Dr. William E. Dorris, born in 1832, brought his family to Grapevine in January 1871 after a three-month trip from Starkville, Mississippi. A Civil War captain in J.B. Dunn’s Company, the Mississippi Rangers, Dorris had lost his first wife, Elizabeth Harmon, during the war. He arrived with his second wife, Miranda Ferguson, and children, and purchased a 37-acre farm from A.B. Coble just north of Archibald F. Leonard’s store, which had been established in 1849. The farm stood near Morehead Branch and Coble Branch, where water was abundant. In Grapevine, Dorris belonged to the local Masonic lodge and the Baptist church and served two years as a school board trustee. His son Thomas Benton Dorris carried on the family’s medical work in Grapevine for more than thirty years, serving as a local railroad surgeon and teaching a Red Cross nursing class during World War I. William E. Dorris moved to Roanoke in 1889, and several prominent Grapevine families later owned the farmstead until John Word and Bessie Bushong Brock bought it in 1905. John Word Brock farmed and also worked for ten years as a mail carrier by horse and buggy. The Brocks raised twelve children in the house, and it remained in the family for 85 years. The L-plan farmhouse has a cross-gable roof, a shed-roof porch, and Folk Victorian features including narrow clapboard siding, two-over-two wood windows, turned spindle porch supports, doorways and window surrounds with fluted moldings and medallions, beadboard walls, and tall baseboards. Originally one room deep, the house was expanded with a rear addition in the 1920s.