McClelland-Grimes Farm

Pasture-dominated farmland in the hills northeast of Waynesburg, Greene County, centers on an 1873 brick Italianate farmhouse built by Michael M. McClelland. The farm combines woodlots, cropland, streams and a farmstead of fourteen buildings, eight of them contributing, including an 1883 timber frame barn, a late nineteenth-century sheep barn, a smoke house and ice house, and a mid-twentieth-century poultry house. McClelland's holdings grew to 512 acres with 450 sheep at their largest, and his production in 1850 and 1880 exceeded township and county averages in livestock, butter and corn. After his 1888 financial reversal, the farm passed through the Grimes family, whose records document diversified income from sheep, hay, coal and natural gas. The property is regarded as a representative survivor of the region's sheep-raising economy and its later shift toward diversification.