Littleton Eyre (d. 26 June 1768), ferry owner and planter, was born in Northampton County, most likely in 1709 or early in 1710, and was the son of Severn Eyre, a merchant, and Gertrude Harmanson Eyre. Nothing is known of his education. Eyre took the oath as subsheriff for the county on 12 June 1733, at which time he would presumably have been at least twenty-one years old. On 15 January 1734 he executed a bond in Northampton County and on that day or soon afterward married Bridget Harmanson, his mother's first cousin. They had one son and one daughter before her death on an unknown date. His namesake grandson Littleton Eyre (1761–1789) served in the Convention of 1788.

Eyre was appointed a justice of the peace on the Northampton County Court on 22 October 1736, a post he held until his death. On 11 February 1766 he presided over a meeting of the county court at which the justices unanimously determined that the Stamp Act was unconstitutional. Eyre became county surveyor in 1741 and served as county lieutenant, commanding the local militia, beginning in November 1754. He also sat on the vestry of Hungar's Parish and served as a churchwarden.

In 1742 Eyre was elected to the House of Burgesses, where he joined others in preparing a bill calling for destroying crows and squirrels on the Northern Neck and the Eastern Shore. He served five terms through 1761 and sat on the Committees of Public Claims and to apportion the public levy. In April 1746 Eyre received a franchise to run ferry services from his land on the Chesapeake Bay side of Northampton County to Yorktown (about thirty-five nautical miles), Hampton (thirty nautical miles), and Norfolk (thirty-eight nautical miles). The trip across the bay saved a ride of almost 500 miles around the Chesapeake. Eyre became very prosperous ferrying passengers and freight across the bay at such official rates as twenty shillings for a man or a horse, thirty shillings for a man and a horse, and 120 shillings (£6) for a coach or wagon with driver and horses.

After several competing ferries began cutting into his profits, Eyre used his influence as a burgess to win in July 1755 the granting of a monopoly on ferry transportation in Northampton. This monopoly, reaffirmed in 1764, was extended in March 1767 to include all of Accomack County. Eyre ran the ferry for more than twenty years. At his death, his partner John Bowdion assumed direction of the service. The franchise stayed in the two families, related by marriage, for more than a century.

Eyre continued buying and selling land in both Northampton and Accomack Counties throughout his life. He owned more than 5,300 acres on the Eastern Shore at various times. When his father died in 1728, Eyre inherited a plantation of several hundred acres on the bay side of Northampton County, as well as 230 acres on Hog Island on the ocean side. Eyre inherited an additional 237 acres on Hog Island and 380 acres in Somerset County, Maryland, in 1747 from his grandmother's estate. After 1735 he also controlled 320 acres that his wife had inherited, including Broad Creek Plantation, on the ocean side of the county.

Late in October 1754 the House of Burgesses granted Eyre the right to purchase 700 acres of land on Cherrystone Creek, adjacent to his plantation. The following month the governor approved the sale for the enormous sum of £850 cash. This land formed the basis of Eyre's home estate, on which in 1760 he built a forty-one-foot square, one-and-a-half-story gambrel-roof frame house. At his death, Eyre's plantation encompassed more than 1,500 acres, worked by at least seventy-six enslaved laborers. He may have run an ordinary or offered meeting space as well; his estate inventory enumerated forty-five wooden, six leather, and twelve Windsor chairs. Late in the eighteenth century his descendants expanded the house by raising the structure to two-and-a-half stories and enclosed the formal garden. Eyre Hall remained in the family's possession in the twenty-first century and for its architectural significance was added to the Virginia Landmarks Register and the National Register of Historic Places in 1969 and named a National Historic Landmark in 2012.

During the Seven Years' (also known as the French and Indian) War, in the summer of 1762, a crew of marauding French and Spanish privateers landed on the Eastern Shore intent on plundering Eyre's home. Local militia drove them back to their boats with no loss of life on either side. On 26 June 1768 Littleton Eyre died at his Northampton County estate. In his will, dated 7 May of that year, Eyre had recorded that he was "much afflicted with the Gout," but no direct cause of death is known. He was likely buried, with his wife, under an unengraved stone in the cemetery at Eyre Hall.

Sources Consulted:
Birth in 1709 or early in 1710 suggested in father's will, Northampton Co. Wills, Deeds, Etc., 26:109 (Eyre at least age eighteen but not yet age nineteen on 10 Feb. 1728); variant birth years of 1711 or 1712 suggested in grandmother Gertrude Littleton Harmanson's will, Northampton Co. Wills and Inventories, 18:286–287 (Eyre not yet of "lawfull age" on 11 Sept. 1732); Northampton Co. Marriage Bonds; Northampton Co. Order Book, 20:51, 438; land transactions in Northampton Co. Deed Book, vols. 18–20 (1733–1771); Northampton Co. Minute Book (1765–1771), 29–30; John Pendleton Kennedy, ed., Journals of the House of Burgesses of Virginia, 1766–1769 (1906), 21, 60, 97, 103; William Waller Hening, ed., The Statutes at Large: Being a Collection of All the Laws of Virginia, from the First Session of the Legislature, in the Year 1619 . . . (1809–1823), 5:364–365, 6:19, 443–446, 496; Eyre Hall National Historic Landmark Nomination Form (2012), National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service, U.S. Department of the Interior; Ralph T. Whitelaw, Virginia's Eastern Shore: A History of Northampton and Accomack Counties (1951), esp. 1:190–197; Kathryn Masson, Historic Houses of Virginia: Great Plantation Houses, Mansions, and Country Places (2006), 118–127; will and estate inventory in Northampton Co. Wills and Inventories, 24:174–175 (quotation), 224–226; obituary with death date in Williamsburg Virginia Gazette (Purdie and Dixon), 7 July 1768.

Written for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography by Stephen A. Maguire.

How to cite this page:
Stephen A. Maguire,"Littleton Eyre (d. 1768)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 2016 (http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.asp?b=Eyre_Littleton_d_1768, accessed [today's date]).

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