History Tuesday – The Lewis-THornburg Farm

History Tuesday at Old Houses Under $50K is for informational purposes only – usually NOT for sale.  We feature properties that cost less than $50K sometime in their history.  Today we feature the Lewis-Thornburg Farm.

Right at the edge of the Birkhead Mountains Wilderness Area in Asheboro, North Carolina, is the restored Lewis -Thornburg FaHouse and farm complex. Built in 1855, per the North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources, it is an excellent example of a medium-sized farmstead that through five generations of the Lewis and Thornburg families to become a successful Randolph County agricultural enterprise. The 160.80-acre farm represents the agrarian economy in the county from the 19th to the mid-2oth centuries when farm families and farm laborers made up the majority of the population.

 

 

The Lewises and the Thornburgs, like most of their neighbors, relied on the livestock and poultry they raised and the crops they grew to provide an annual income for their families. The farmstead illustrates the evolution of a subsistence farm to profitable farming enterprise  over a century and through difficult periods such as the Civil War and Great Depression.