Old Prince Edward County Clerk's Office

Worsham was a small courthouse village founded in 1745, but now lacks its courthouse since the court moved north to Farmville in 1874. This substantial brick, one-story Clerk's Office, however, survives. Its two front doors are elevated under an eccentrically stretched classical porch and lead to two elevated rooms for office and records. The building is well dressed with a full entablature and pediments on both ends, intended to match the now-demolished courthouse of 1832. The office was extended when the building was used as a boys' preparatory school, Prince Edward Academy, established here in 1874. The Debtor's Prison (1787), the village's earliest remnant, is a tiny one-room log structure that Richard Bigg built of carefully squared and tightly fitted logs for walls, floor, and ceiling. The practice of jailing debtors, usually separated from criminals, was abandoned in the early nineteenth century.