Buckingham Courthouse, VA

Buckingham Courthouse is the county-seat village of Buckingham County, Virginia, a crossroads on U.S. 60. The settlement was established in 1818 as Maysville, then took the county’s name. When the first courthouse proved too small, commissioner Charles Yancy asked Thomas Jefferson for plans; the 1822 building became Virginia’s first temple-form, porticoed courthouse. It burned in 1869 and was rebuilt in 1873 along similar lines. The Buckingham Court House Historic District, listed in 1969, grew around that courthouse with taverns, dwellings, court offices, and Maysville Presbyterian Church.

Buckingham County High School and Buckingham County Middle School keep the county seat tied to present-day school life, while the courthouse remains the village’s visual center. The U.S. 60 corridor passes through a landscape of farms, woods, and old Piedmont roads. Robert E. Lee and his defeated army passed through after Appomattox, and the village is remembered as the place where he pitched his last tent with the army. Buckingham Courthouse is still a small working county seat, with its nineteenth-century civic buildings close to the road and the history visible from the surrounding streets.