- Warrenton's former jail is a singular example of the state's early county penal architecture. The complex includes the 1808 brick jail, converted to the jailer's residence and completed in 1823, and the parallel 1823 stone jail with its high-walled jail-yard. Located next to the courthouse, the jail provides a telling picture of conditions endured by inmates of such county facilities. A jail was built for the county in 1779, but it proved to be inadequate within a number of years. The more substantial brick structure was finished in 1808, and on October 24 the keys to the new jail were turned over to the sheriff. With the completion of the stone jail and its plank-lined cells, the resulting two-part building served the county until 1966. The complex is now maintained by the Fauquier County Historical Society as a county history museum.
- Brentmoor - described as "a simple, rational, convenient, and economic dwelling for the southern part of the Union." The Spilman family sold the property in the 1870s to James Keith, president of the Virginia Court of Appeals. In 1875 John Singleton Mosby, the Confederate ranger, purchased the house. Mosby, with his Partisans outwitted the Union army during the Civil War to the extent that much of northern Virginia was known as "Mosby's Confederacy." Mosby sold the house in 1877 to former Confederate general Eppa Hunton, who was then serving in Congress. Brentmoor was the childhood home of Eppa Hunton III, a founder of the prominent Richmond law firm Hunton and Williams.
- Located in Warrenton, Monterosa-Neptune Lodge was the main residence of William ("Extra Billy") Smith, two-term governor of Virginia (1846-49 and 1864-65). Smith also served in the Senate of Virginia, the U.S. House of Representatives, the Confederate House of Representatives, and as a Major General in the Confederate Army. Early in his career, Smith ran the longest mail route in the nation and was dubbed "Extra Billy" by a U.S. Senator during a Congressional investigation of waste in Federal spending, which focused, in part, on the U.S. Postal Service. Sharing the site with Smith's two-and-a-half story brick house are three outbuildings: an extraordinary Italianate brick stable built in 1847, a brick smokehouse and a two-story dwelling that dates from the late 19th century known as the Office. James K. Maddux, a later owner and a leader in the Warrenton Hunt, remodeled Smith's Italianate dwelling in the Colonial Revival taste, adding the portico. He also changed the name to Neptune Lodge.
|
