Phifer, John, Farm

Set on a dirt-and-gravel road in the northwest corner of Rowan County, this 234-acre piedmont farm has been worked by the Phifer family for roughly 165 years. Its fields, pastures and woodlands hold about two dozen buildings, among them two successive log houses, a double-pen log barn, a log granary and corn crib, and a log smokehouse, along with frame outbuildings such as a blacksmith shop, springhouse, chicken houses and tool shed. None of the buildings is painted, and their weathered look blends with the landscape. The small two-story house of about 1819 is the farm's earliest building. Its roof gable projects several feet to shelter a chimney of fieldstone and brick, a medieval-derived form known from only a handful of North Carolina examples and no others in Rowan County. Because it stopped serving as a dwelling in the late nineteenth century, it survives largely intact. The farm's collection of buildings, tools and household furnishings records a largely self-sufficient way of farming over several generations.