The St. James' House at 1300 Charles Street was built around 1768 and is one of the few eighteenth-century frame houses still standing in Fredericksburg. It has been described as a gentleman’s cottage of gambrel roof design with beaded clapboard siding over brick nogging.

St. James' House living room

James Mercer (an attorney, a member of the Virginia House of Burgesses, first judge of the General Court in Fredericksburg, and the attorney who drew up the will for Mary Washington) built the house on land once owned by Fielding Lewis. The eighteenth-century portion is quite small -- an entry hall with two identical long, narrow rooms (the parlor and dining room) on the ground floor and a bedroom upstairs. The 1853 kitchen (an earlier one burned) is now used as a den –- you can still see the residue of coats of whitewash on the ceiling. The den is connected to the 18th-century portion by the "Taproom", once an open "dog trot" or breezeway and now an informal eating area and kitchen.

The house is particularly noted for the collection of antique furniture and decorative arts assembled by Daniel Breslin and William Tolerton, who restored St. James' in the mid-1960's and willed it to the APVA together with an endowment, for which APVA is extremely grateful. Some pieces of note are the tall case clock in the entry hall; a block-front tiger maple Chippendale chest and a portrait of a youthful King George III in the parlor; and a three-section Maryland-made dining table, a mahogany Pembroke table, and a Delaware huntboard in the dining room. The collection of porcelain and silver is also remarkable. St. James' represents Messrs Breslin's and Tolerton's interpretation of an eighteenth-century townhouse in that the furnishings are probably more formal than what would have been in the house during the time of James Mercer.