Avenel

Avenel is a two-story brick house with a hipped roof, built around 1836 for William M. Burwell on a rise above the town then called Liberty, now part of the City of Bedford. The Flemish-bond house stands on a raised basement and combines Federal and Greek Revival features, including a Doric cornice, recessed wood panels between the windows, and a recessed two-level loggia. Its plan has two perpendicular entrance halls, each with a staircase, which may have accommodated an extended family. Interior woodwork, ornamental plaster ceilings and mantels draw on Asher Benjamin's pattern book. A ruined brick kitchen, a smokehouse, a hen house and a barn survive nearby. The property is significant for showing how skilled local craftsmen interpreted high-style ideas for planter families in mid-nineteenth-century Piedmont Virginia, and for its unusually intact original fabric. Burwell was a legislator who secured the charter for the Virginia and Tennessee Railroad. Much of the plantation land was later sold and developed as city neighborhoods.