Jones-Johnson-Ballentine Historic District

Two farm complexes sit on either side of Sunset Lake Road in southern Wake County, bisected by Terrible Creek, on land granted to Etheldred Jones in 1778. Jones, a Revolutionary War veteran, built a hall-and-parlor house around 1800 that survives with later alterations. The Johnson family's house was remodeled in neo-Classical Revival style around 1905 over a mid-nineteenth-century I-house. The Ballentine farm includes a dairy barn modeled on plans from Radford's 1908 pattern book, and a complete dairy operation begun in the 1920s. In 1930 a southern branch of Standard Homes Company, a Washington, D.C. house-plan business, was established on the Johnson farm. The property is valued for its intact cluster of farm buildings and its record of Wake County dairying and the mail-order house-plan trade, and for its family ownership across six generations.