Heathsville Historic District

Heathsville, the county seat of Northumberland County, Virginia, grew along the highway that runs the length of the Northern Neck. The historic district takes in most of the small town and the farmland edges where early plantation houses stand. At its center is the brick courthouse of 1851, remodeled in 1900-01 with Queen Anne and Colonial Revival features, set in a square around a Confederate monument. Nearby are an 1844 jail and Rice Hotel, a large tavern that grew in stages from the late eighteenth century and has a twelve-bay front with a two-tier wooden piazza. The district also has churches, including a Carpenter Gothic Episcopal church of 1881, along with cemeteries and plantation houses such as Springfield. Twenty-seven antebellum buildings make up the largest concentration of pre-1860 structures in the Northern Neck. Few modern intrusions disturb the traditional courthouse-village setting, which reflects architecture, government and commerce from about 1700 to 1941.