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Virginia: Tidewater and Piedmont » The Peninsulas » Westmoreland County » Westmoreland County Courthouse

Westmoreland County Courthouse

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1900, B. F. Smith Fireproof Construction Company. 1930, alterations. Montross

Montross has been the county seat of Westmoreland County (created 1653) since the 1680s. The courthouse, which sits on a courthouse green with the inevitable Confederate monument (1876, Bevan and Sons), was designed and constructed by Smith, who made a career of designing modest courthouses on the Northern Neck and elsewhere in Virginia. Photographs show this building as originally a twostory, vaguely Italianate residential structure. In 1930, the Jeffersonian–Colonial Revival idiom arrived in town and the courthouse received its present Roman Doric portico. Adjacent is the old jail (1911, Pauly Jail Building Company). Now the headquarters of the Westmoreland Historical Society, it contains exhibits and collections, including a portrait of a toga-clad William Pitt by Charles Willson Peale.

Writing Credits

Author: 
Richard Guy Wilson et al.
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Data

What's Nearby

Stratford Hall
Menokin
Grove Mount
Spring Grove
Rochester House

Citation

Richard Guy Wilson et al., "Westmoreland County Courthouse", [Montross, Virginia], SAH Archipedia, eds. Gabrielle Esperdy and Karen Kingsley, Charlottesville: UVaP, 2012—, http://sah-archipedia.org/buildings/VA-01-PE10.

Print Source

Buildings of Virginia: Tidewater and Piedmont, Richard Guy Wilson and contributors. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002, 334-334.

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