The front facade features a one-story Tuscan order portico consisting of paired rectangular wooden pillars supporting a full entablature.

His daughter and her first husband, Bathurst Skelton, lived at Elk Hill during the two-year marriage that began in November 1766 and ended with his death in 1768.

[6][a] Three hundred acres of Elk Hill was a component of the dowry for the marriage between Martha and Thomas Jefferson.

[12] The plantation conveyed their products to Richmond via canal boats and, beginning in the late 19th century, via railroad trains.

[14] During the Revolutionary War, Elkhill was occupied by Lord Cornwallis and his men for ten days, during which they used the plantation as a temporary base of operations.

Jefferson visited the site not long after Cornwallis left, and later recorded what he had seen in a letter to William Gordon in Paris.

[10] Lord Cornwallis then proceeded to the point of fork, and encamped his army from thence all along the main James river to a seat of mine called Elkhill, opposite to Elk island and a little below the mouth of the Byrd creek.

He destroyed all my growing crops of corn and tobacco, he burned all my barns containing the same articles of the last year, having first taken what corn he wanted, he used, as was to be expected, all my stocks of cattle, sheep, and hogs for the sustenance of his army, and carried off all the horses capable of service: of those too young for service he cut the throats, and he burnt all the fences on the plantation, so as to leave it an absolute waste.

He carried off also about 30. slaves: had this been to give them freedom he would have done right, but it was to consign them to inevitable death from the small pox and putrid fever then raging in his camp.

When I say that Lord Cornwallis did all this, I do not mean that he carried about the torch in his own hands, but that it was all done under his eye, the situation of the house, in which he was, commanding a view of every part of the plantation, so that he must have seen every fire.