Old Barns for Sale in Delaware

Northern Delaware - New Castle County and the Brandywine Valley bordering Chester County Pennsylvania - has the most significant historic agricultural landscape in the state. The du Pont family's long stewardship of landscape in this corridor, combined with the preservation work of organizations like the Brandywine Conservancy across the state line, has kept more intact historic farm character here than development pressure would otherwise have allowed.

Farm properties in the Brandywine Valley carry the premium of proximity to Wilmington and Philadelphia, which means prices are elevated above what purely agricultural economics would produce. But unlike the immediate Philadelphia suburb ring in Chester County PA, Delaware's New Castle County still has properties that clear the horizon line of suburban encroachment in ways that provide functional agricultural contexts for historic barn structures.

Kent County and Sussex County in the southern half of the state have a different agricultural character: flat coastal plain farming, poultry production (the Delmarva Peninsula is the most concentrated broiler chicken production region in the country), and the more modest farm buildings of flat-land grain and vegetable agriculture. Sussex County borders the Maryland Eastern Shore and shares its agricultural character - flat, fertile, agricultural, without the topographic drama that produces the most distinctive barn forms elsewhere.

Southern Delaware properties are typically more affordable than the Brandywine Valley corridor, and the historic farm buildings here, while less architecturally dramatic, are genuine. The Delaware State Historic Preservation Office maintains records of significant farm properties and is the right contact for buyers looking at specific historic structures.

Delaware was one of the original thirteen colonies, settled from the early 1600s, and some of the agricultural land in the state has been continuously farmed since that era. The farm buildings that survive from the 18th and early 19th century in the Delaware piedmont represent some of the oldest working agricultural architecture on the continent.

The Quaker and Pennsylvania German influence from the adjacent Pennsylvania border counties shows in the farm building traditions of western Delaware: bank barn forms appear, stone construction is common in the Brandywine Valley where limestone and schist are available, and the overall character of the older agricultural landscape reflects the serious farming culture of the colonial and Federal periods.