Tyler, John J., Arboretum

Home Farm, in Lima, Delaware County, is a farmstead whose buildings date from 1738 onward and whose surrounding grounds hold the John J. Tyler Arboretum. Thomas Minshall built the first section of Lachford Hall in 1738, and the Painter family, beginning with Enos Painter and his sons Minshall and Jacob, expanded the farm through the nineteenth century. Minshall and Jacob Painter planted a collection that at one time numbered over 1,100 trees between 1830 and 1860, including exotic species that did not survive the climate. Twenty-two Painter trees survive, including a giant sequoia and a Cedar of Lebanon believed to be the largest of their kind in the state. The district is regarded as significant for conservation of horticultural specimens, for its link to the Painters' scientific pursuits, and for its largely intact eighteenth- and nineteenth-century farm buildings, which include stone barns, springhouses, a root cellar and the Painter Library of 1863.