Woodville Historic District

Woodville is a village of fourteen principal buildings in western Bertie County, North Carolina, built mainly between 1801 and 1927 on both sides of the old Roxobel-Windsor Road. Most houses stand back from the road in groves of hardwoods, with outbuildings extending to the sides and rear. The oldest house, a Federal tripartite dwelling built in 1801 for John Pugh Hill, was later the home of physician and planter Whitmel Hill Pugh, who named it Woodville. Planter families including the Pughs and Thompsons built their residences on this high ground to escape the malarial pocosins and to be near schools and commerce, while their plantations lay in the river bottomlands. The village has a church dating from 1845, a Gothic Revival chapel from 1854, and a group of antebellum houses. It is significant as one of the most intact plantation villages surviving in the Roanoke River Valley, and for its collection of nineteenth and early twentieth-century buildings representing the planter class in the county.