Abingdon Historic District

Abingdon was founded in 1778, incorporated by Virginia along a stretch of the Great Valley Road that the DHR now calls the best-preserved of the linear communities that grew up along that corridor. The brick Federal and antebellum buildings that line its core gave the place, in the register's own words, "an air of permanence and prosperity." Three Virginia governors lived here. A Confederate general grew up here. What endured is the district itself — listed on the National Register in 1970, still legible, still in use.