Van Kirk Farm

Set on rising ground in rural Elizabeth Township, the Van Kirk Farm is a working dairy farm centered on a red brick Greek Revival farmhouse dated to about 1840. The house has a center-hall plan, six-over-six windows and a front portico with four fluted Doric columns, and its interior woodwork, including door surrounds and mantels with attached pilasters, is largely intact. The farm also includes a two-story brick springhouse with brick ventilators, a board and batten house, a frame barn, and a one-room frame building thought to date to about 1875. Land here was owned by Joseph Van Kirk, who acquired 112 acres in 1813 and nearly 300 more by 1823. The farm is considered important because its farmhouse is the county's rare regional example of the style, and because its buildings and rural setting preserve a nineteenth century agricultural landscape that has largely disappeared from Allegheny County.