Zehmer Farm

Zehmer Farm is a 309-acre working landscape on the edge of McKenney in southern Dinwiddie County, Virginia. Its core is a one-story, L-shaped frame farmhouse begun after 1901 and finished about 1905 by Charles G. Zehmer, around which a farmstead grew over three generations of his family. The surviving buildings include a smoke house, pump house, mule barn, corn crib, two log flue-cured tobacco barns, a dairy barn, milk houses and silos, along with a long-used vegetable garden, fields and woodland. The sites of tenant houses, fire-cured tobacco barns, a butcher house and sawmills are also counted. Together they record the shift from timber and tobacco to dairy and cattle farming between 1905 and about 1960. The property was recognized for its architecture because the buildings form an unusually intact and complete example of an early twentieth-century tobacco and dairy farm in the county, at a time when surrounding land is steadily being developed.