Oxmoor Farm: Louisville's Oldest Working Farm
Near Louisville, Kentucky
Eight miles outside downtown Louisville, Oxmoor Farm has been in continuous agricultural operation since seventeen eighty-seven, making it the oldest working farm in the Louisville area and one of the oldest in Kentucky.
Alexander Scott Bullitt, a Virginia-born attorney who moved to the Kentucky frontier in seventeen eighty-three, acquired the land, mostly as a wedding gift with a further purchase in seventeen eighty-seven, and built a farmhouse in seventeen ninety-one. He was not a minor figure: Bullitt helped write Kentucky's first constitution in seventeen ninety-two and became the commonwealth's first lieutenant governor. His wife was the niece of Patrick Henry. The farm grew tobacco and hemp over the generations and passed through five generations of the Bullitt family across two centuries.
The main house, built in stages from seventeen ninety-one to the early nineteen hundreds, is a layered record of Kentucky domestic architecture. Archaeological digs at Oxmoor have also uncovered the foundations of slave quarters, adding a harder chapter to the farm's story.
