The History of Farmer's Delight Plantation in Loudoun County Virginia

Farmer's Delight is a brick house built around 1791 near Middleburg, in Loudoun County, Virginia. It still stands on farmland. The Virginia Department of Historic Resources calls it "one of the county's oldest brick dwellings."

The property has had four main owners: Joseph Lane, the Leith family, the Frost family and the diplomat George C. McGhee. It is now held by a nonprofit foundation. This blog shares its name and nothing else. We do not own the estate and we do not speak for it.

The sources give the land a long chain of owners before any house was built on it. Journey Through Hallowed Ground traces it to a 1661 land grant from King Charles II. That grant covered the country between the Rappahannock and Potomac rivers.

The Clio says Robert Carter acquired the surrounding Goose Creek Tract in 1727. It says Dr. Charles Green obtained 1,000 acres of that land in 1741. The state register adds that George Washington and Lord Fairfax served as trustees of an 18th-century tract in this line of ownership.

The sources disagree about acreage. Wikipedia puts Lane's purchase at 320 acres. Journey Through Hallowed Ground describes a 500-acre working farm today. Two other sources describe grounds of about 90 acres. These figures may be measuring different parcels, and the sources do not settle which is which. A deed search would.

Colonel Joseph Flavius Lane lived from 1756 to 1803. He served in the General Assembly and was a lieutenant colonel during the Whiskey Rebellion in 1793. According to Wikipedia, his house measured about 23 by 43 feet. It had two stories and five bays, meaning five openings across the front. Inside was a center hall with a room on each side and a steep, narrow stair. Lane also built a small stone cottage that already stood on the site into the new house. Its foundation stones survive.

The brickwork is laid in Flemish bond, a pattern in which each row alternates a brick's long side with its short end. Over the windows are gauged jack arches, which are flat arches made of bricks cut to fit. Sources describe the style as Tidewater Georgian, Federal, or a mix of the two.

None of the sources used for this article say. They record owners, buildings and gardens. They do not name the people who did the farm labor between 1791 and the Civil War, and they do not say how many there were.

This silence does not tell us the farm had no enslaved people. It means the question has not been answered in these accounts. Primary records from the Lane and Leith years, such as Lane's estate papers from after his death in 1803, are the place to look. This article has not examined them.

The Lane family kept the property until 1856. The Leith family owned it from 1856 to 1919, and during that time it was also called Gregg Farm.

A horseman named Henry Frost, Jr. bought it in 1919 and renamed it Frostfields. Sources give his middle initial as J. or W. The Frosts added wings to the house and built racing and hunting stables.

George Crews McGhee lived from 1912 to 2005. He was a Texas-born Rhodes Scholar, and he bought the estate in 1948 with his wife, Cecilia DeGolyer McGhee. He served as ambassador to Turkey and to West Germany, and he held posts under presidents from Truman to Johnson. He hosted Lyndon B. Johnson at the estate.

The gardens are the part a grower will care about most. Landscape architects Boris Timchenko and Meade Palmer designed them. They cover about 20 acres and include a boxwood maze, a magnolia grove, and an arboretum of 162 trees representing 122 species.

The property was added to the Virginia Landmarks Register on April 17, 1973, and to the National Register of Historic Places on June 2, 1973. It carries a state protective easement. The McGhee Foundation, which received its IRS ruling in 2003, is now its steward.

The estate is used for public events. The Land Trust of Virginia listed its Sunset in the Field fundraiser there for October 11, 2026, at 36276 Mountville Road, Middleburg. Visit Middleburg promotes a recurring plein air painting event on the grounds.