Mathews County Courthouse Square

Mathews County Courthouse Square is the civic center of a rural Virginia county that was set off from Gloucester County in 1790. The roughly one-acre green holds six buildings and several monuments. The oldest is the T-shaped, Flemish-bond brick courthouse, built in 1792-95 by Richard Billups, who also built several large houses nearby. His trademark was a three-part semicircular window with intersecting tracery, set in a cross-gable. Close by are the 1859 clerk's office, built by William H. Brown, and a former jail that now serves as the sheriff's office. A mid-nineteenth-century old jail has been altered into a furnace room. A 1930 library and a 1950s county office building were added later, along with monuments including a Confederate memorial and a 1928 Fort Cricket Hill marker. The courthouse is the only one the county has had, and the square shows how local government grew over more than a century and a half.