Upper Town Creek Rural Historic District

Four contiguous farms on about 1,755 acres at the eastern edge of Wilson County contain plantation houses and farm complexes built from about 1820 through the 1860s. The William Davis Petway House, a two-and-a-half-story Federal-style I-house, dates to around 1820, and the Colonel David Williams House, a square two-story Greek Revival house, was built between 1845 and 1860. Hawthorne, a double-pile frame house of about 1855, follows a plan not found elsewhere in the county. The Jesse Norris House is a board-and-batten Gothic Revival dwelling. Tobacco barns, packhouses and tenant houses from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries survive beside them. The district is considered important because it preserves both the antebellum plantation system and the tenant farming that followed the Civil War, with an unusually full set of early residential and farm buildings in one place.