Oxford Historic District (Boundary Increase and Decrease)

Oxford's historic district covers the earliest developed part of the Granville County town. It spreads along College, Main, Gilliam, High and Front streets and neighboring blocks. Of its roughly 246 properties, most are houses, with churches, banks, government buildings and tobacco facilities mixed in. A commercial area radiates from the 1838 Granville County Courthouse, a Greek Revival building of Flemish bond brick that has served continuously as a courthouse. Surviving antebellum houses are timber-framed and weatherboarded, with examples such as the Marcellus Lanier House and the Titus Grandy House. After the Civil War, building recovered in the 1880s, producing Italianate, Queen Anne and Second Empire buildings. Fires in 1886 and 1887 led to rebuilding of the downtown in masonry. Colonial Revival and Neo-Classical houses followed between 1900 and 1930. Little was built from the Depression onward, and later additions are mostly small Colonial Revival and ranch houses. The district was listed because it preserves most of the town's nineteenth-century buildings and its significant early twentieth-century ones.