The house and large rear building are reconstructions of the blacksmith James Anderson's house and shop, respectively. The house, a small group of outbuildings, and a boxwood garden were completed in 1940. Dramatic revisions followed additional archaeological excavations in 1974–1976. A new and larger version of Anderson's shop in its Revolutionary War guise was recreated, reproducing cheaper construction techniques that received increased scrutiny from a new generation of scholars in the 1970s and 1980s. The new shop was intended to represent both the extensive nature of wartime ironworking in Williamsburg and the character of relatively unrefined buildings built in the eighteenth-century Chesapeake.