Milton Historic District

Milton is a small Piedmont town in Caswell County, North Carolina, set on a hilly promontory where Country Line Creek meets the Dan River. The whole town is the historic district. It was established by legislative act in 1796 to compete with Virginia for the tobacco trade, and grew into a market and social center for the surrounding plantations, with banks, academies, tobacco factories, a cotton mill and a racetrack. Railroad access came late, and the town lost out to Danville and Durham, shrinking from over 1,200 people before the Civil War. That decline preserved a remarkable set of buildings: the 1818 Union Tavern, Federal houses, the Greek Revival Baptist and Presbyterian churches, the Milton State Bank, seven Victorian row stores from the 1880s, raised cottages and a surviving tobacco factory. The cabinetmaker Tom Day worked in the town from about 1820 to 1859, and his work appears in local interiors and church furnishings.