How Salisbury Was Built and Evolved Over Time

Salisbury looks the way it does because it burned down twice.

After 1886

The second great fire destroyed the commercial core, and the rebuilding was done in brick to a late Victorian commercial pattern: two- and three-storey blocks with segmental-arched windows, corbelled cornices and cast-iron or timber shopfronts. That gives downtown a consistency of date unusual for a town founded in 1732 — almost nothing older than 1886 survives in the centre.

The Newtown district

North of downtown, a residential neighbourhood of large timber houses built by merchants after the fire in Queen Anne, Colonial Revival and Italianate styles, with turrets, wraparound porches and patterned shingles. It is a designated historic district and the best domestic architecture in the town.

Pemberton Hall

A brick house of 1741 on the river west of town, in the gambrel-roofed Tidewater manner, is among the oldest surviving buildings on the Eastern Shore and shows what the colonial town looked like before the fires.

Chicken houses

The characteristic building of the modern peninsula: long, low, windowless, ventilated sheds in rows beside farmhouses, each holding tens of thousands of birds.

Telescope houses

A Delmarva vernacular: a small house extended over generations by adding successively larger or smaller sections in a line, each with its own roof, so the profile steps like a drawn telescope. Several survive around the county and they record how rural families built — incrementally, as money allowed.

The waterfront

Rebuilt with a riverwalk, and new flats in converted and infill buildings downtown.