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Master plan of Frying Pan Park showing ideal arrangement of the model farm, exhibition halls, and equestrian facilities. Fairfax County Park Authority, 1974.

In 1965 the Park Authority bought the Floyd Kidwell farm next to the original school tract which consisted of some 40 acres with several farm buildings. The Kidwells had owned the property since 1934; their farm being the very sort of family operation that proponents of the model farm project hoped to show.[296] Money was still scarce for the farm's development, however; therefore, most of the land was earmarked for equestrian use—only a third was set aside for the model farm. Additional acreage, purchased in 1974 (and again in 1977) and the acquisition of the Kidwell farm buildings made more extensive and authentic cultivation possible; the farm was finally established in 1974.[297] Because the land was pieced together from numerous sources, the farm is presented as a representation of small-scale farming in the county, not an exact recreation of the Kidwell farm. In its patchwork composition, it echoes the trends of the county for few farms stayed intact during the fluctuations of the 1920s and 1930s, but were added to or diminished depending on the cash flow.

Model farms originated in Scandinavia, where entire villages were preserved during the late 19th century in order to save the folkways which were rapidly eroding in the wake of industrial development. In this country the earliest efforts at such preservation took place in the 1940s. They had only scanty growth until a thoughtful article by Marion Clawson was published in Agricultural History in April, 1965. This piece alerted preservationists and historians to the possibility of such projects and influenced the establishment of nearly one hundred such "open-air museums," among them the National Park Service's Turkey Run Farm near McLean, Virginia.[298]

Frying Pan Farm differs from most of these restorations in its portrayal of 20th century farming, a time and way of working that many older people can still recall. Rather than show the slow and hand-operated life of a pre-mechanization farmer, Frying Pan Farm shows the farm in a dynamic transition. In the words of the supervisory board, it recreates a time that "had not given up the idea of home-cured meats, home vegetable gardens, home orchards, apple butter, sorghum molasses ... but it was considering the use of farm tractors, milking machines, and tractor-drawn equipment...."[299] The farm thus portrays crop and pasturage rotation, and some mechanized activity with a 1940 tractor, yet the farmer harvests his grain with a horse-drawn binder. Most of the equipment is from the pre-World War II period and animals have been chosen or bred to conform to those available in the 1930s. A volunteer program, established in 1976, aids the farmer in tending the large vegetable garden, and the livestock which consists of poultry, hogs, rabbits, goats, sheep, dairy cows and draft horses. Frying Pan Farm cultivates corn, wheat and hay crops and includes a late-19th century farmstead, a frame barn, shed, henhouse, and rabbit hutch and a machine and separator shed. An orchard and additional crop acreage and fencing are planned. Far from being a zoo or a site of isolated craft or mechanical demonstrations, the farm is operated daily as if agriculture were its only aim. Crops are grown not merely for show but to feed the animal stock and manure is used to fertilize garden and grain fields. The visitor who stops by the farm does not see a prearranged interpretive display, but chances on the farmer performing that day's necessary work: milking, haying, repairing fences, or plowing.[300]

This early threshing machine is one of the pieces of period equipment owned by Frying Pan Farm. Photo, Virginiana Collection, Fairfax County Public Library.