Hair, Matthew, Farm

Located in rural Jenner Township, Somerset County, Pennsylvania, the Hair Farm covers 110 acres of open fields, woodland and a small spring-fed stream. Its central building is a 2½-story brick house dated 1817 by a circular date stone in the east gable bearing the initials M. H., for builder Matthew Hair. The house has a central-passage plan, a shed-roofed front porch, and original four-light transoms and six-over-six sash. Alongside it stand a circa 1870 German-influenced bank barn and a circa 1850 kitchen and spring house, with a windmill-fed cistern on the highest point of the property. The farm is regarded as a clear record of how Somerset County farms evolved from preindustrial subsistence through the nineteenth century. Its brick house is also described as one of only a few early nineteenth-century brick houses still known in the county.