Atlantic Coast Line Railroad Commercial and Industrial Historic District

Southwest of Petersburg's historic core, a cluster of factories, warehouses and small shops grew up beside the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad, whose tracks and spurs cut diagonally through the area. The oldest building is the Cameron Building, built about 1879 for a tobacco company after earlier factories burned. In 1913 the Export Leaf Tobacco Company began adding brick processing buildings nearby, and both firms later became part of Brown & Williamson. The H. P. Harrison Company built a three-story Italian Renaissance Revival factory and warehouse in 1912. Auto-related shops from the 1940s and early 1950s, along with the Gibson Drive-in, fill the edges of the district. A wrought-and-cast-iron fence surrounds much of the former tobacco property. The buildings show how industrial design changed, from narrow sash-window factories to larger structures with steel windows and, later, nearly blank walls. Together they reflect the tobacco and grocery industries that anchored Petersburg's economy.