Snake Creek Farm Historic District

Snake Creek Farm is a small farm complex in a remote valley of northern Carroll County, Virginia, north of the crest of the Blue Ridge. Its centerpiece is a two-and-one-half-story frame house built by farmer James F. Martin soon after he bought the land in 1910. It has a double-pile, center-passage plan, a clipped gable roof with metal shingles in the gables, decorative metal cresting, and finished rooms on the third floor. Interior walls are sheathed in tongue-and-groove boards, a practice tied to a local shortage of plaster. Nearby are a springhouse, a meathouse, a family cemetery with early to mid-nineteenth-century graves, and a two-room schoolhouse that Martin had built in 1907. The school served neighborhood children until the 1950s, and Martin's second wife, Nettie, taught there. The house is considered a rarity in southwest Virginia, and the school reflects the public education system established after the Civil War.