Leiby, Jacob, Farm

Built from 1829 onward, the Leiby farm in Virginville, Berks County, is a farmstead made almost entirely of stone cut from the quarry on its own land. Jacob Leiby, who ran the quarry from 1825 and died in 1884, developed the farm between 1829 and 1884. The farmhouse carries a datestone with his name and the year 1829. Its main buildings include a Federal-plan house, a Pennsylvania bank barn, a wagon shed, a cider house, a blacksmith shop later used as a school and then as a residence, a bakeoven and a double ground cellar. Stone was also used for fence posts, water troughs, paths, steps and garden edging. The quarry produced a sandstone known as Leiby blue stone, prized for its large slabs, and it supplied building stone across the region in the mid-1800s. The farm is regarded as a showcase of that stone and of the Pennsylvania German self-sufficient farmstead. Leiby's cemetery monument is also of stone, and the farm remained a working property through the twentieth century.