Four Locust Farm

Four Locust Farm, once the Pettus Dairy Farm, occupies 332.8 acres of rolling pasture about one mile north of Keysville in Charlotte County, Virginia. A two-story frame farmhouse, dated to about 1859, faces the highway, while a farm road leads west past dairy barns, silos, a milk house, a workshop, equipment sheds, cattle pens and tenant houses. The property includes 22 contributing buildings and seven contributing structures. The farm grew tobacco from 1919, but falling prices in the 1920s led the Pettus family to build a dairy barn in 1925 and keep a 100-head Holstein-Friesian herd. The barns follow the sanitary Richmond milkshed pattern, with concrete-block lower levels, many windows, extensive ventilation and James Manufacturing Company weathervanes. Interior milking stalls, pipes and milk-house fittings remain largely intact. Dairying ended in 1962, and beef cattle have since been raised on the same buildings and land, which remain in careful use.