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NPS Form 10 - 900 - a OMB No . 1024 - 0018 United States Department of the Interior National Park Service NATIONAL REGISTER OF HISTORIC PLACES CONTINUATION SHEET Section 8 Page 19 Woodville Historic District Bertie County, North Carolina and the building that replaced it have passed away and the place is bare and lonely . " Yet the virtues of hospitality and kindness " amidst all the changes of fortune, time, and people remain unchanged ; and without which properly speaking there could be no Woodville . " " In the early twentieth century the final phase of village development was the construction of three Craftsman style houses . Thomas W . Griffin preserved the rural village tradition by building his large Colonial Revival style Craftsman house in an oak grove on the Windsor road in 1917 [Thomas W . Griffin House] . Burges Urquhart built his daughter Patty and her husband Clifton Whitehead a Craftsman house [Whitehead -Urquhart House] in 1917 on a small lot close to the road across the main road from his house, the old Lewis Thompson place . In 1927 Dr . Frank Garris built an up -to - date brick Craftsman house [ Garris - Griffin House] next to St . Frances Church . Only two more houses have been erected in the village in the past seventy years--Joe Whitehead ' s brick 1960s ranch house beside Patty and Clifton Whitehead ' s house, and a small house constructed in the fork across from Grace Church in recent years . To Dr . Smallwood , the village seemed physically ruined at the end of the nineteenth century . Yet to contemporary visitors at the end of the twentieth century, the rural village with its remarkably intact collection of federal and antebellum houses and early 20th century Craftsman infill seems a miracle of preservation . The families who live in Woodville today, most direct descendants of the builders, cherish the village ' s history and architecture and have commissioned this nomination in order to protect it from destructive change . Their biggest fear ' s that the main road, the village spine, now designated as Highway 11 and a major north- south truck route, will be widened , thereby destroying the connection between the two sides of the Village . The Plantation Village in the Roanoke River Valley : Woodville' s Social History Context Woodville was one of several plantation neighborhoods in the Roanoke River Valley, which includes Bertie, Halifax; Hertford, Martin and Northampton counties, where interconnected families of planters and slaves formed rural communities . Another such rural village is Como , located between the Meherrin and Chowan rivers near the Virginia border in northern Hertford County. Across the Roanoke River in adjacent Halifax County lies Dawson Crossroads-Enfield Plantations, an antebellum plantation neighborhood containing a number of distinguished plantation houses and & mid- 19th century church . Scotland Neck , a nearby town, was a prosperous area of interconnected plantations like Woodville, but grew into a town when a railroad came through in 1882 . Many such rural communities developed before the Civil War but few survived the breakup of the plantation system after the war and late 19th and 20th century social and economic changes . Bertie County and other counties in the region had vast areas of land covered with malaria-infested swamps, isolated by unpassable rivers . Overland transportation was difficult . Roads were maintained by adjacent property owners such as Lewis Thompson, who operated two toll gates across roads on his land in the 1860s . 11 "Recollections of Woodville . "