Powhatan Rural Historic District

Powhatan Rural Historic District is a working farm and estate of about 1092 acres in King George County, Virginia, on a ridge above the Rappahannock River valley. It combines three historic farm clusters: the brick Greek Revival house called Powhatan, built around 1832 for planter Edward Thornton Tayloe; the Federal-style frame house at Mount Ida, dated to about 1835 by a nail analysis; and the Hudson farm, developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries after Tayloe family land was sold. Tayloe was among the county's largest producers of hay, butter and livestock before the Civil War, when Union troops quartered at the property and its fortunes declined. Raymond R. Guest began reassembling the Tayloe lands in 1955, renovating the main house and adding stables and a race track. No antebellum farm structures or slave dwellings survive, but the houses, family cemetery, and open agricultural setting preserve the historic layout of the plantation landscape.