About

Located on a well-traveled Halifax County route that became Highway 58, Bloomsburg (Watkins House) is a finely detailed Greek Revival plantation house, among the first generation of such houses in Halifax County. It was built for merchant-planter Alexander Watkins in the late 1830s and/or 1840s. The compact two-story frame house features marble mantels, superb examples of decorative plaster cornices and ceiling medallions, and a stair with foliated ornament. Watkins operated a Bloomsburg Store on his property, which, family tradition holds, did considerable business with immigrants heading westward. The store no longer stands, but surviving buildings on the property include a mid-19th-century two-room brick kitchen, a brick carriage house, and other historic domestic and agricultural outbuildings.