Madison Farm Historic and Archeological District

Madison Farm is a 115-acre working farm near Elliston in Montgomery County, Virginia, set on a knoll above fields that run west to the South Fork of the Roanoke River. Its centerpiece is a two-story frame house built around 1775 for John Madison, with Flemish-bond brick chimneys and original beaded weatherboards. Later generations added a log-and-frame ell and remodeled the interior, including late nineteenth-century changes that turned the original hall-parlor plan into a side-passage plan. Nearby stand a log meat house, an early frame outbuilding traditionally linked to a family servant, and a log corncrib. Archaeological testing found two well-preserved sites: a Late Woodland village known as the Marye Site, dated by radiocarbon to about A.D. 1530, and the Madison House Site, with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century deposits including a former kitchen area. Together these resources document prehistoric settlement and more than a century of farm life.