March 27, 2009
Contact: Randy Jones
Department of Historic Resources
(540) 568-8175
Randy.Jones@dhr.virginia.gov
State Lists 18 New Historic Resources
on the Virginia Landmarks Register
–Listings cover landmarks in the counties of Amherst, Caroline, Fairfax, Fauquier, Floyd, Gloucester, Louisa, Mathews, Nelson, Northumberland, Patrick, Prince William and the cities/town of Danville, Fredericksburg, and Orange–
A Quaker meetinghouse, a Marine Corps general’s quarters, and two country stores that once catered to Chesapeake Bay steamboat passengers are among the 18 new listings recently added to the Virginia Landmarks Register (VLR) by the Department of Historic Resources.
The Woodlawn Quaker Meetinghouse, in Fairfax County, is a one story, wood frame building in the distinctive Quaker Plain Style. The original portion of the building was constructed between 1851-53 on 2.4 acres of a large land tract purchased in 1846 by Delaware Valley Quakers for division into small farms. The Quakers, who were pacifists and opponents of slavery, planned to operate the farms in demonstration of their anti-slavery message. The original Woodlawn Tract and its plantation house were given to Nellie Custis by George Washington less than 50 years before the Quakers purchased the property. Since its completion in 1853, the Meetinghouse has been in continuous use as a place of worship for Quakers.
The Commanding General’s Quarters, in Quantico Marine Corps Base, Prince William County, has served as the base commander’s residence since its construction in 1920. The large, two story Dutch Colonial Revival style dwelling is a contributing resource within the previously register-listed Quantico Marine Base Historic District. The quarters was the one time residence most notably of Major General Smedley D. Butler. The most decorated Marine in U.S. history at the time of his death in 1940, Butler laid the foundations of the modern Marine Corps by implementing a professional military educational system (now Marine Corps University); advancing early Marine Corps aviation, the foundational core of the Corps’ Doctrine of Amphibious Warfare; and introducing the Marine Corps to the public through a high profile public relations campaign.
The Ware Neck Store and Post Office, in Gloucester County, built in 1877, with expansions in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, has been in operation for 132 years. Regionally, the store is one of only a few continuing its historic function and a well preserved example of a quickly disappearing type of rural commercial vernacular building. Its proximity to Hockley Wharf drew steamboat passengers traveling along the eastern seaboard from the time the store was built until the 1930s. Today, its location at the intersection of State Rtes. 692 and 623 on Ware Neck continues to attract retail and social activity, as well as patrons visiting the post office the store has housed, with few interruptions, since 1886.
The B. Williams & Co. Store operated in Mathews County from 1870 until 1935 and the demise of steamboat traffic in Mobjack Bay. An important landmark along the East River at historic Williams Wharf, the store is significant as an early woman owned and operated enterprise. Both Bettie Williams, who ran the millinery shop, and Mary L. Williams, who operated the store during the early 20th century, left their marks as notable pioneers in the business community. Bettie Williams’s highly regarded hats attracted female customers regionwide. The store’s construction soon after the Civil War represented a significant investment in the county’s infrastructure, and as a woman-owned business it helped redefine the roles and importance of women in rebuilding the local economy. The Mathews County Land Conservancy is restoring the building to serve as a community heritage center to showcase the wharf’s historic context and the impacts of water, commerce, and steamboats on the county’s people and lifeways. Remarkably, the building survived hurricanes in 1933 and 2003 that destroyed many other buildings at Williams Wharf.
Among the landmarks approved for listing on the VLR are these from the capital region of the Department of Historic Resources, which covers central and Southside Virginia:
Fairview, built for wealthy entrepreneur Nathan C. Taliaferro in 1867, is one of only two architectural examples of the Italian Villa style known to exist in Amherst County. While the house incorporates defining architectural features such as a central tower, bay windows, overhanging eaves and brackets, and a low pitched roof, its unique interpretation of the Italian Villa style indicates that Fairview was likely designed by an architect rather than simply copied by a builder from a period pattern book.
