An area of scattered pre-Revolutionary town lots became an important middle-class neighborhood early in the twentieth century, before the creation of Colonial Williamsburg. The Cary Peyton Armistead House (c. 1890, 320 North Henry Street), which long remained an unexpected sight on Duke of Gloucester Street, was moved in 1995 to North Henry, an area that lost numerous turn-of-the-twentieth-century houses in the 1970s and 1980s. The oddest of the demolished houses was the home of Georgia O'Keeffe, built by her father with faux-stone concrete blocks. Town houses (1979–1981, Robert Magoon; 230 North Boundary Street) are consciously contextual, while their greater density and height give them the pleasing quality of a small urban enclave.
Less sympathetic was a plan prepared for Colonial Williamsburg by I. M. Pei in 1980–1981 that called for redeveloping half of Peacock Hill with stark, cubic town houses akin to Pei's 1960s attached residences in Society Hill, Philadelphia. Public opposition derailed the initial project, and subsequent efforts diminished its harshness. The east end of the neighborhood is anchored by the Colonial Revival Matthew Whaley School (1929, Charles M. Robinson; Scotland Street), built to replace a predecessor that stood briefly on Palace Green before reconstruction of the Governor's Palace.