Kinney, James, Farmstead

This farmstead in rural Belmont County, Ohio, grew around a brick farmhouse that James Kinney built in 1863 when his family outgrew an earlier log house. The four-over-four house has a center hall, a Doric portico, a slate roof and fireplaces in most rooms. Nearby stand a two-story brick summer kitchen, a smokehouse, a coal and wood house, a carriage house and a large timber-frame bank barn built in 1874. A corncrib and wagon shed from about 1835 predates Kinney's purchase and once served drovers on a nearby trail. Kinney raised horses, cattle, sheep, hogs and grain, and was listed in an 1888 atlas as a stock dealer and farmer. His 282 acres in 1870 was large for the county. The property was listed as an unusually intact example of a nineteenth-century farm in a county where coal mining has destroyed many others. The boundary also takes in a small stand of old growth forest.