Robb Farm: a Hartslog Valley homestead since 1826

William Robb was born in County Tyrone, Ireland, in 1775 and left for Pennsylvania in 1799, working off the cost of his passage on a farm in the upper Kishacoquillas Valley. In 1806 he married Mary Livingston. Africa's 1883 history records the marriage and says Robb settled in Walker Township, in Woodcock Valley, in 1826. The nomination puts the farm in the Hartslog Valley and fills it in: he rented the Goldsborough farm and lived in a log house there, and in 1833 he bought the 362-acre property from the Goldsborough estate and built a brick house in the 3/5 Georgian form, the bricks dug and fired in the meadow along Crooked Creek. In 1839 he raised the barn, a standard Pennsylvania barn with an open forebay, 75 by 35 feet at its core.

Robb died at the farm in 1845, and on December 6 of that year the home place passed to his son Livingston, then 25, who ran it for over four decades. In 1850 the census credited his farm with 520 bushels of wheat against a township average of 261. About 1864 he built a large rear addition, turned the house to face the improved road, and reshaped the roof into a low hip that lent it a degree of Italianate styling. The farm did well enough in the war years for a Steinway grand piano to be shipped directly to the house. The nomination calls the 200-acre farm of 1880 the most prosperous in the valley, with 59 sheep, 75 apple trees yielding 300 bushels, and 500 pounds of honey.

The next century brought dairying, more than 200 hogs in the 1930s fed on whey from the Sealtest cottage cheese plant in Huntingdon after the blight took the chestnuts, and more than 300 sheep in the 1950s. The tenant house across the road, rebuilt about 1920, has a corner post log core that the nomination says may be the original log house of about 1826.

The nomination, prepared in 2009 and 2010 by William M. Hunter of Heberling Associates in Alexandria, argues significance in agriculture from about 1833 to 1959. Its 179.65-acre boundary is roughly the farm as subdivided in 1845, and it notes that only two of the county's 40 National Register properties were then farms. Eleven buildings survive, all contributing. In the stone springhouse, the date 1933 is carved into the ceiling.

Checked 2026-09-05 · National Register of Historic Places nomination, read in full

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