Cooper, A.S., Farm

Set in a narrow valley of the Blue Ridge Mountains near the South Fork of the New River, this farm straddles the Ashe and Watauga county line. Buildings are grouped in three clusters: the homeplace built around 1890 by A.S. Cooper, Sr., a barn complex, and a group around the c.1880 Phillips house. The centerpiece is a two-story late Victorian I-house with a wrap-around porch, stained glass and sunburst corner blocks. Nearby are a spring house, granary, barns, concrete silos, a 1946 milking parlor, two 1955 chicken houses and a family cemetery of eighteen graves dating from about 1860. The fields, pastures, woodlands and springs follow the slope of the land. The farm was listed because it shows how a Blue Ridge farm moved from subsistence crops and livestock to dairy and poultry production in the mid-twentieth century, and because its buildings represent local architecture from about 1880 to 1946. The Cooper family has continued to farm it.