Woolen Mills Village Historic District

Woolen Mills Village is a former company town at the eastern end of East Market Street in Charlottesville, where Moore's Creek meets the Rivanna River. Milling began on the site in 1829, and the Charlottesville Woolen Mills was incorporated in 1868, later becoming a major producer of cloth for uniforms. The company built housing for its workers, including three brick Gothic Revival duplexes from the 1840s and the Pireus Row houses of the 1870s. A large frame house on the hill served the mill superintendent and later president, Henry Clay Marchant. In the 1880s nearby farmland was subdivided, and mill employees bought lots and built their own houses, mostly vernacular designs with Victorian or Colonial Revival porch details. Riverview Cemetery was founded in the 1890s. The mills closed in 1962, and the village was annexed by the city in 1968. Today it is mainly residential, and the surviving brick mill buildings recall its industrial past.