Located in southern Caroline County, The Grove dates back to circa 1787, when the earliest portion of the house was constructed. Subsequently expanded through several building campaigns, today it represents intact architectural craftsmanship from the 18th and 19th centuries in the upper Tidewater region. The property was likely the scene of activity during the Revolutionary War because of its proximity to Littlepage’s Bridge, spanning the Pamunkey River, and its location along a major colonial stage road (today’s U.S. 301) between Richmond and Williamsburg to the south, and Fredericksburg and other port towns to the north.
Pharsalia, originally a Nelson County plantation, features an 1814 Federal style manor house built for William Massie, best known today for establishing the county’s commercial orchard industry. Massie, a landowner, miller, politician and businessman, kept meticulous records about farming practices and his slaves, providing an invaluable resource for historians. Operating as a working farm today, Pharsalia retains one of the county’s best collections of antebellum plantation buildings.
Shady Grove School, in Louisa County, was completed in 1925 with money from the Julius Rosenwald Fund and the volunteer labor and financial support of the local African American community. The one room school educated black students in grades 1-7 for more than 35 years, during Virginia’s era of segregation. It remains a well preserved example of a rural Rosenwald school, one of only two built in the county.
In addition to the Woodlawn Meetinghouse and the Commanding General’s Quarters at the Quantico base, recently listed resources from the department’s Northern Virginia region, covering the Shenandoah Valley as well, include the following:
Bristersburg Historic District, in southeastern Fauquier County, dates back to the early 19th century when the village first arose at the intersection of the main north-south route through the county, Carolina Road (Rte. 616), and the primary east-west route between Fredericksburg and Warrenton, Elk Run Road (Rte. 806). Today Bristersburg features a collection of mid-19th - to early 20th century buildings, including three stores (one with a warehouse), a school, a blacksmith shop, and a handful of dwellings. Throughout the 19th century and much of the 20th, the village offered a concentration of needed services – from commercial, to educational, to religious – for rural families in the area. During the Civil War, Bristerburg’s Zoar Baptist Church (1852) was used as a stable and a hospital.
The Broad Run/Little Georgetown Rural Historic District, located in northeastern Fauquier County, and a small portion of Prince William County, dates to circa 1759 when the first significant wave of European settlement occurred soon after a young George Washington surveyed the area. The district’s development is associated with establishment of Kinloch plantation in 1813, and the Manassas Gap Railroad in 1852-53, and the Civil War, during which it experienced battles and skirmishes. Today the 9,500 acre district represents a remarkably intact agricultural landscape, evoking 19th and early 20th century rural Virginia. The district also features the previously register-listed landmarks Beverley (Chapman’s) Mill, Heflin Store, and the Thoroughfare Gap Battlefield.
Chestnut Hill, in the town of Orange, was built circa 1860 as a fashionable Italianate/Greek Revival dwelling for Alexander Daley, an Irish immigrant, and successful local politician and businessman, who founded a tanyard, leather dealership, and shoe factory. In 1883, the great nephew of President James Madison and town postmaster R. C. Macon purchased the home with his wife, Emma. In 2003, in order to keep it from being demolished for a road project, the house was relocated to a land parcel cut from the original property.
The ruins of Idlewild, a once impressive Gothic Revival house constructed in 1859, stand on a prominent hilltop in Fredericksburg. The house, which burned in 2003, leaving intact mostly the walls and an English basement, was a noted landmark during the Chancellorsville campaign in the Civil War, and it served as Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee’s headquarters, May 4-5, 1863, at the conclusion of that campaign. The property also includes three brick outbuildings that likely were built about when the house was erected.
Sumerduck Historic District, in Fauquier County, encompasses a Piedmont village that arose during the late 19th and early 20th centuries as an agricultural crossroads community. Its well-preserved collection of historic buildings includes two churches, a school, a general store and a small number of houses.
