Reeve Court, an imposing threestorey structure beside the State House, was for centuries the tallest building in the town. The Reverend Dr Thomas Holland, minister of the parish church, built it around 1705 and the lot was granted the following year in recognition of the minister’s expense in putting up a substantial house. By October 1706 Holland and his wife Elizabeth had sold their house for £110 to Samuel Smith and moved to Hampton, Virginia.

Smith, a considerable landowner in other parishes, obtained a grant for land on the Bridge House side of Pound Alley to build a detached kitchen and another grant for the present front yard and side garden to the east. In 1729 he willed the property to his only surviving son Seth, a merchant in Guadeloupe, and died two years later. When Seth died he left his real estate to his four children, Seth, Thomas, William and Elizabeth, after his wife’s death. By 1760 Dr Richard Tucker had acquired the house, perhaps through his wife Mary. Tucker paid a tax of ten shillings for his property in that year, indicating a substantial house.

In 1770 the Tucker family moved to the Dutch island St Eustatius and lived there until Richard’s death in 1782. During this sojourn, Tucker’s daughter Elizabeth was courted by English merchant Thomas Reeve. When Admiral Rodney sacked St Eustatius in 1781, Reeve lost nearly £400 in goods. Later that year, he came to Bermuda and married Elizabeth in St George’s. The newlyweds moved to St Croix, where Reeve started a shipping business after his widowed mother-in-law, Mary Tucker, returned to Bermuda in 1782. Five years later, Richard Tucker’s estate was assessed at £600 for the house, and Mary’s assessment reveals that, besides furniture and goods amounting to more than £900, she owned another house worth £325 elsewhere in the town.

About 1800, the Reeves returned to Bermuda and moved into the house that still bears their name. Thomas Reeve died on July 30, 1805. Elizabeth, however, survived until 1844 when she died at the age of 87. By 1822 Mary Tucker had died and the property was inherited by Richard’s son, William Tucker, whose wife, Hester Louisa, was the ‘Nea’ celebrated by Irish poet Thomas Moore. William, a merchant, had been extraordinarily successful during the War of 1812 and built a fine house on Rose Hill, but the premature death of his wife in December 1817 cast a considerable pall over his life. He died in 1867 after serving the town for many years as a JP and magistrate.

Reeve Court then passed to his son Territt Fraser Tucker who lived there with his wife Sophia. In his 1873 will, Territt gave lifetime occupancy of the house to his wife and then bequeathed it jointly to his children. After Sophia died in 1889, Reeve Court was apparently occupied by Catherine, the youngest daughter, who married Frederick Basham the following year. The Bashams bought out the shares of Catherine’s brothers and sisters for £487.10.0d.

After it changed hands several times in the last century, the Bermuda National Trust purchased the house in 1987.

The three-storey core is apparently that built by Holland in 1706, and additions to the north and northwest were added in the late 18th or early 19th century. The roof is unusual in that it has one gable end and one hip end centred on a large old internal chimney, reflecting a partial conversion from a gabled to hip roof style after a western addition was made to the original gable end.