Hill Mansion

501 South East Street

— South East Street Historic District —

Photographed By Devry Becker Jones (CC0), April 3, 2021

1. 501 South East Street Marker

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The Hill Mansion (501 South East Street), a four-bay Italianate-style house with a bracketed cornice, segmental windows and other Tuscan features, is an imposing Culpeper landmark built in 1857 and listed individually in the National Register of Historic Places. The distinctive elevated Italianate porch extends across the East Street front, and includes segmental arches, wooden shields, eave brackets, and wrought-iron railings. A very fashionable and stylish house of its period, its exterior brick walls were stuccoed and scored to resemble ashlar. An outside brick kitchen (no longer extant) was situated near the English basement dining room, a typical feature of mid-nineteenth-century residences of the Virginia Piedmont. The house occupies a town lot, and is set back from the street to provide a generous lawn. The three first floor rooms have marble mantels and floor to ceiling windows. The house, which remained in the ownership of Hill descendents into the late twentieth century, retains most of its interior appointments including a broad curving stair. Major Thomas Hill had the house built for his son Major Edward Baptist Hill, brother of the better-known General Ambrose Powell Hill, who lived nearby in an even grander Italianate-style

Photographed By Devry Becker Jones (CC0), April 3, 2021

2. 501 South East Street

house on Culpeper’s Main Street. The East Street Hill Mansion, as it is often called was used as a hospital, and sometimes also referred to locally as the “Meeting Place of Generals. During General Robert E. Lee’s visit to his wounded son Rooney who was recuperating from injuries received at the Battle of Brandy Station, Mrs. Edward B. (Mildred) Hill entertained Lee at a party with the Generals J.E.B. Stuart, P.C. T. Beauregard, and her brother-in-law A. P. Hill among the other guests. Stuart is said to have been at the house frequently during the winters of 1862 and 1863. At least one Confederate soldier who died from his injuries while being treated at the hospital was buried temporarily in the Hill Mansion garden. The U. S. government, using eminent domain, established the existing National Cemetery on a portion of the Hill land expanding beyond and formalizing the burials that occurred there during the Civil War. Even so, the property remains a quite large town lot and retains a rural character and feeling.