Pharsalia

Pharsalia is a complex of antebellum plantation buildings at the base of Priest Mountain, on a knoll above the Tye River Valley near Tyro in Nelson County, Virginia. William Massie established the plantation in 1814, and his frame Federal-style manor house was complete by 1816. It began as a one-story, single-pile house with four rooms and an eleven-bay front, and Massie enlarged it in 1840 and 1852 into its present T-shaped plan with an offset pediment above the original roofline. Around the house stand a brick kitchen and laundry that doubled as a slave hospital, an icehouse later used as a school, log slave quarters, a smokehouse, a weaving room, a privy and a crib barn, along with a mill site and the foundation of a commercial smokehouse. Massie's detailed papers record how the buildings were planned and used. This documentation, together with the surviving structures, sets the property apart among Nelson County plantations. Today it remains part of a working farm used for events and workshops.