Henderson Hall: A Plantation Frozen in Time

Near Williamstown, West Virginia, Henderson Hall stands as one of the most intact antebellum plantation complexes in the upper South. The Italianate mansion was completed in eighteen fifty-nine and still holds a remarkable collection of period furnishings, a remarkable survival for a building that saw the Civil War and nearly a century of afterward. The property traces to Alexander Henderson, a Scottish immigrant whose family held this land along the Ohio River generation after generation.

The grounds also contain pre-Columbian Adena burial mounds, the family cemetery, a carriage barn used as a schoolhouse, corn cribs, and two earlier homes all on the same land. The whole complex was added to the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen eighty-six and today operates as a museum open to the public.