Eden Hill: the Seeds farm in Spruce Creek Township

Eden Hill Farm, in rural Spruce Creek Township in the north of Huntingdon County, was placed on the National Register as the Hugh D. and Martha S. Seeds Farm. Its 96 acres hold a coursed limestone farmhouse the nomination dates to about 1830, a Pennsylvania bank barn of about 1880, and the lanes, fence rows and field pattern of a nineteenth-century farm.

The name goes back to Robert E. Stewart, an immigrant from County Down, Ireland. J. Simpson Africa's 1883 county history tells how he and his wife Elizabeth looked over the forest they had bought and thought it a second garden of Eden, and how they slept under a large oak tree until he built a cabin of poles. The nomination says his will divided the farm among his three children and that his daughter Martha, who had married Hugh D. Seeds, also an Irish immigrant, in the 1820s, received 110 acres. It says Hugh and Martha built the house shortly after acquiring the property in 1830. Africa records that Hugh Seeds improved a farm in that neighborhood and that his son John owned it by 1883. John Seeds sold Eden Hill to Edward B. and Elizabeth Isett in 1888, and the Isetts held it until 1951.

The house is two and a half stories, five bays wide, with a full Georgian plan, interior end chimneys and a raised basement across the front. It keeps its original floor plan, floors, plaster, woodwork, doors, windows and hardware. A basement kitchen with its cooking fireplace and crane sits beneath the first-floor kitchen and dining room; the nomination says it was most likely the place for canning, rendering and washing. The front door carries a signed Carpenter lock with the seal of Pennsylvania, and a plaster medallion four feet across is set in the first-floor passage. The barn, about 40 by 100 feet, is a four-bay bank barn with a cantilevered forebay, its frame laid out by the square rule on mill-cut timber. Its only alterations are three enlarged ground-floor openings for machinery and the loss of the roof ventilators.

The farm was listed under Criteria A and C, for agriculture and architecture, for the period 1830 to 1948, and it was still a working farm when the nomination was written: three of its five fields were in crops, one fallow and one in pasture, with a tree-lined lane running north from the barn.

The woodwork of the dwelling exhibits an articulated sense of hierarchy within the building, with the most elaborate woodwork found in the room most distant from the kitchen, the southeast parlor. The less formal and public rooms, such as the second-floor chambers, have simpler woodwork.National Register of Historic Places nomination, Hugh D. and Martha South Seeds Farm (reference 99000328), section 7 page 2 (PDF page 4) · character 7,717 of the scanned text

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

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