It is a setting of natural beauty. The roughly semicircle valley is from a quarter to three quarters of a mile wide and about a mile and half long. Each house is on a plot of from three-quarters of an acre to an acre. The plot also provides for a barn, a chicken pen, a garden and a lawn with shrubbery. The houses are built chiefly of cinder blocks.
Wood is used in the interior, but little on the exterior.
The dwellings range from three to five rooms and designed in several different basic styles. Their appearance is sturdy, comfortable, serviceable, economical, neat and architecturally well designed. The property is bisected by by U.S. Route 35, which separates a 500-acre tract of rich bottom land along the river from a higher level. Supposedly built in 1840 by Peter Ruffner, the placid brick Red House with its graceful white pillared portico and converted slave quarters may have been standing as early as 1825. The community had its own newspaper, The Melting Pot.