Brooklyn-South Square Historic District

Southeast of downtown Salisbury, this residential district combines the large houses of prosperous merchants with the smaller homes of railroad workers, salesmen and clerks. It contains 88 structures, including 85 dwellings, a brick church and two frame stores, plus seven vacant lots. The area first held a cotton factory built in 1830, which later became a Confederate prison for captured Union soldiers and was destroyed in 1865. Development was slow after the war, but between 1882 and 1902 the former prison site filled with the district's most elaborate homes. The oldest dwelling is the Woodson-Overcash House, a log house of about 1840 in the late Federal style. Later buildings range from Greek Revival and Italianate to exuberant late Victorian houses and 1920s bungalows. The neighborhood stayed stable into the 1950s, then declined, and the widening of S. Long Street in the early 1980s removed some buildings and moved two key houses on their lots.