Mount Vernon Farm: Renting beauty
With 840 acres, eight generations of family owners and 193 years of farming, Mount Vernon Farm rises from the eastern edge of Sperryville, an icon of Rappahannock County history and beauty. At one time, 115 cows were milked twice a day in the 235-foot barn that stretches along the lowland section of the farm, down the hill from the graceful brick farmhouse John Miller Sr. bought in 1827 from Francis Thornton and later expanded. At other times, grass-fed beef cattle, pigs, lambs and chickens were rotated through the pastures, with llamas parading to scare away coyotes and other visiting predators.
Today, the animals are gone. The barn, emptied of cows, caters to brides and grooms, celebrating their vows with family and friends, flanked by tables heaped with offerings from the county’s best cooks. The Miller family no longer sleeps in the farmhouse, which, newly renovated, is The Inn at Mount Vernon Farm, with rooms starting at $250 a night. The grazing pastures are filled with wildflowers, native grasses, and in the summer and early fall, hundreds of butterflies darting across miles of grassy trails where guests walk and enjoy breathtaking views.
It’s a new business, and the product is beauty. Young couples, stressed city-dwellers, environmentalists and fishing enthusiasts flock to the place. Cliff Miller III notes that his immediate ancestors would be reeling if they saw the changes, but he applauds the vision brought by his son, Cliff Miller IV, who arrived in 2010 after trading NASDAQ stocks on the West Coast. His idea was to turn the farm into an eco-refuge and hospitality business. The reengineering includes a nine-hole golf course along Route 211, tied to the Headmaster’s Pub, which anchors the old Schoolhouse structure, which the Miller family also owns. Since the pandemic hit, Headmaster’s put its menu online, and business picked up smartly. Golf activity — benefitting nationally as an apparently safe pastime — has doubled in recent months. Active farming is part of the picture only through the successful adjacent vegetable and flower mainstay, Waterpenny Farm, which leases acreage from Mount Vernon Farm.
“We’ve got the perspective of 200 years,” Cliff Miller III says. “We’ve seen a lot of things that worked well at one time, but stopped working well.” For Miller, the environment evolved from a parallel preoccupation to the central focus. In the late 1990s, he worked to eliminate toxic fertilizers and pesticides, cleaned up the stretch of the Thornton River that traverses the property and used federal subsidies to help cover the necessary green investments. He stopped cutting hay, concluding that it took nutrients away from the land. Six hundred and four acres went into conservation easement.
Mount Vernon has migrated from
being a farm inside a landscape to being a landscape that remembers farming. Visitors share the Millers’ passionate appreciation of the local environment, and the hospitality business so far is working out.
Reflecting on past and present, Cliff Miller III prefers the current incarnation of their Mount Vernon. “I’m not here because my family owned the land,” he says. “I’m here because of the beauty of the place.”