Speed the Plough

Speed the Plough is a nearly 300-acre farm in Amherst County, Virginia, whose centerpiece is a two-story brick house built around 1850 by William Alexander Dearing in the Greek Revival style. Dearing grew tobacco and grain and held fourteen enslaved people in 1860. After his death in a feud, his family kept the land until 1915, when a fruit company planted orchards. Rowland Lea bought the farm in 1927, remodeled the house, and added bathrooms and a north wing. Around 1933 his partner George C. Stevens financed a barn, a rock wall, a garage and apartment, a chicken house, and the Rock Cottage, a fieldstone Tudor Revival retreat modeled on an English hunting lodge. The grounds also include a springhouse, the Dearing family cemetery, an adjoining African-American cemetery, ponds, and possible archaeological sites. Together these resources trace the farm's shift from tobacco to orchards to pasture across more than two centuries.