Quiet Valley Living Historical Farm | Our Farm : Farm House

OUR FARM: BUILDINGS
Farm House - Spring House - Cabin - School House - Barn

Our House

The photograph on the left, labelled "Grandfather Marsh's Place", was taken by a family member in 1907. This is the oldest image we have of Quiet Valley Farm that shows the Farm House (right foreground), Barn (left background, behind the trees) and Springhouse (white building on the bottom left). The photo on the right shows the house as it appears today.

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History - Architecture - Preservation

History:

Like many small family farms throughout Pennsylvania, the history of Quiet Valley's buildings has been principally passed down orally from one generation to the next.

The Farm House was built in stages throughout its 200 year history. The first part of the house was built by Quiet Valley's original settlers, the Zepper family. Upon their arrival in Quiet Valley in the late 1760s, the family carved out a "bank-house" from the side of a small hill. This stone-walled structure served as their residence through much of the late 1700s. The addition of a log structure on top of the bank house sometime in the late 1700s or early 1800s led to the original room to be used as a Cellar Kitchen.

The Cellar Kitchen served as the Zepper family's one room home when they settled Quiet Valley in the 1760s.

Large families inhabitated Quiet Valley throughout its history and this led to further additions to the house. The marriage of one resident to a "city girl" mandated changes that made the home more "modern". The addition of a Parlor and New Kitchen in the late 1800s gave the house the form one sees today.

Architecture:

There are several construction methods used in Quiet Valley's Farm House, highlighting the many years of occupation. As mentioned above, the Zepper family began by constructing a bank-house with thick limestone walls. The Cellar Kitchen walls are made up of locally harvested limestone of various dimensions. The traditional lime mortar is a mixture of sand and lime (produced in local lime kilns) mixed with just the right amount of water.

The next section of the house to be constructed was the log cabin, built on top of the existing stone walls. This addition, the largest, provided the family with increased living space and a large loft. The construction of this section of the house incorporated a number of techniques including dovetailed notching at the corners of the log walls and timber-frame techniques in the floor joists and roof timbers. Here you can see the log construction of the cabin that was added on top of the original one room house. Note the notching on top of each of the logs.

The last additions to the house included the addition of a small parlor and porch on one side of the log structure and a new, "modern" kitchen on the other side of the structure. These two additions, a mixture of timber-framing and stick construction, provided the late 1800's family a more livable home. This stove (pictured), in the house's new kitchen, was a vast improvement over the open hearth cooking done in the old cellar kitchen.

Preservation:

Quiet Valley Living Historical Farm is committed to the preservation of all of our historic structures. We recently applied for a Keystone Preservation Grant from the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission that, if approved, will permit us to undertake a study of the history of the Farm House and a determination of the structure's condition and preservation needs. Check back with us as we update this page with further information as preservation continues.