Appalachian Figures Series – The Story of Robert C. Burkholder of Lee, Virginia
The old houses of Lynchburg still carry the hand of Robert C. Burkholder. They stand on hillsides, along old streets, and near places where postwar Virginia tried to rebuild itself after the Civil War. Some of them are plain at first glance. Others catch the eye with brick walls, brackets, tall windows, and porches shaped by the habits of another century. His own home on Cabell Street is one of the strangest and most thoughtful of them, a Y-shaped brick house made for light, air, and movement.
Burkholder was not a household name in Appalachian history, but his life touched several important stories. He was reportedly born in Lee County, Virginia, in 1826. He became a carpenter, builder, architect, Confederate artilleryman, manufacturer, and public official. His career carried him from Southwest Virginia into Lynchburg, then across the Piedmont and into other parts of the state. By the 1870s and 1880s, he had become one of the most important local architects in Lynchburg.
His story is also a reminder that Appalachian history does not stop at county lines. A man born near the western edge of Virginia could become part of the architectural story of Lynchburg, the political story of Reconstruction-era Campbell County, and the preservation story of some of Virginia’s best-known historic buildings.
A Lee County Birth That Still Needs a Careful Record
Robert Calhoun Burkholder is usually given as born on June 3, 1826. Several later references place his birth in Lee County, Virginia. That date came long before Virginia began statewide birth registration in 1853, so there is no ordinary Virginia birth certificate to settle the matter.
That is why the strongest record to check is his 1914 Virginia death certificate. Death certificates are not perfect, since the information was reported by someone after the person’s death, but they often give the best available clue for an early nineteenth-century birthplace. In Burkholder’s case, the death certificate should be checked against cemetery records, census records, family records, and architectural studies. Some architectural references give a different birthplace, including Botetourt County, so the Lee County connection should be handled with care unless the death certificate or another original record confirms it.
Even with that caution, Burkholder belongs in the larger history of Southwest Virginia people whose lives carried them far beyond their place of origin. If Lee County was his birthplace, he left the mountains as a young man and entered the building trades at a time when Virginia towns were changing quickly.
Learning the Builder’s Trade
By 1850, Burkholder was in Lynchburg and working as a carpenter. The census placed him there as a young tradesman, part of a world where carpenters, joiners, builders, and mill owners shaped the growing town as much as merchants and lawyers did.
He appears to have taken his craft seriously. Later preservation research notes that he and J. H. Walker advertised a carpentry business in Lynchburg in 1851. Their advertisement said they had gone to New York and other northern cities to gain knowledge in the trade. That detail matters. Burkholder was not simply learning from local habit. He was looking at broader architectural practice and bringing those lessons back to Virginia.
In time, he advertised as a general architect. He offered plans for houses and other improvements, and by the late 1850s he was involved in the building supply trade. He operated or participated in planing and molding works, sash and blind manufacturing, and related businesses. In a nineteenth-century building economy, this meant he was not only drawing designs. He was tied to the production of doors, blinds, moldings, window sash, and the finish materials that gave buildings their character.
That combination of designer, builder, and manufacturer helps explain his later success. Burkholder understood buildings from the drawing board to the job site. He knew what could be made, how it could be fitted together, and how a house or church could be shaped through both structure and detail.
War and a Changed Virginia
The Civil War interrupted Burkholder’s work, as it did nearly every part of life in Virginia. He served in the Confederate army with the Lynchburg Light Artillery. His wartime service was not the longest part of his life, but it placed him within the upheaval that remade Virginia society, politics, labor, and property.
A complete profile of Burkholder should also include the harder parts of the record. Secondary summaries indicate that he enslaved people before the war, and the 1860 federal slave schedule should be checked directly. This is not a side issue. In antebellum Virginia, building trades, household wealth, urban growth, and slavery were often tied together. Any full account of Burkholder’s life has to place his architectural success in that world, then follow how his career continued after emancipation.
After the war, Lynchburg was a city trying to recover and redefine itself. Buildings still had to be repaired, built, and enlarged. Churches grew. Neighborhoods changed. Men who had been soldiers returned to civilian work. Burkholder resumed business and, in time, became one of the leading architectural figures of the postwar city.
