Cool Spring Farm (Gerrardstown, West Virginia)

Cool Spring Farm, also known as Rockdale Spring Farm and Torytown, was a wilderness estate settled by Colonel Morgan Morgan, long celebrated as the first permanent European settler in what became West Virginia, who was granted 1,000 acres there in 1735 though he is believed to have first settled the land in 1731. His seventh son, Zackquill Morgan, built the house at Cool Spring Farm in 1761 before selling it in 1765 and moving west to found Morgantown in 1781. The property changed hands several times before John McKown Jr. purchased it in 1827, and his son Edmund renamed it Rockdale Spring Farm; in 1994 the original house built by Zackquill Morgan was listed on the National Register of Historic Places.