Bloomsbury Farm

Bloomsbury Farm was an 18th-century timbered framed house, one of the oldest privately owned residences in Spotsylvania County, Virginia. The house was originally built by the Robinson family sometime between 1785 and 1790. It was architecturally significant for its eighteenth-century construction methods and decorative elements. The surrounding location is also significant as the site of the last engagement between Confederate and Union forces in the Battle of Spotsylvania Courthouse on May 19, 1864. Bloomsbury Farm was added to the National Register of Historic Places in May 2000. The house was demolished in December 2014 by Leonard Atkins, a nearby resident who purchased the property in November 2014 ostensibly to restore it. Atkins cited the building's supposedly poor condition and public safety as the reasons for the abrupt demolition, and he planned to replace the historic house with a new one commensurate in style and value with the modern houses in the surrounding development in which he lives. The farm was removed from the National Register in 2017.
The house at Bloomsbury Farm began as a late 18th century, single-pile , two-story house. In the early 1800s, the layout of the house was changed when a central hallway was created. Bloomsbury is of braced frame construction. The framing used for the house was hewn and pit-sawn beams and rafters. Wrought nails, hand-hammered from iron, were used as fasteners in the original building. The interior of the walls were filled with brick nogging. The house has two exterior-end chimneys of brick laid in Flemish-bond pattern. The foundation is fieldstone and uses dragon beams to support the east end of the first floor summer beam.

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