Belle Grove's plantation grounds include the large limestone manor house, an 1815 icehouse and smokehouse, a slave cemetery, a "heritage orchard", and a demonstration garden designed by the Garden Club of Virginia. At the entrance to the plantation is a monument erected in 1919 in memory of Stephen Dodson Ramseur, a Confederate general who died at the plantation in 1864 following the Battle of Belle Grove.
Manor house
Exterior: The symmetrical main block consists of three stories: a basement, a piano nobile main floor, and an attic half-story. The corners are decorated with quoins. The front elevation, which is the only one in which the limestone is finished, consists of seven bays: six with main floor windows and the center one with the main entry. Twelve steps ascend the elevated front portico, with its prominent pediment and four Tuscan-style columns, which encompasses the three central bays – of which the middle one has the main door and door surround, framed by two pilasters also of the Tuscan order. This main block originally had neo-classical-style porticos on all four sides, but today only the front and back porticos survive. Interior: The interior is notable for its fine woodwork in a transitional style ranging from Georgian to Federal.
History
Jost Hite – grandfather of Major Isaac Hite, Jr – was a German immigrant to the Shenandoah Valley. In 1732, Jost and his partner Robert McKay, along with 16 other families, journeyed via the Valley Pike into the northern Valley to settle on acquired through two land grants. One of Jost's sons – Isaac Hite, Sr – purchased in 1748, and another in 1770, just southwest of Middletown. Together, these would become the Belle Grove Plantation. The first house on the Belle Grove site was built for a tenant farmer around 1750. Isaac, Jr, attended College of William & Mary and served in the Continental Army during the American Revolutionary War. Upon their marriage in 1783, Isaac, Sr, gave his son and daughter-in-law – Nelly Conway Madison, sister of the future President – the Belle Grove house and grounds. In 1794, construction began on the new mansion, which was completed in three years. It was constructed of local limestone quarried on the property, and, according to prevailing custom, was intended to display the owners' high social and financial status. Thomas Jefferson, through the agency of his friend James Madison, made a number of suggestions to the architect which strongly influenced the final design. Madison is known to have visited the plantation several times, even staying in the "Old Hall" during his own honeymoon in 1794. After Nelly's death, Major Hite married Ann Tunstall Maury. Of the three children born to the first marriage and the ten to the second, all but one lived into adulthood. In 1815, an addition was made at the west end of the house realizing the facade that exists today. As his grain and livestock holdings grew, Maj. Hite expanded his estate to include a total of of land and 103 slave workers. He eventually owned and operated a general store, grist-mill, saw-mill and distillery. After his death, and that of Ann, Belle Grove Plantation was sold out of the family. By the start of the Civil War, the estate no longer existed as it had during the Hite family era. There was a succession of owners before the Brumback family purchased the property in 1907. The Brumbacks operated an inn there in the 1920s, but sold it to Francis Welles Hunnewell of Wellesley, Massachusetts in 1929. These 20th-century owners altered the house very little. With professional assistance, Mr. Hunnewell had the house carefully restored in the 1930s and 1940s. Upon his death in 1964, he bequeathed the house, 100 surrounding acres, and an endowment of $100,000 to the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Belle Grove was opened as a house museum in 1967 and has been open to the public, as well as remaining a working farm, ever since.
