Oliver-Morton Farm

Set at the end of a long gravel lane about a mile from the nearest paved road in Oak Hill, Granville County, the farm contains a group of dwellings and outbuildings spanning roughly the late eighteenth century to the early twentieth. Its oldest building, the Oliver House, is a steeply pitched story-and-loft house whose walls and interior partitions are brick-nogged between heavy pegged studs, a practice found in only a few other county buildings. It has a two-room-deep plan with four rooms and a closed stair, and it keeps a three-part Georgian door surround and flush-sheathed wainscoting. Deeds first record it in 1824, when Francis H. Oliver sold it with 461.5 acres to Thomas Vass. Samuel V. Morton, who acquired 702.4 acres in 1888, built a two-story Italianate I-house to its south in the early 1890s. Its bracketed porch and interior post-and-lintel mantels are unusual for rural farmhouses of the period. Five outbuildings, including a diamond-notched log striphouse, survive from the tobacco era.