Southwest Mountains Rural Historic District

Spread across about 31,975 acres of northeastern Albemarle County, this rural district follows the Southwest Mountains, a small range roughly twenty miles east of the Blue Ridge. Farms, woodlands, pastures and the hamlets of Cismont, Cobham, Keswick, Lindsay and Stony Point make up the landscape, along with several small rural black settlements founded after the Civil War. Early settlers from Tidewater Virginia established tobacco plantations here. Surviving buildings include 109 domestic complexes, eleven churches, sixteen commercial buildings, two railroad depots and sixteen cemeteries. Federal and Greek Revival mansions such as Castle Hill and Edgehill are the best known, yet most contributing buildings follow a vernacular tradition, often I-houses and one-and-a-half-story frame dwellings. Grace Episcopal Church at Cismont, designed by Philadelphia architect William Strickland, is the most stylish nineteenth-century building. Recent houses and farm buildings are largely noncontributing, and the district keeps open views and an agricultural character close to Charlottesville.