Whitesell, Jesse Farm (Boundary Increase)

The story

Written by AI from this property's National Register nomination and the record above; every sentence is checked against its sources before it appears here. Corrections: privacy@treealive.com

Whitesell, Jesse Farm (Boundary Increase) is a 255-acre historic farm district on KY 116 west of Purchase Parkway, near Fulton in Obion County. Its main house was built about 1870 to 1873 in the Italian Villa style.

Why it's listed

It was listed under criterion A, with local significance in agriculture. The nomination gives its period of significance as 1854 to 1956, when Jesse Whitesell began buying farmland.

Physical character

The farmhouse is brick, built in a T-shaped plan with a three-story tower and wraparound porches on brick piers. A white-painted brick ranch house with Colonial Revival touches was added in 1955, and a frame tenant house with two rooms, end gables and a large chimney replaced one lost to fire in the 1960s. Outbuildings include a notched log smokehouse, a brick smokehouse finished to resemble fieldstone, and a seed shed from the late 1920s once used for Hunter Whitesell's seed business.

Historical context

Jesse began the farm in 1854 by buying 142 acres in Kentucky's Fulton County, and by 1862 had added a last 13 acres. He started the farm's first cotton gin in 1872, and his obituary appeared in 1892. By 1910 Mose and Jane Jones, born Davis, and her children may have rented and run the farm. Hunter had not yet moved into the homeplace by 1920, though he and his wife Bell settled there later that decade. Whitesell Farms Inc. formed in 1972.