Smithfield

Smithfield is a 980-acre farm in the Elk Garden Creek bottom southwest of Rosedale, Russell County, Virginia, rising from the highway to the ridge of River Mountain. Its centerpiece is a two-story, five-bay Flemish-bond brick house built in the late 1850s, with a central passage, four rooms on each floor, and Greek Revival mantels and trim inspired by Asher Benjamin's pattern books. Around it stand a brick springhouse, an acetylene house, a meat house, and a former Rosedale schoolhouse moved to the farm, along with horse, sheep and cow barns, a shop, and a wagon shed. The property was settled by Colonel Henry Smith, and ownership stayed in the family for generations. That continuity preserved nineteenth-century field patterns and names. The farm is recognized for its agricultural history and for a house that shows how regional domestic forms changed from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century.