Four Acres

Four Acres is a brick Colonial Revival house at 1314 Rugby Road in Charlottesville, completed in 1910 for Melton C. and Lucy Cocke Elliot as a summer residence. Architect Eugene Bradbury, who also designed the Elliots' Washington town house, drew up the plans. The house rises two and a half stories above a slightly raised basement and has a two-story Ionic portico with a pediment, dentiled cornices, stone lintels with keystones, and a steep hipped slate roof with pedimented dormers. Although built in the twentieth century, it used older methods, including hand-hewn interior beams, hand-forged nails and handmade bricks. The name comes from the surrounding tract, assembled by Mrs. Elliot through purchases in 1907 and 1915. Later owners included Julia Reynolds Austen, Lillian Edwards, and Admiral Halsey, who lived there in the late 1940s. Renovations over the years changed hardware, fireplaces and interior doors, but the house remains in excellent condition and is valued as an outstanding example of its style.