Kennedy-Wade's Mill Historic District (Boundary Increase)

Along Otts Creek near Raphine in Rockbridge County, a cluster of farm and mill buildings spread across about 113 acres forms a working mill community of the Shenandoah Valley. The centerpiece is a three-story gristmill of limestone and board-and-batten frame, rebuilt around 1877 after a fire and still fed by an overshot wheel. Nearby stand a Flemish-bond brick farmhouse from about 1793, enlarged in 1841, a frame miller's house expanded in the 1890s, an assistant miller's house of 1900, and a frame I-house of 1913 built by a former assistant miller. Springhouses, bank barns, smokehouses, chickenhouses and a corncrib complete the group. Together they illustrate vernacular building forms in western Virginia from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century, and they record how milling shaped local farming and trade. The surrounding landscape remains rural, which preserves the setting of one of the region's few continuously operating mills.