By 1830 John Walker built on his Little Run, 400-acre plantation a Georgian, two-story, four-room brick I-house with a shingle, gable roof, an attic, a basement, and a detached kitchen with a room above it, the quarters of the slave cook. A corner stairway in the kitchen gave access to a room above. The brick used in constructing the main block of the house and the detached kitchen were made from clay found on the place and laid in the Flemish bond pattern. Through a Georgian door, a visitor entered a wide, wood-paneled hall, the ceilings of which as well as those of the four rooms were ten feet from the floor. The floors throughout the house were wide pine boards. The first floor rooms were the dining room and parlor; and the two upstairs ones were bedrooms. Each of these four rooms had a fireplace framed in turned pilasters and a decorated mantel. The attic called a dormitory was also a bedroom. A winding stairway with undecorated newel posts, rectangular banisters, and rail rose to the attic. The Walker mansion house, like all other plantation houses of the period, had around it beside the detached kitchen other support buildings such as a blacksmith shop, a carriage house, a wagon shed, a cow shed, an icehouse, slave quarters, a smokehouse, a springhouse, and stables. He named the house Velvet Acres because of the luxuriant growth of that flower on the place.