The Brown Grove Rural Historic District is an excellent example of a rural African American landscape that grew from Virginia’s plantation economy to a Reconstruction Era self-sufficient agricultural community and transitioned during the twentieth century into a middle-class residential neighborhood. This community has maintained tight family connections with reliance on supporting institutions like Brown Grove Baptist Church, the anchor of spiritual life in the historic district area. During the late nineteenth to early twentieth century, formerly enslaved African Americans purchased parcels from the large estates of white landowners in this portion of Hanover County. The community that emerged at the turn of the twentieth century featured a landscape of small subsistence farms connected by a network of paths and tracks to each other, the wider world, and community hubs such as the centrally located Baptist church, the schoolhouse, and a few general stores. The district is notable for the large number of small family cemeteries. The district is significant in part for its association with Caroline Dobson Morris, a midwife nicknamed “the mother of Brown Grove.” The construction of Interstate 95 in the 1950s and 1960s through the Brown Grove community caused demolition of several dwellings and loss of farmsteads and resulted in the two halves of today’s discontiguous district. The highway project falls within the district’s period of significance and the pattern of locating large public infrastructure projects in minority communities is a traditional if discriminatory development pattern.
The district was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in April 2023. The nomination was prepared by Hanbury Preservation Consulting and the William and Mary Center for Archaeological Research.