Doub Farm

About this property

The Doub Farm is a historic home and farm near Keedysville, Maryland, United States. The house is a two-story, seven-bay brick structure set on low fieldstone foundations. The property includes a small brick wash house, a row of board-and-batten outbuildings, a large stone end bank barn, a frame corn crib and wagon shed, and lime kiln. The kiln is still in good condition with its circular lining of header bricks still intact. The land containing the Doub Farm was purchased in 1832 by John Doub of Doub's Mill in Beaver Creek, Maryland, and given to his son Samuel Doub. Samuel Doub built the current eight-room brick farmhouse in 1851, as evidenced by painted dates in the attic. Samuel's son Frisby Doub owned and lived in the house until 1915. Both Samuel and Frisby were farmers. Frisby Doub died unmarried without children in 1915 and the property passed to the Kline family who had been his caretaker while elderly. The Klines owned the house until sometime in the 1950s or 1960s, when the property was purchased by the US Steel Corporation to use as a stone quarry. The house was subsequently abandoned and fell into disrepair. Economic conditions prevented the stone quarry from being built. William Doub, a great-great-grandson of John Doub, became aware of the property and in 1976 offered to buy it at a low price from US Steel, who no longer had need for the property. Doub and his family restored the house and used it in the subsequent years as a weekend house. The house was lived in by Doub's son, Peyton Doub, from 1992 to 2007 and his other son, Albert Doub, and family currently live in the house. The Doubs currently manage the property for conservation and agriculture, leasing the fields and pastures to Brian Baker, a local farmer. One key structure on the Doub Farm is a fieldstone lime kiln. The roughly cubical structure measures approximately 15 feet (4.6 m) wide, deep, and tall. It is open on the top. A single narrow doorway provides access to the bottom. It is thought that farmers in the day would shovel fieldstones into the top or through the door and burn them to produce powdered lime to spread in the fields to raise soil pH. The remnants of a road marked by fieldstone berms pass by the bottom of the structure and the door. Another key structure is a small wooden building situated about 100 feet (30 m) southwest of the house. Doub lore states that Frisby Doub built the structure to live in himself as an old man in the early 1900s, while a caregiver family lived in the farmhouse. The shed-like building contains wood panel interior walls and two glass pane windows. The present Doubs have used it as a storage shed. Albert Doub's son, William Calvert Doub, is presently fixing over this shed to use as a sound studio.

Location

Categories

Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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