Marshall Historic District

Marshall, originally called Salem, is an unincorporated town in north-central Fauquier County, Virginia, and the second largest in the county. Its historic district follows Main Street and Winchester Road across about 99 acres and includes 217 contributing resources. The town was laid out in 1797 with fifty-two half-acre lots at the junction of two Colonial thoroughfares, and the oldest surviving building is a stone Baptist church from about 1771. The Manassas Gap Railroad, running through town from 1852, spurred further growth, and the district later gained commercial blocks, a 1923 bank designed by Robert E. Mitchell, and many early-twentieth-century houses. Roughly sixty percent of properties are dwellings and their outbuildings, and about thirty percent are commercial. The district also includes Rosstown, a Reconstruction-era African-American neighborhood centered on Salem Baptist Church. Federal, Colonial Revival, Gothic Revival and Craftsman buildings stand alongside vernacular frame houses, and the intact streetscape shows how the community developed from the late eighteenth century to the mid-twentieth century.