Wertland Street Historic District

Wertland Street is a residential row just north of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. Its roughly thirty buildings run between Tenth and Fourteenth Streets and form a cohesive streetscape of Victorian vernacular houses, with a few Federal, Queen Anne, Colonial Revival and Georgian Revival examples. The oldest is the brick Wertenbaker House of about 1830, built by William Wertenbaker, the University's second librarian, for whose family the street is named. Another early survivor, the McKennie-Miller House, was tied to the publisher of the city's first newspaper. Development as a fashionable neighborhood followed the subdivision of four large tracts in the 1880s, and more than fifteen houses stood by 1910. Large lots and standard setbacks on the north side create an orderly arrangement found nowhere else near the University. The district has changed little in about seventy years, and after decades of conversion to student apartments, many houses are being rehabilitated.