Termite Control in Smithfield, VA

Smithfield Termite Pressure

A Colonial Seaport Built of Wood

Smithfield’s historic core holds a lot of old wood. The town was founded in 1749 and incorporated in 1752 on the banks of the Pagan, in a county where English settlement began in 1619; the historic district, on the National Register since 1973, counts about fifty buildings the state rates as architecturally exceptional, many dating to the 1700s and 1800s, and that aged wood sits over damp ground off the Pagan River. Add the crawlspaces under so many historic homes and the eastern subterranean termite has what it wants: damp soil and a short path to seasoned wood.

The eastern subterranean termite is the main structural threat, eating structural wood from the soil up and giving itself away with pencil-thin mud tubes on piers and walls. The old-house borer tunnels aged softwood framing, leaving oval exit holes and a rasping sound inside a wall; powderpost beetles honeycomb seasoned hardwood and leave tiny holes with a fine, flour-like dust; and carpenter bees bore finger-width galleries in trim with sawdust piled below.

Swarm season runs roughly March through May, and a spring flush of winged termites indoors is the single most common reason a Smithfield owner picks up the phone. The other is a closing: the buyer’s lender usually asks for a wood-destroying-organism check, as Virginia Tech’s extension service notes, and when that report turns up activity, we treat it. In Virginia the buyer, not the seller, carries the inspection burden on a sale, which makes ordering the report early worth more here than in a town of newer housing.

The Department of Historic Resources’ survey of the town puts the building record plainly: Smithfield “possesses an excellent collection of buildings from the 1750s to the present”, and its eighteenth-century courthouse complex, clerk’s office and jail survive today. That is close to three centuries of continuous timber construction on the same ground, which is the real reason termite risk here is not a generic coastal claim. In the older houses, original sills, hand-framed crawl spaces and porches rebuilt over the years give a subterranean colony more wood-to-soil contact than a modern slab offers, and more places for the evidence to hide.