Johnson-Sherrill Farmhouse
(ca. 1902)
The Johnson-Sherrill Farmhouse represents the only early 20th century family-owned farm property remaining on Davidson’s Shearer Road.
21525 Shearer Rd, Davidson, NC 28036
Situated approximately three miles east of Davidson, the Johnson-Sherrill Farmhouse is the oldest remaining family farm dwelling on Shearer Road. Constructed circa 1902 on what was then Grey Road, the house was originally conceived as a hall-and-parlor house. Expansions in the 1920s to the front and rear of the house added three rooms and a porch to the front of the house and another two rooms and a large L-shaped porch to the back, creating a cross-gabled roof plan. The Johnson family enclosed the back porch in the 1950s both to accommodate the growing family and to modernize the house. Despite those changes, recent suburban sprawl in northern Mecklenburg County has left the Johnson-Sherrill Farmhouse as a rare example of the family-owned farms and farmhouses that once made up most residences across the county in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
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Born in Mecklenburg County in 1849, William Hugh Johnston moved around 1868 to Cabarrus County where he married Mary Jane Andrew in 1872. The couple had nine children, eight of whom lived to adulthood. Hugh and Mary Jane likely moved back to Mecklenburg County soon after their marriage and may have rented a local farm before their January 1881 purchase of 53 acres of land on Grey Road. Like many small family farmers of that era, the Johnson family relied heavily on credit – often some combination of loans secured by property mortgages or crop liens – to sustain their agricultural operations. In December 1886, for example, Hugh secured a crop loan with George Graham McKnight based upon the agricultural products to be grown on the Johnston farm. Hugh’s successful harvest enabled him to repay the loan of $16.97.
In December 1890 Hugh and Mary Jane purchased an adjacent 43 acres with a two-story log house, barn, and corn crib from Hanson Helper, the proprietor of Davidson’s Helper Hotel. The Johnsons purchased another nearby 85 acres four years later. Their oldest child, Charles McAuley Johnson, was born in 1872 and married Cabarrus County native Carrie E. Winecoff in 1902. On land owned by Hugh and Mary Jane, the newlyweds built the house now known as the Johnson-Sherrill Farmhouse in which nine of their own children were born and raised. Charlie and Carrie started their own farm which eventually grew to nearly 170 acres. They did not own the Johnson-Sherrill Farmhouse until early 1914 when Hugh and Mary Jane deeded the property to them.
Crops grown on the Johnson farm included cotton, corn, sorghum for molasses, sweet potatoes, and Irish potatoes. There were numerous fruit trees—apple, peach, pear, and damson plum—as well as grape vines, blackberries, and strawberries. Livestock raised on the farm include dairy cows, pigs, and poultry. Extra farm products not needed by the family were taken into Davidson to sell to boarding houses or to trade with stores for products that the family could not raise themselves, like sugar, coffee, spices, rice, and oatmeal. Outbuildings on the property constructed to support farming operations included a barn, smokehouse, chicken coop, and corn crib. The family farm ended operations in 1958 and the associated outbuildings were dismantled or sold over several years, as was most of the farmland, leaving the Johnson-Sherrill Farmhouse as the only family-owned farm property from the early twentieth century remaining on Shearer Road.