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NPS FORM 10 -900 -A (8 -86) United States Department of the Interior National Park Service National Register of Historic Places Continuation Sheet Section number 8 Page 10 Section 8: Statement of Significance Narrative Statement of Significance: Captain John S. Pope Farm Orange County, North Carolina OMB ApprovIl lo. 1024 -0018 The Captain John S. Pope Farm meets National Register Criterion A for agriculture for its role in the history of tobacco farming in Orange County. The farm is a well - preserved example of a mid -sized tobacco farm, typical of those that existed throughout northern Orange County in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The farm has remained in continuous operation by the Pope family since at least 1870 and retains the 1874 acreage as well as its historic arrangement of fields and forests. The property also meets National Register Criterion C for architecture. The two- story, triple -A- roofed I -house is one of the earliest extant and most intact examples of this rural house form, which was found throughout Orange County in the mid- to late nineteenth century. The property retains one of the largest collections of agricultural outbuildings in Orange County with buildings dating from c.1870 -1874 through 2008, illustrating typical rural North Carolina building practices of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The house and its collection of twenty contributing outbuildings illustrate the property's continued use as a tobacco farm from the 1870s through the early 1960s. The locally significant Captain John S. Pope Farm remains one of the best - preserved rural complexes in northern Orange County with a period of significance extending from c.1870 to 1963, during which the complex achieved its current appearance. The house was constructed c.1870 -1874 and the majority of contributing buildings were erected from c.1870 -1880, 1900 -1930, and 1945 -1960. While the property remained in continuous operation as a tobacco farm into the twenty -first century, there is no basis for a claim of exceptional significance for the later use of the farm and for those buildings less than fifty years old. History of the Captain John S. Pope Farm The 73.05 -acre Captain John S. Pope Farm is a portion of the larger John Alphonse McDade (1807- 1869) farm in northwest Orange County. McDade acquired the land in 1806 and lived nearby, but it is not known if he farmed the 73 -acre tract. McDade had five children before his wife Nancy M. Woods McDade's death in 1845. At the time of her death their youngest daughter, Josephine, was only two years old and may have left the farm to live with other family. By 1850, the federal census lists McDade as a farmer in the "Northwest Division" of Orange County with the oldest four of the couple's five children still living on the farm: John M. (1831- 1893), William Woods (1833 - 1862), Mary Jane (1835 - 1917), and Henry Lee (1838 - 1913).