History
The law office building was built between 1851 and 1856. It was purchased by lawyer John W. Woodson in 1856. It was a working law office during the time of the surrender of Confederate General Lee to the Union commander General Grant on April 9, 1865. Its furnishing are consistent with law offices of the time period, including an attorney's desk and a portrait of George Washington. John W. Woodson was no longer living at the time when General Lee surrendered to General Grant.
Woodson was born March 8, 1824 and died July 1, 1864. There is no confirmed evidence that it was necessarily always occupied by Woodson. He was an attorney that practiced law in the Old Appomattox Court House. Woodson rented the building from Samuel D. McDearmon starting on January 1, 1854. He used the building to store his law books, legal documents, and a change of clothing. In his book A Place Called Appomattox, historian William Marvel notes that "it was not until the first court day of 1854 that Woodson bought a hasp, hinge, and padlock for the building and a lock for the chest in which he could store a change of clothes."
In 1856 Woodson purchased the beige frame building from McDearmon, who was bankrupt by then. Woodson's village office was on the same corner lot as John Sear's blacksmith shop and had a small footprint. Woodson decided to sell the balance of the lot not used by himself to a John Plunkett, who owned the adjacent village general store known as the Plunkett-Meeks Store. The historian Marvel indicates that when John Woodson died of typhoid in 1864 "the little law office at Clover Hill" was left to his wife.
Read more about this topic: Woodson Law Office
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The only history is a mere question of one’s struggle inside oneself. But that is the joy of it. One need neither discover Americas nor conquer nations, and yet one has as great a work as Columbus or Alexander, to do.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)
“While the Republic has already acquired a history world-wide, America is still unsettled and unexplored. Like the English in New Holland, we live only on the shores of a continent even yet, and hardly know where the rivers come from which float our navy.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness, with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we called it the word of a demon than the Word of God. It is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind.”
—Thomas Paine (1737–1809)