This Saturday, October 10, Cherry Hill Farm will host Farm Day, a festive event filled with live music, pony rides, a petting zoo, and more. But this fall festival has something you won’t find anywhere else: the chance to see what life was like on a farm in the 1800s. Among the many activities offered, you can watch demonstrations of beekeeping, blacksmithing, and basket weaving. You’ll also have a chance to walk through a farmhouse that’s decorated just the same as it was over two hundred years ago. (Wait until you see what a coal-burning stove looks like!)
Cherry Hill Farm can bring you all these extra experiences because it’s a living museum, which means it’s not the kind of place that just has items on display in glass cases. It’s a real place with land that used to be a farm and a house that looks like it did in the 1800s, complete with a barn in the backyard. Cherry Hill Farm is one of the Little City’s most important landmarks, so let’s take a look at its history.
Cherry Hill Farm goes all the way back to 1729, before the Revolutionary War, when it was part of a 248-acre property. The property changed ownership several times until William Harvey bought 66 acres in 1845. He is believed to have built the Cherry Hill Farmhouse that same year. A man named William Blaisdell bought the house and surrounding acres in 1856, and the barn was completed sometime around 1857. (Seventy percent of the original barn still stands today!) The farmhouse is decorated with antiques to look exactly the way it looked when the Blaisdell family lived there between 1856 and 1868. To give you an idea of how long ago this was, the Civil War took place between 1861 and 1865.
The farmhouse looks just like a house from the 1800s on the outside and it’s even more authentic inside. There are two big doors to the farmhouse, one at the front and one directly across the front hallway. This was in the days before air conditioning, so in the summer when it was hot, the Blaisdell family could open both doors and let a cool breeze fill the first floor of the house. To the right of the front door, the house has a fancy parlor with a fireplace and a melodeon (which looks like a piano). This room is similar to what we might call a living room, but it was only used for special occasions like welcoming visitors or celebrating holidays. The first floor also has a dining room where the family would share meals and gather near a fireplace.
The Keeping Room is where they kept and cooked food and it contains a butter churner, a Pie Safe that kept baked goods safe from bugs and other critters, scales to weigh food because they didn’t have measuring cups yet, and a black coal-burning stove with a little door so you could also bake things inside. This room has a second staircase (almost like a secret staircase!) that goes up to the second floor, and steps that go down to a cool cellar where they could have stored food in jars. There’s no sink in this room because there was no indoor plumbing in the 1800s, so they would gather water from a nearby well. (A kitchen used to be part of this room but it was removed during recent renovations. A modern kitchen is part of the farmhouse today so that food can be prepared for events but it is not part of the public tour.)
The second floor offers a chance to see what a typical bedroom was like in this era and includes a children’s bedroom and a parents’ bedroom, both with furnishings you’d find in the 1800s.
Cherry Hill Farm was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1973 and Cherry Hill was listed as a Virginia Historic Landmark that same year.
Farm Day is free to attend and takes place on October 10 from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. at 312 Park Avenue. Tours of Cherry Hill Farmhouse aren’t available on Farm Day, but you can still tour the farmhouse on Saturdays from 10 a.m. until noon, through October 31, 2026.
Upcoming events at the Cherry Hill Farmhouse include a 1960s themed tea tasting on Sunday, November 8, and the popular holiday teas on Saturday December 12 and Sunday December 13. Visit cherryhillfallschurch.org for more information.
