Oak Ridge is a 200-year-old estate formerly owned by a number of businessmen prominent in Virginia history. John Harmer and Walter King acquired the initial land grant in the colonial period that was later seized during the American Revolution. William Cabell acquired the property and left the tract to his son-in-law Robert Rives, a successful tobacco planter and international merchant, who built the earliest part of the house circa 1802.
Subsequent 19th century owners of the house included William Porcher Miles, a former Confederate congressman from South Carolina.
Wall Street financier and Nelson County native Thomas Fortune Ryan purchased the estate in 1901 and transformed the small, Federal-style dwelling into a 50-room Colonial Revival mansion. Much of Ryan's American Empire furniture remains in the home.
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This Oak Ridge Estate Historical Marker is located on Route 29 about 2 miles from the Entrance to Oak Ridge Estate. The text of the marker reads:
OAK RIDGE ESTATE
"About two miles east is Oak Ridge, a 4,800-acre estate first patented in the 1730s. Robert Rives (1764f 1845), a tobacco planter and international trader, built his house there in 1802. In 1867, William Porcher Miles (1822-1899), a former Confederate congressman, acquired the plantation. Nelson County native and Wall Street financier Thomas Fortune Ryan (1851-1928) purchased Oak Ridge in 1901 and transformed it into a country estate. He remodeled Rives’s Federal farmhouse into a Colonial Revival mansion and built some 80 structures, including schools, a telephone company building, a movie theater, and stables for Ryan’s 200 Thoroughbreds. A Crystal Palace-style greenhouse, a racetrack, and a private railroad station are among 50 surviving structures."