April 2002 Homes Tour*
*(Taken from the Gazette-Virginian article with permission.)
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By Will Blythe, Published April 17, 2002
The name suggests that the 294 acres of Pleasant Grove are a fine place for a house and farm, evoking its harmonious location on a slight rise amid the woods and fields and creeks of southwest Halifax County. But as pleasantly situated as it is, the site actually takes its designation from one of the property's former owners, Pleasant William Farmer (1803-1884), and was originally known as Pleasant's Grove. For more than six generations that land has belonged to the Farmer family and its descendants, dating from its present ownership all the way back to Archer Farmer, who in the mid eighteenth century moved from Henrico County to Halifax County, then called Lunenberg,County. At the heart of the farm, shaded by maple, dogwood, magnolia, and cedar trees, stands the main house complex, featuring Pleasant Grove, a two-story frame dwelling completed in 1890 in the Victorian style with Italianate and Greek Revival secondary characteristics. Using lumber cut and milled on the site, an as-yet-unknown builder constructed the house for David Samuel Farmer, who had inherited a parcel of land above Miry Creek from his father, Pleasant William. In its basic form and with a roof of rolled tin painted red, the residence is a representative Southside Virginia dwelling of the late nineteenth century, reminiscent of Laurel Grove, a house built in 1888 in the Sutherlin vicinity of southeastern Pittsylvania County, several miles to the west of Pleasant Grove. The interior features two hallways, a front-entry hallway and a rear hallway, with the front hallway displaying more formal characteristics - bulls-eye decorations over the doors and windows, and front stairway banister and newel posts made of walnut wood (as opposed to poplar wood in the back hallway). Pre- served in the house are many of its original walnut furnishings - tables, love seats, chairs, rockers, a bedstead, and a vanity - purchased around the time the house was completed in 1890 and brought back to their original beauty by the skilled hands of Sam Thompson, The Cabinet Maker. Other architectural features of interest include the apron panels under the first-floor windows - a late occurrence of a treatment that was much more common before 1880 - and the second floor ell schoolroom, now renovated, where a rubbing can be viewed of a graffiti penciled onto the original wall by a possibly bored and certainly irrepressible twelve-year-old Emily Esther Farmer in 1914. She was merely one (though certainly one of the most freely-spoken) of a multitude of Farmers and their relations and friends who have passed through and left, their mark on Pleasant Grove (though not necessarily on the walls) in the last two and a half centuries. The family has been associated with the Pleasant Grove Christian Church, now the United Church of Christ,since its inception more than a hundred years ago. The land upon which the church is located was,donated by Pleasant William Farmer. The Farmers also have been active in the affairs of Elon College, a school that was founded by the Christian Church, and several have served on the Board of Trustees of the college. One member of the family who lived nearly her entire life in the house was Nannie Baker Farmer, the daughter of David Samuel Farmer, and the somewhat better behaved sister of Emily Esther Farmer. Miss Farmer, who died in 1979, taught in the Halifax County schools for almost her entire career, and helped educate hundreds of children in the county. The house has been the site of the births and deaths of at least two generations of Farmers, and happily, the scene of many family reunions, where inordinate quantities of ham biscuits, fried chicken, pound cake, iced tea, and vegetables (especially tomatoes) grown in the nearby garden were consumed, leading to many a contented nap on the side porch. Dr. William B. Blythe, David Samuel Farmer's grandson (and Emily Esther Farmer's son), remembered at such times listening to his grandmother, Mary Lovelace Farmer, tell stories about "when the Yankees came through." Blythe's father (and Emily Esther's husband), LeGette Blythe, a noted North Carolina author, wrote parts of two novels, Alexandriana (Stackpole, 1940) and Bold Galilean (UNC Press, 1948) in the parlor of the house. In 1997, with the assistance of Decatur Overbey and his able crews, Dr. Blythe and his wife, Gloria, began a now-completed renovation of Pleasant Grove, all of which was done without altering the architectural detail of the house or doing violence to its history and spirit. More than two and a half centuries after the Farmers moved to Halifax County, the family's descendants continue to gather here to celebrate their kinship and love of this place. Pleasant Grove is listed on the Virginia Landmarks Register and the National Register of Historic Places. --By Will Blythe, grandson of Emily Esther Farmer Blythe (some say he is just as irrepressible as his grandmother) |
| The Halifax County Historical Society Flora Osborne, President Phone: 434-575-5059 |
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