Dinwiddie, VA

Dinwiddie Courthouse is a Dinwiddie County census-designated place and county seat on the Boydton Plank Road, southwest of Petersburg. Its present identity is tied to the courthouse built in 1851, a brick landmark that became Union General Philip Sheridan’s headquarters during the Battle of Dinwiddie Courthouse in 1865. The fighting around the courthouse and nearby Five Forks helped cut the Confederate supply line into Petersburg and pushed the Appomattox Campaign toward its final week.

The community’s daily map is still county-centered: government offices, the courthouse site, and the roads leading toward Interstate 85 and the surrounding farms. County roads and farm lanes meet the larger Petersburg region here. The Five Forks Visitor Center and Park gives the Civil War landscape a place to start, with exhibits and programmed events at the battlefield site. Dinwiddie is not an incorporated town, but it has the feel of a county crossroads—court business, historic roads, and a rural landscape clustered around one of Virginia’s most consequential battlefields.