John Rufus Bell
(1875-1955)
Modernizing Clermont in the 1910s and 20s
John R. Bell and his family were the tenants who managed Clermont Farm during World War I and the following period, about 1915 to 1928 or 1929, roughly 13 years. When he and his wife Emma came to Clermont in 1915, they had three children: a son, Ammie, 14, a son, Joseph, 12, and a daughter, Sarah, 8. In the 1920 Census, when they are listed in the tenant house on the hill near the Main Barn, a fourth child, Mary 4, and a fifth, Edith May, had been added. John Bell was a well-known and progressive farmer in Clarke County, from a very extensive family of farmers. Then, the Clermont owner, Admiral A.M.D. McCormick (son of the Confederate widow Ellen McCormick, who had died in 1908) had decided to invest in the farm’s modernization, so he bought out his two siblings and looked for a good farmer to operate the farm on shares with him. John Bell fit the bill, and Admiral McCormick incentivized the offer by including the construction of a large modern bank barn and of a new tenant house with indoor plumbing. Mr. Bell accepted and got to work. The new house was built in 1915-16. He repaired the existing 1871 Barn (foundations still extant) in 1916, and in the summer of 1917 built the new two-story 104’x50’ Main Barn, followed in 1918 by large one-story additions at each end. The 60’ wide entry apron to the ten huge doors on the west side (the “bank” hillside) into the second floor for hay was built on top of an innovation: a 12,300 gallon water cistern of poured concrete, collecting rain water from the roof, to provide a steady water supply for the milking herd and horses below, as well as to a poured-concrete trough in the barnyard. His work may also have saved a number of the historic domestic buildings at Clermont (the 1777 Kitchen, still in use, the1803 Slave Quarter, being used as farm labor housing, and the 1857 Springhouse), whose stone foundations he shored up, then formed, and poured concrete over them – not elegant, but the buildings survived for another century until another round of preservation work.
