Built for merchant-broker Solomon Brown in 1819 and later owned by the Taylors, an African American family. This house was moved twice by mule cart and survived the fire that leveled most of Denton on July 4, 1865, when balls of candlewick and kerosene were flung in celebration at a Civil War reconciliation picnic.

One-room dwellings were so common at the end of the 18th century that they housed roughly 85% of the inhabitants of southern Delaware and the lower Shore. They became less popular by the mid 1800s. By the time the log dwelling was built on Painter’s Range about 1828, one-room houses in rural areas were associated with “subsistence farmers”; i.e., a family scratching out a living on fifteen to thirty acres.

Typical home of a “middling planter,” circa 1787, Chance’s Desire was a classic hall-parlor dwelling in which there were two rooms aligned end to end on the ground floor with a fireplace at each gable end.  Parlor room with large “chimney breast” with thirteen hand-carved raised panels over the fireplace. Overhead were decorative floor/ceiling joists carved from local poplar trees.