Spotsylvania Court House Historic District

Spotsylvania Court House is a small crossroads county seat about ten miles southwest of Fredericksburg, laid out along Route 208, once the main road between Richmond and Fredericksburg. At its center is the brick courthouse, completed in 1840 by Malcolm B. Crawford with a Tuscan-order portico and heavily repaired in 1900-1901 after Civil War damage. Nearby are a late 18th-century jail moved to the square in 1839, the ca. 1800 Spotswood Inn, Christ Church of 1841, Berea Church of 1856, and the ca. 1840 Dabney farmhouse, the only house to survive the fighting. In May 1864 the village was the scene of intense combat between Lee's and Grant's armies, and the land east of town held a main Confederate defense line, now partly a landscaped Confederate cemetery. After the war the town recovered slowly, and a building boom between 1895 and 1905 produced several substantial frame houses. Open farmland on the east preserves the rural setting.