Clover Mount (Stonehouse Farm)

This limestone residence of prosperous Scots-Irish farmer Robert Tate and his wife, Margaret, illustrates one of the first waves of permanent and substantial house building in Augusta County. It began as a two-story hall-parlor dwelling—a typical local plan in the eighteenth century, especially for log houses—at the right end of the existing structure. By 1803, Tate had enlarged the house to resemble the two-story center-passage houses that had begun to penetrate the Valley by the early nineteenth century. The one-room two-story addition on the left side of the original house features a corner fireplace, a common element of large houses in the county from this period. Rough stone jack arches surmount the first-story windows, and the entrance is sheltered by a later three-bay one-story wooden porch. The house retains some of the best surviving and most extensive examples of stenciled wall designs in the Valley, with vertical bands of geometric and flower designs in dark-green and iron-red colors in seven rooms. A large bank barn is behind the house.