The brick dwelling of Grassdale, embellished with a festive bracketed cornice and veranda, is one of Virginia’s very few fully-developed Italianate country houses built before the Civil War. Such houses are relatively common in northern states, but Virginia’s economic and political uncertainty, as well as conservative tendencies, inhibited the construction of plantation houses in the period’s prevailing taste. Grassdale was completed in 1861 for James Maury Morris, Jr., and is an important architectural component of Louisa County’s Green Springs Historic District. The house shows the influence of the numerous designs for rural seats appearing in popular architectural pattern books of the period. Handsomely preserved and little-altered, Grassdale is situated to take advantage of a view across broad, gently sloping pastures. Immediately around the house is a park of large old oak trees.