Foust-Carpenter and Dean Dick Farms

Along Mt. Hope Church and Carpenter House Roads near Whitsett, a 325-acre farm district preserves a working rural landscape in southeastern Guilford County. It includes six dwellings and thirty outbuildings, among them a circa 1898 I-house built for John C. Foust, tenant houses, a nineteenth-century log house, frame barns, corn cribs, pack houses and equipment sheds. Eighteen irregular fields, some terraced, and a network of dirt farm roads follow patterns visible in aerial photographs from 1937. The land was held continuously by the Foust, Carpenter and Dick families, and the Carpenters still grow corn, barley, wheat, tobacco and hay and raise cattle. The Dean Dick farm, started by an African American farmer who bought land in 1905, adds a log dwelling, milk barn and icehouse. Surrounding farms have been subdivided for housing, which makes this the most intact agricultural landscape in Jefferson Township and the reason for its listing.