Recalling Danville's former role as a world textile-manufacturing powerhouse, Dan River Mill No. 8 was built by Dan River, Inc. in 1920 and operated from 1921 through to the 1990s. Encompassing 18-plus acres on the south bank of the Dan River, the mi... Read More

The main residence of the Dan River plantation of Dan's Hill is one of the several stately brick dwellings erected during the early 19th century, the region's period of ascendancy. The formal five-bay structure was built ca. 1833 for Robert Wilson, a... Read More

Home to the elegant Millionaires Row and the Old West End, the Danville Historic District showcases some of the finest Victorian and Edwardian architecture in Virginia and North Carolina. Many of the old mansions built by the tobacco and textile baro... Read More

Danville's historical society is working to share a comprehensive history of the city, after decades of selective preservation.... Read More

The turn-of-the-century architectural movement termed the American Renaissance endowed cities and towns with grand classical works that lend a strong sense of continuity and place. A relatively late but nonetheless effective expression of this moveme... Read More

The Danville Museum of Fine Arts and History is housed in the Sutherlin Mansion which was the former home of Major William T. Sutherlin, wartime quartermaster for Danville and among its most prominent citizens. For one week, 3-10 April 1865, Major an... Read More

Established in December 1866, the Danville National Cemetery first was used to inter Union prisoners of war who died in the tobacco warehouses and factories that were converted into Danville's Confederate prisons. Most of the dead, 1,170 known, and 1... Read More

The railroad station is among the most threatened of American architectural forms. Perhaps less than ten percent of our extant stations are used for their original function. Many that are not abandoned now serve new uses. Temporarily closed to passen... Read More

Occupying some forty blocks of the heart of the city, the Danville Tobacco Warehouse and Residential District formed the economic wellspring of 19th-century Danville. The various warehouses, factories, shops, and dwellings display the city's mill-tow... Read More

In 1766 John Dix established his ferry approximately three miles south of here on the Dan River. During the American Revolution, in February 1781, the ferry was a strategic site in Gen. Nathanael Greene's "race to the Dan," the pursuit of Greene to t... Read More

This twenty-five-acre urban historic district encompasses the core of southern Virginia's leading tobacco and textile manufacturing city. The district has been the commercial and administrative heart of Danville from the 1790s to the present. Spread ... Read More

Holbrook-Ross Street Historic District is significant for its evolution into a distinctive African American neighborhood in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Architecturally, the 116 buildings in the 200-400 block of Holbrook and Ross streets, ... Read More

An elegant component of Downtown Danville's central business district, this Neo-Adamesque high-rise building was built in 1927 to house the city's leading hostelry. The structure is representative of the wave of finely appointed, thoroughly modern ho... Read More

The Langhorne House is the birthplace of Lady Nancy Langhorne Astor, the first woman to sit in the British Parliament. Lady Astor's homecoming visit to Danville in 1922 was a celebrated event in the city's history. The original section of the two-sto... Read More

Recalling the somber, Medieval buildings of Northern Italy, Danville's Main Street Methodist Episcopal Church South, the "Mother Church of Methodism," is among the most ambitious works of Victorian architecture in a city famed for such works. The Rom... Read More

Danville's Mechanicsville Historic District emerged in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as a distinctive, ethnically mixed neighborhood of tradesmen, educators, skilled workers, and laborers associated with Danville's textile and tobacco indust... Read More

The North Danville Historic District is primarily residential with a small commercial district along North Main Street, the central corridor. The city of Danville developed south of the Dan River during the late 18th century as a tobacco marketing, m... Read More

Our History Matters works to bring awareness, acknowledgement, and appreciation for African American life and historic preservation in order to build more inclusive communities, formed with the mission to showcase the omitted histories of the people ... Read More

A symbol of Danville's 19th-century affluence, the Penn-Wyatt House is the city's most exuberant example of Victorian residential architecture. The original owner, James Gabriel Penn, came to Danville in 1868 and established himself as a tobacco comm... Read More

The roughly 512-acre Schoolfield Historic District encompasses the remaining buildings associated with the mill village of Schoolfield, an independent company town the textile giant Dan River Mills developed southwest of downtown Danville beginning i... Read More

In the late 19th century, Danville added the textile manufacturing element to its already robust tobacco-driven economy. As workers from the mountains of Virginia and North Carolina moved to Danville, the Riverside & Dan River Cotton Mill Company too... Read More

The Schoolfield Welfare Building, located in Danville and completed in 1917, was constructed by Dan River, Inc., and built in support of the textile mill company's progressive welfare policies that aimed to better the lives of its mostly female workf... Read More

Stratford College (1930-1974) and its constituent preparatory school, Stratford Hall (1930-1964), maintained the tradition of liberal arts education for women begun in 1854 at the Danville Female College. Main hall was built in 1883 to house the Danv... Read More

Connected today as Danville's premier boutique hotel, The Bee is made up of two beautiful historic buildings in the City's River District. These two buildings at 117 South Union and 123 South Union have a historic relationship to each other as the tw... Read More