Third Spotsylvania County Courthouse Site

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This site was the location of the third Spotsylvania courthouse. In 1722 the first county court session was held at Germanna (now in Orange County) and a courthouse was built soon after. The court was relocated to Fredericksburg in 1732. In 1778 the General Assembly permitted the county to move the courthouse again to a more central location. The first court session was held here in 1781. The County's courthouse, jail, pillory, stocks, and gallows were built, and a clerk's office and tavern were erected thereafter. A second courthouse, built in 1800, replaced the original. In 1837 it burned to the ground, and a replacement was built nearby at the present site of the Spotsylvania courthouse.

Department of Historic Resources, 2004

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References/Bibliographic Citation:

Thomas J. Chadderdon and Philip Pendleton, Spotsylvania Courthouse Bypass of State Route 208, Corridors A and C, Spotsylvania County, Virginia (Report Prepared for the Virginia Department of Transportation by Cultural Resource Group, April 1995), 10-25; Bradley McDonald and Jerrell Blake Jr., Archaeological Evaluations of Sites 44SP272 and 44SP273, Within the Route 208 Bypass Project, Spotsylvania County Virginia (Report Prepared for the Virginia Department of Transportation by Gray and Pape, Inc., Richmond, 2001), 7-16; James Mansfield, A History of Early Spotsylvania (Berryville, Va.: Virginia Book Co., 1977), 89-97; John O. and Margaret T. Peters, Virginia’s Historic Courthouses (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995), 72-75; E. Lee Shepard, “The Ease and Convenience of the People,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, 87 (July 1979): 279-299; Spotsylvania Courthouse Historic District, Historical Background Statement, National Register of Historic Places Archives File (88-142), DHR