The original five-bay portion of the modest Charles City County plantation house of Belle Air illustrates in its form and construction details the transition from 17th-century building methods to 18th-century ones. The exposed interior framing with summer beam and the heavy closed-string stair railing are characteristic of the 17th century. The symmetrical façade and center-passage floor plan are harbingers of standard 18th-century forms. Because of destruction of Charles City County records, the house’s construction date had been difficult to document. Daniel Clarke purchased the property in 1662, but dendrochronological studies indicate that the house was built beginning in 1725 and ending in 1750, with a three-bay western section added ca. 1800. Belle Air is a unique surviving example in Virginia of a wooden house with post-medieval-type exposed interior framing, and it may be the oldest plantation dwelling along Virginia’s historic Route 5.