Walnut Hill Historic District

Two large farm complexes along Mial Plantation Road near Shotwell, in southeastern Wake County, make up this district of roughly 157 acres. The Mial-Williamson Farm and the Joseph Blake Farm were once part of Walnut Hill Plantation, founded in the late eighteenth century and held by related Mial, Price, Blake and Williamson families for six generations. The district includes tenant houses, tobacco barns, packhouses, fields and woodlands, along with community buildings. Oaky Grove Methodist Church, built about 1876-1877 with pointed-arch openings, is one of the earliest Gothic Revival churches in the county. Frog Pond Academy, a two-room 1860s plantation schoolhouse, later served as a tenant dwelling and, from 1940 to 1952, as an office for an agricultural experiment station studying soil conservation on tobacco land. The Blake Farm keeps a mid-nineteenth-century office and a notable group of domestic outbuildings. Together they document a working agricultural community from the post-Civil War era to the mid-twentieth century.