🐄 Sugar Loaf Farm

Sugar Loaf Farm is an early 19th-century cluster of agricultural, industrial, and residential buildings located in a bucolic setting approximately 7.5 miles southwest of Staunton, Virginia and 1/2 mile southeast of Sugar Loaf Mountain. As a member of the U.S. National Register of Historic Places, Sugar Loaf Farm maintains the only surviving brick grist mill in Augusta County, Virginia. The brick grist mill on the property combines the mechanical principles of Oliver Evans, a prominent mill designer of the late eighteenth century, with the engineering craftsmanship and building detail of molded brick cornices, a vernacular architecture in the upper Shenandoah Valley in the early 1800s. The Farm's three original buildings, the farmhouse, grist mill and miller's house, were all constructed by David Summer at a time when Augusta County had emerged as the center of one of the most dominant wheat-growing and flour-processing regions in the South. Sugar Loaf Farm serves as a valuable reminder of the wheat-based agriculture that persisted in this region well into the twentieth century. Today, Sugar Loaf Farm is a privately run farm that specializes in raising Black Angus cattle.