Uzzell-Best Farm is significant as a well-preserved farmstead dating from the mid-nineteenth century in continuous agricultural use to the present day, owned by the same family. The farm buildings including barns, a kitchen, a smokehouse, and a tobacco pack house, illustrate the evolution of changing agricultural practices of over a century in eastern Wayne County, North Carolina, namely the transition from an economy based on the work of enslaved laborers to the sharecropping system, a shift to tobacco production, and ultimately the consolidation of property under a family farming corporation.
The Uzzell-Best farmhouse is significant as an example of the Folk Victorian style of architecture, featuring trim and ornament drawn from the Queen Anne, Italianate, and Gothic Revival styles applied to a house form with restrained scale, massing, and texture. The house reflects local vernacular building trends with distinctive fireplace mantels and a regionally popular nineteenth-century form, the “breezeway kitchen.”
Hanbury Preservation Consulting wrote the National Register nomination and the farm was listed in September 2023.