Between 1924 and 1926 the Penobscot County town of Lincoln, Maine experienced a rapid and extensive growth of industrial fur farming. During these years Dr. Frank F. Gordon a dentist in Bangor, and his brother Dr. Fred E. Gordon, an optometrist in Lincoln, developed numerous fox farms - or ranches as they were called ? in Lincoln, and to a lesser extent in other areas of Maine and New Hampshire. Each ranch contained as many as 200 fox in outdoor pens surrounded by a wooden palisade, a house for the caretaker, and an observation tower. Other facilities, including skinning and scalding rooms and food storage buildings, were shared among groups of ranches. The Gordons went bankrupt in 1926 and all their ranches were sold. Over the next decade and a half there continued to be at least two and as many as fifteen fox farming operations or companies in Lincoln. The subject of this nomination, the Gordon Fox Ranch on West Broadway (South Lincoln Road), is a rare surviving example of a fox ranch which contains a ranch house, observation tower, small office building, and the earthworks which supported the palisade. The property was listed in the National Register in the area of agriculture, for its direct association with the short-lived fox farming industry. The distinct form and massing of the observation tower and ranch house also give the property significance, as they exhibit the specific characteristics of a type of company-built architecture. Finally, the resources may yield additional information about ranching activities, specifically the spatial organization and patterning of the animal pens and enclosures that give the property significance. The period of significance begins in 1924 and ends in 1940, the year the property was most likely sold out of farming.