Venters Farm Historic District

Venters Farm is a working agricultural district of about 37 buildings on roughly 536 acres along US 258 near Richlands, west of the New River. It grew from land inherited in 1896 by newlyweds Wayne and Julia Venters, who built a two-story late Victorian farmhouse with Italianate and Queen Anne details, a detached kitchen, a corn barn, a carriage house and a smokehouse. Later additions include a mule and hay barn, a cow and pig barn, tobacco curing barns and pack houses. Nine tenant houses, dating from 1896 to the 1950s, sit in groves of trees along the highway and are surrounded by open fields of tobacco and corn. The district was listed because it survives as a distinctive example of the large landowner and tenant farming pattern that prevailed from the late nineteenth century through the first half of the twentieth. Twenty-three buildings contribute to the district, while fourteen built in the 1950s and 1960s do not.