Resources recently listed in the Roanoke region, covering southwest Virginia, consist of the following:
The Barnard Farm, dating to circa 1829, is located in Patrick County’s Kibler Valley, where the Dan River emerges from the Blue Ridge. The property features a wide array of historic buildings including the original 1.5 story log farmhouse that was enlarged and remodeled in the Greek Revival style in the mid 19th century, and again in the Craftsman style in the 1930s. Other buildings include log and frame tenant houses, the small Kibler Post Office, a cinder block general store from the 1950s, and various agricultural structures. The Barnard Cemetery, also on the property, contains gravemarkers ranging from fieldstones to a locally crafted soapstone headstone and professionally carved marble and granite monuments.
The boundary increase to the Danville Tobacco Warehouse and Residential Historic District adds two commercial buildings (209 and 215 Main Street) to the previously listed historic district. The two story brick buildings were constructed circa 1875 and remodeled in the Georgian Revival / Craftsman style circa 1920. In their early history they were owned by Picket Scott, a successful African American businessman who established himself in Danville during Reconstruction. Later the buildings were owned by Jacob Silverman, a member of Danville’s Jewish mercantile community. The two buildings are associated with the economic development of the district and are similar architecturally to other commercial buildings on adjacent streets in the district.
The three buildings of Danville’s Schoolfield School Complex, built between 1913 and 1940, represent the heart of the formerly thriving Schoolfield Village textile manufacturing community. The school offered education to the children of mill workers who poured into the area for jobs, mostly arriving from the mountains of southwest Virginia and North Carolina. Schoolfield Village was planned and constructed by the Riverside & Dan River Cotton Mill Company to provide its workers a community with the amenities of housing, stores, churches, fire protection, public works, and educational opportunities. The school complex is notable for its distinctive architecture, particularly the Prairie Style 1913 building, designed by regionally known architect Charles G. Pettit, Jr.
The West Fork Furnace property, in Floyd County, features a well preserved iron ore furnace dating to 1851-53, when it was constructed and operational. While most of the other structures of the property lack individual distinction, collectively they represent the unique system engineered during the mid 19th century for efficiently processing and manufacturing of metal ore. The property has the potential to yield archaeological information that will further scholarship on the application of scientific principles to the development of an industrial facility in the mid 19th-century American backcountry.
In addition to the two general stores from Gloucester and Mathews counties, the following landmark from the Tidewater region was also approved for listing on the state register:
Bluff Point Graded School #3, in southeastern Northumberland County, with a period of significance of 1913-1959, is a rare surviving rural school, originally housing two rooms. It offered public education to white children in primary and upper level grades from 1913 to 1933 under the direction of the local community, which was isolated from the rest of the county by its location along the Chesapeake Bay. After the school closed, the building served as The Community House, a function it continues today. The school is representative of an important stage in the development of public education in Virginia, from an era when members of rural communities worked together to build and maintain their schools for education and community activities.
These new Virginia Landmark Register listings, approved by the two boards of the Department of Historic Resources during a joint quarterly meeting March 19, will be forwarded by Virginia’s State Historic Preservation Officer the director of the Department of Historic Resources, Kathleen S. Kilpatrick to the National Park Service for listing in the National Register of Historic Places.
Listing a property on the state or national register places no restrictions on what a property owner may choose to do with his or her property.
Designating a property to the state or national register does provide an owner the opportunity to pursue state and federal tax credit rehabilitation improvements to his or her property. Tax credit rehabilitations must comply with federal standards, which are administered in Virginia by the Department of Historic Resources. An owner of a register-listed landmark may also donate a preservation easement on the property to the Commonwealth of Virginia in return for state tax credits.
Virginia is a national leader among the 50 states in registering historic sites and districts. The state is also a national leader for the number of tax credit rehabilitation projects proposed and completed each year. Together the register and tax credit rehabilitation programs have played a significant role in promoting the preservation of the Commonwealth’s historic sites and in spurring economic revitalization in many Virginia towns and communities.