A Delegate from Campbell County
Burkholder’s public life reached beyond architecture. He represented Campbell County in the Virginia House of Delegates from 1869 to 1873. Those years came just after Congressional Reconstruction, when Virginia politics were unsettled and the state was trying to restore civil government while wrestling with the consequences of war, emancipation, debt, and political realignment.
His committee assignments fit a man of his trade. During his first term, he served on Manufactures and Mechanic Arts and on Officers and Offices at the Capitol. In the 1871 to 1873 session, he chaired the Committee on Public Property and again served on Manufactures and Mechanic Arts. These were not accidental places for a builder and architect. They connected directly to public buildings, mechanical labor, production, and the physical needs of government.
Burkholder was not one of Virginia’s best-remembered political figures. He did not become a governor, senator, or national statesman. Still, his service shows how Reconstruction-era government drew in local professionals whose authority came from business, property, war service, and community standing.
The House on Cabell Street
The building most closely tied to Burkholder’s own life is the Robert C. Burkholder House at 203 Cabell Street in Lynchburg. It was built in the 1870s in Daniel’s Hill, one of the city’s prominent historic neighborhoods. The house is known for its unusual Y-shaped plan. Each major room could receive light and air from multiple directions, a useful feature in hot Virginia summers before modern cooling.
The house is both practical and expressive. It shows Burkholder thinking like a craftsman and an architect at the same time. The details are often described as Italianate, but the plan itself is more original than ordinary pattern-book building. It was a house made by a man who knew conventions and was willing to bend them.
Daniel’s Hill itself adds context. The neighborhood rose on a ridge near downtown Lynchburg, bordered by the James River and Blackwater Creek. In the nineteenth century, it became a place of substantial houses, churches, worker housing, and urban change. Burkholder’s house stood among that mixture of wealth, labor, ambition, and decline. Preservation records later singled it out as one of the most interesting buildings in the district.
The house also entered legal history. The Virginia Supreme Court case Burkholder v. Ludlam involved property and improvements connected to the Cabell Street house. The case is useful not only for legal historians, but also for anyone studying how land, family transfers, debt, and construction could become tangled in nineteenth-century Virginia.
Court Street Baptist Church
Burkholder’s most historically important public building may be Court Street Baptist Church in Lynchburg. Begun in 1879 and completed in 1880, the church became one of the great landmarks of Black religious life in the city. The congregation had been organized in 1843 after Black Baptists separated from First Baptist Church. By the time the new building was finished, it was the largest church edifice in Lynchburg, and its spire dominated the downtown skyline.
The building was designed by Burkholder, a White architect, but the construction was carried out exclusively by Black laborers. Black artisans were also largely responsible for the decoration and furnishings of the auditorium. This makes the church a powerful example of African American enterprise in the decades after slavery. The congregation faced opposition from nearby White residents who objected to a Black church being built in a fashionable part of town. Yet the church was completed, praised, and preserved as one of Lynchburg’s most important African American landmarks.
For Burkholder, Court Street Baptist Church shows the reach of his practice. For the congregation, the building meant far more than an architectural commission. It was a statement of faith, community, skill, and endurance.
Rockwood and a Wider Reputation
Burkholder’s work did not stay inside Lynchburg. In Pulaski County, he designed Rockwood, a large and carefully detailed house built in 1874 and 1875 for Francis Bell Sr. The Rockwood National Register nomination is one of the richest sources for Burkholder’s career. It cites a notice from the Lynchburg Virginian in November 1874 stating that Burkholder had returned from Pulaski County after several months away, where he had constructed for Bell what the newspaper called probably the finest dwelling in Southwestern Virginia. The reported cost was thirty thousand dollars, a major sum for the period.
Rockwood connects Burkholder to the broader economy of postwar Virginia. Bell was involved in the cattle trade, including the export of live cattle to Great Britain. The house reflected that wealth through design, craftsmanship, decorative plaster, ironwork, and finish details. A mechanics’ lien recorded in Lynchburg and Pulaski County in 1875 also preserves valuable information about the construction, including payments for plans, travel, walnut flooring, mantels, closets, and work performed under contract.
This kind of record is especially useful because it shows architecture as labor and business, not just style. Plans had a price. Travel had a price. Wood, mantels, flooring, and delays had a price. Burkholder’s architecture was built through contracts, crews, mills, transportation, and legal documents.
