About Historic Clermont Farm
Clarke County, Virginia
Elizabeth Rust Williams' Enduring Gift to the Commonwealth of Virginia
Elizabeth Rust Williams, a farmer, preservationist, lawyer, and judge, preserved her family’s 360-acre Clermont Farm so future generations could connect with Virginia’s land and history. Upon her death in 2004, she donated the property to the Virginia Department of Historic Resources and established The Clermont Foundation to support and manage the site without state funding. Her legacy also honors the lives of the nearly 200 enslaved people who built Clermont and whose descendants helped form Josephine City, Berryville, now the home to the region’s only African American museum.
Clermont Farm, managed and funded by The Clermont Foundation, is now a state-owned research and training site in agriculture, history, and historic preservation, with its land and buildings serving as teaching tools. A five year study of the historic buildings has been completed, as well as research on the history of the site in topic areas including agriculture, architecture, African American life, women’s roles, military history, legal and medical history, and Clermont’s role as a public history site.
The Early Years
Clermont, personally surveyed by an 18-year-old George Washington on October 19, 1750, from Lord Fairfax’s 5.2 million-acre Northern Neck Proprietary, and owned by just four families from then until 2004 (Vance, Wadlington, Snickers, McCormick/Williams), encapsulates the history of the Great Valley and early national development, including the extension of slavery. The first three families to own Clermont were active in the nation's founding, from the French and Indian War through the Revolution and its aftermath.
Native Americans shaped the land for at least 10,000 years for game production and harvest. After contact, it was inhabited by a community of European and enslaved African Americans who built on it and tilled it. The farm’s timber-frame, log, and stone buildings represent a span of construction of over 200 years, from the initial house in 1755-6 to a significant addition in 1970.
Today, a Working Farm
Clermont is still a working farm. In the 18th and 19th centuries, it was a champion wheat-growing farm that supplied international markets. It currently raises Angus beef cattle and Katahdin (hair) sheep and supports research and training. Three families live in Clermont. The Foundation has partnerships with the Clarke County Public Schools and Farm Bureau to provide a training site for Clarke agriculture students, with Virginia Tech, JMU, and others for student training/faculty research purposes, and with Virginia Extension for working farmers.
The buildings at the farm are undergoing a long-term process of stabilization. Given Clermont’s purpose, the treatment mode chosen under the Secretary of the Interior’s Standards is “Preservation” (preserving all layers, all periods), as opposed to “Restoration” (to a specific point in time), “Reconstruction” (from little or nothing), or “Rehabilitation” (for modern adaptive re-use). The buildings are empty, all dendrochronology-dated, and their fabric has been opened for research and to assist the teaching of students in several historic disciplines. The site is on the Virginia Landmarks Register and the National Register of Historic Places.
In a devastating fire in 2018, the working 1917 timber-framed barn and 1849 corn crib were lost, along with one of the largest wooden archaeological artifacts excavated on land in Virginia, the forebay and turbine boxes of a " tub mill" (horizontal water wheel) from Woolf’s Mill in Fauquier County, VA, a grist mill like those used to grind Clermont wheat. While there was never a mill at Clermont, the tub mill was a reminder that Clermont has always existed in and is inseparable from a much larger labor, production, transportation, and market context related to regional, national, and international conditions.