The early Northampton County cottage called Pear Valley is a textbook of vernacular design and displays the refinement that the colonial housewright could give to small dwellings. Lending the house both dignity and stability is the brick end with its glazed headers forming decorative chevrons. The massive pyramidal chimney with its long tiled weatherings is typical of the Eastern Shore’s earliest vernacular buildings. The interior retains its chamfered plate and chamfered ceiling joists, and the roof framing has the rare treatment of exposed rafter ends pegged into the plate. Long thought to be of 17th-century origin, recent dendrochronology study indicates that Pear Valley was built ca. 1740. Archaeological investigation has shown that the house, formerly considered to be an original one-room cottage, is the surviving end of a two-room structure and had a brick chimney opposite the existing chimney.