Rock Hill Farm

When Rock Hill Farm came on the market in 2008, it was badly in need of renovation, but unusually well preserved. Vas and Linda Devan, both avid horsepersons and foxhunters, decided to purchase the property and undertake the project. Rock Hill was already in conservation easement with the Virginia Outdoors Foundation and the Devans then added the farm to the Virginia Landmarks Register in June, and the National Register of Historic Places in August of 2009. Most of the original structures still stand, which include a Quaker--style house and bank barn built in 1797, and a smoke house, well house/dairy, and corn crib. A slave cemetery, located near the swimming pool pavilion, bears witness to the original owner Abner Humphrey's status as a slaveholder. Rock Hill may have had a brief role in the Civil War. Family history holds the farm to be the site where Mosby's Rangers divided up the money from the "Greenback Raid." In October 1864, Confederate Col. John Singleton Mosby and his men derailed a train near Duffields station in West Virginia. The men made off with the federal payroll of $173,000 which was headed south to pay Union Gen. Phillip Henry Sheridan's troops. Mosby refused his share, but later his men purchased for him a horse he had admired at Oatlands Plantation. Rock Hill's other barns and outbuildings reflect more recent years as a thoroughbred horse breeding operation. Now the horses here are working foxhunters or homebred foxhunters in training, and Rock Hill's new owners have made things as horse- and hunt-friendly as possible, with mown pathways and strategically placed jumps. Feel free to explore the property, treat the friendly horses to carrots, and picnic by the pool or pond pavilions.