Squire Cheyney made his living as a farmer, planting corn, barley, oats, flax, and some buckwheat, sowing rye and wheat in September for harvest the following year, and maintaining apple and peach orchards whose fruit was eaten fresh or distilled into whiskey and peach brandy. His food crops included peas, beans, potatoes, and a few turnips. More than a simple farmer, he embraced Enlightenment ideas through Deist beliefs, republican principles, and scientific agriculture, adopting crop rotation, frequent turning of the soil, irrigated pasture, and the use of dung and "plaster of paris" to enrich his grain fields and increase yields. As production grew, he and his son William built a new bank barn about 1804, and he also built a nearby springhouse, first constructed about 1800 and later enlarged. The house built by 1797 for Cheyney, his wife, and his married son William remained near the barn, and after Cheyney's death William enlarged it to the west, while the earlier house where Cheyney raised his nine children disappeared and its exact location became unknown.