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NPS Form 10 - 900 - a OMB No . 1029 - 0018 ( 8 - 86 ) United States Department of the Interior National Park Service NATIONAL REGISTER OF HISTORIC PLACES CONTINUATION SHEET Section 8 Page 14 Woodville Historic District Bertie County, North Carolina Section 8 : Statement of Significance Woodville Historic District in western Bertie County near the Roanoke River, is a rare survival of a plantation village-- a cluster of six plantation houses built facing each other along the old Roxobel-Windsor Road (now State Highway 11 ) . The plantations of the Pugh, Thompson, Urquhart, and other families were located elsewhere, along the fertile river and creek bottomlands, but the houses were built at Woodville on high ground to enjoy healthy living conditions and social interaction . During the first half of the nineteenth century village families also constructed an academy, two churches, a post office, stores and a tavern . Although only the houses and a church stand today, the village remains recognizable as one of Bertie County ' s oldest and most intact communities . The Pughs, Thompsons, Smallwoods, Urquharts and others who created this village have been highly distinguished in the agricultural and social history and political life of Bertie County . (A number of village sons and daughters relocated to the Deep South during the antebellum era, where they established cotton and sugar cane plantations in Louisiana and Mississippi and built grand plantation villas . ) The oldest house in the village, an ornate Federal tripartite form house built in 1801 , was the residence of Dr . Whitmel Hill Pugh, physician, planter and political leader, who named it Woodville . His brother William Alston Pugh built . a large Federal style house across the road about 1815 that contains some of the most distinguished Federal woodwork and plasterwork in the Roanoke Valley. About 1840 Lewis Thompson, planter and political leader, constructed a Greek Revival style house . In 1854 Lewis Thompson built Grace Episcopal Church, an Episcopal chapel of board- and-batten Gothic Revival style at the village crossroads . About 1860 William Alston Pugh ' s son Joseph James Pugh built a large Greek Revival style house with Italianate details . Lewis Thompson' s son Thomas W. Thompson built a Greek Revival-Italianate style house about 1863 . The very intact groupings of outbuildings around the residences, including slave quarters, meat houses, dairies, various storage buildings and even an ice house, contribute to the well -preserved village ' s embodiment of the rural life of the gentry in he nineteenth and g g ry t t early twentieth centuries , ignificant buildings of the compact village, set in wooded groves, are nearly invisible to the The architecturally- s traveler along the main road , now busy North Carolina 11 . Yet the Woodville Historic District is eligible for listing in the National Register of Historic Places for its significance under Criterion A as one of the most intact plantation villages surviving in the Roanoke River Valley and under Criterion C for its distinguished collection of nineteenth and twentieth century buildings embodying the material culture of the planter class in Bertie County, Historical Background Dr . Charles Smallwood ( 1828 - 1899) , who grew up in Woodville and served as the area doctor throughout his life, wrote his childhood recollections of Woodville in 1894 . His vivid descriptions of the families, their houses, their marriages, children, and deaths provide a fascinating window on Woodville irrthe antebellum era :