Oxford Historic District (Additional Documentation)

Oxford's historic district surrounds the 1838 Granville County Courthouse on Main Street and spreads north and south along College, Main, Hillsboro and Williamsboro streets. Its 246 properties are mostly residential, with churches, banks, tobacco processing buildings and a commercial core. The area is the town's first developed section, and it contains most of Oxford's surviving nineteenth-century buildings. Its Greek Revival houses date to the quarter century before the Civil War, when the county's plantation economy was at its height. The Bright Leaf tobacco trade drove the later building boom of the 1880s and early 1890s, producing Queen Anne, Italianate, Second Empire and Colonial Revival houses. The Bryant-Kingsbury House, built around 1825, is probably the town's oldest surviving building. The district is listed because it records Oxford's growth from a county seat to a tobacco market town, and because its architecture ranges widely across the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.