Clifton

Clifton is a farmstead in northwestern Culpeper County, Virginia, near Rixeyville, whose buildings record more than a century of change. The main house was built around 1845 as a two-story Greek Revival dwelling with a side-passage plan. A west wing added around 1850 made it a central-passage house. Around 1910 a porch, a rear ell and a kitchen wing were added, bringing Craftsman details to the interior. Around the house stand ten contributing outbuildings in three groupings, including an antebellum two-story kitchen with a wide stone chimney, a late-nineteenth-century bank barn, an ash house, an icehouse, a springhouse and a corncrib. Five contributing sites include the locations of former buildings and two cemeteries. One is a family cemetery begun by George Roberts Crigler, and the other is a slave cemetery above the Thornton River. The property was listed because it keeps an unusually large group of farm buildings and shows how a local family's farm evolved over time.