Anderson-Doosing Farm

Set in the Catawba Valley of northern Roanoke County, this roughly 25-acre farm preserves the core of a once larger agricultural holding along the headwaters of Catawba Creek. The most prominent building is a two-story Greek Revival frame house built about 1883 for John and Barbara Ellen Doosing, with limestone chimneys, a symmetrical three-bay front and graining on interior doors. Lower on the property stands a double-crib log bank barn from about 1830, later enlarged with sheds and a straw shed. Other resources include a log cabin later used as a blacksmith shop, a log meat house with a reused door carved 1864, a corncrib, chicken houses, a 1940s cinder block milking parlor and a prehistoric archaeological site. The farm passed from the Andersons to Jacob Doosing in 1845, then to his nephew John W. Doosing, and in 1916 to the McNeil family, who ran a small blacksmith shop. Together the buildings document farm life from the early nineteenth century into the twentieth.