Boyer-Mertz Farm

Rural farmstead of brick and frame buildings in Maxatawny Township near Kutztown, built between about 1871 and 1940 and still operated as a dairy farm. The 1871 brick bank barn carries a datestone naming Benneville and Mary Boyer, and the family's cherry-trimmed brick farmhouse dates from 1905 and combines Late Victorian and Colonial Revival features. The complex includes a ca. 1850 stone summer kitchen, a 1871 brick tenant house, a butcher house, corn cribs, a carriage shop once used to make buggies, a milk house, and five stone cisterns that supplied water for the farm. The property is listed for its long agricultural use in Berks County and for its intact group of vernacular outbuildings that were adapted to mechanized dairy farming. Ownership passed from the Mertz family to the Angstadts in 1945, and the farm has stayed in that family's hands since.