Otterburn - Credit: Wikimedia Commons
Otterburn - Credit: Wikimedia Commons
Otterburn is a Palladian-influenced Greek Revival plantation house near Bedford in Bedford County, Virginia. The hilltop house was first built in 1828 for Benjamin A. McDonald (1797-1871) and his wife, the former Sally Camm of Lynchburg, and overlooks the Little Otter Creek watershed. Benjamin A. McDonald, a prominent local Whig educated in Scotland, was appointed a local justice of the peace in 1832 and won election as Bedford County's first presiding justice in 1852. Re-elected twice, he served in the county's highest office from 1852 through 1864. His associated plantation in 1825 was , and included a gristmill, sawmill and dependent structures, mostly operated by enslaved labor (more than 20 slaves in the 1820s and 1830s, more than 30 slaves in 1840). At its largest, the associated plantation encompassed about acres, but in modern times includes fewer than acres. Fire gutted the original house in 1841, and it was reconstructed in the Greek Revival style by 1843, with an unusual transverse hall plan, facade that makes the -story structure look only stories, and the addition of a loggia, cross-gable roof with a wrought iron balustrade and Greek Revival detailing. The surviving wash house also dates to this mid-19th-century era. During the Civil War, Union soldiers reportedly confiscated flour barrels from the house, and damaged interior stairwell railings when rolling them out. Read more on Wikipedia
Source: en.wikipedia.org