Clermont

Clermont is a 355-acre farm of rolling pasture on the eastern outskirts of Berryville, Clarke County, Virginia. Its main house grew in stages: a one-and-a-half-story frame section probably built by Edward Snickers around 1770, a frame addition around 1810, a limestone addition around 1840, and a connecting frame addition in 1970. The original section has a central-passage plan with a corner stair hall lit through an interior window, a layout the nomination calls the only known example in the region. Around the house are an eighteenth-century smokehouse, log servants' quarters, a springhouse, an early twentieth-century bank barn and two tenant houses, along with the ruins of an icehouse and a slave cemetery. The farm was listed for its architecture and for its long role in grain production, which was strong before the Civil War. After the war, land from Clermont was made available to former slaves and other African Americans, and the community of Josephine City grew from it.