Two names cling to this house, the Peyton Randolph House and the Randolph-Peachy House. This historic house museum in Colonial Williamsburg preserves a building whose oldest portion dates to about 1715, built by William Robertson, and stands among the museum's oldest surviving structures. In 1973 it was designated a National Historic Landmark as the home of Founding Father Peyton Randolph (1721–1775), the first and third President of the Continental Congress.
Take in its two-story wood-frame form: a seven-bay main block with a single-story ell to the east. The roof is hipped at the western end and gabled at the eastern, and the main entrance occupies the center bay beneath a protective gabled hood. The windows sit slightly out of symmetry — a visible hint of the house's layered construction history. Step through your imagination and you can sense original 18th-century woodwork still within, and the marble fireplace mantel anchoring the central section.
You are standing close to the northeast corner of Nicholson and North England Streets, near the center of Colonial Williamsburg; the building's shape and details are a quiet, tactile link to those centuries. Notice the streets and buildings framing this quiet corner of Colonial Williamsburg.