, built roughly between 1918 and 1940, trace a change in middle-class taste, from loosely interpreted Dutch Colonial, Arts and Crafts and Georgian forms to closer copies of eighteenth-century Chesapeake buildings. Architects, contractors and published plans all shaped the designs. Pollard intended housing for owners and renters of varied means, and rooms and apartments were let to faculty and students. Historians Earl Gregg Swem and Richard L. Morton lived here. The district is valued for its cohesive scale and its record of Colonial Revival design in Williamsburg.