Bedford Alum Springs and Later Work
Burkholder also worked on projects connected to resorts and public accommodations. A later architectural report on Bedford Alum Springs notes that he was paid for architectural services in the late 1870s and that the American Architect and Building News reported his involvement in plans for a new dining room, kitchen, and lodging rooms above at Bedford Alum Springs in 1881.
The resort world of the nineteenth century depended on comfort, ventilation, verandas, dining rooms, lodging rooms, and a sense of healthful escape. Burkholder’s background in practical building made him well suited to such work. He understood houses, churches, hotels, mills, and manufactured building parts. His career crossed the line between the elegant and the useful.
A Style Shaped by Craft
Architectural historians usually place Burkholder in the Italianate and Second Empire traditions, though some of his work also carries Greek Revival and other nineteenth-century influences. What stands out most is not a single style, but the way he adapted style to place and purpose.
His own house was inventive. Court Street Baptist Church was dignified and public. Rockwood was large, expensive, and carefully finished. Other Lynchburg houses connected to him show the taste of a city growing through tobacco, railroads, commerce, industry, and postwar rebuilding.
Richard H. Ryan’s University of Virginia thesis on Burkholder remains one of the most important studies of his career. Preservation sources also rely on the work of architectural historian S. Allen Chambers Jr., whose history of Lynchburg architecture placed Burkholder among the leading local architects of the postwar period. These studies matter because much of Burkholder’s life has to be reconstructed from buildings, directories, advertisements, court records, census records, and scattered newspaper notices.
Death and Legacy
Robert C. Burkholder died in 1914 and was buried in Spring Hill Cemetery in Lynchburg. Some sources give December 11 as the date of death, while others give December 12. The death certificate should be checked for the final word on the date, place, parents, and reported birthplace.
By then, the world that produced him had changed. The Virginia of his youth, with slavery, turnpikes, handcraft, and small-town building trades, had given way to a twentieth-century state of railroads, electric lights, industrial growth, and new architectural tastes. Yet many of his buildings remained.
Burkholder’s legacy is not only in the structures themselves. It is in the path his life followed. He was reportedly born in Lee County, trained as a craftsman, became a Lynchburg architect, served in war, held public office, and left behind buildings now studied by preservationists. His story belongs to Appalachian history because it shows how people from the mountain counties helped shape places beyond the mountains. It also belongs to Virginia history because it shows how architecture, labor, politics, slavery, Reconstruction, and memory can meet in the life of one man.
A full account of Robert C. Burkholder begins with a question of birthplace, but it does not end there. It continues in brick houses, court records, church walls, old newspaper notices, and the surviving skyline of Lynchburg. His name may not be widely remembered, but his work still stands.
Sources & Further Reading
Virginia Department of Health. “Virginia, Death Certificates, 1912–1987: Robert Calhoun Burkholder.” FamilySearch. Accessed June 11, 2026. https://www.familysearch.org/en/search/collection/2377565
United States Census Bureau. “United States, Census, 1850.” FamilySearch. Accessed June 11, 2026. https://www.familysearch.org/en/search/collection/1401638
United States Census Bureau. “United States, Census, 1860.” FamilySearch. Accessed June 11, 2026. https://www.familysearch.org/en/search/collection/1473181
United States Census Bureau. “United States, Census (Slave Schedule), 1860.” FamilySearch. Accessed June 11, 2026. https://www.familysearch.org/en/search/collection/3161105
United States Census Bureau. “United States, Census, 1870.” FamilySearch. Accessed June 11, 2026. https://www.familysearch.org/en/search/collection/1438024
Virginia House of Delegates Clerk’s Office. “Robert C. Burkholder.” DOME: A History of the Virginia House of Delegates and Its Members. Accessed June 11, 2026. https://history.house.virginia.gov/members/6573
Virginia House of Delegates Clerk’s Office. “1869–1871 Session Information.” DOME: A History of the Virginia House of Delegates and Its Members. Accessed June 11, 2026. https://history.house.virginia.gov/sessions/156
Virginia House of Delegates Clerk’s Office. “1871–1873 Session Information.” DOME: A History of the Virginia House of Delegates and Its Members. Accessed June 11, 2026. https://history.house.virginia.gov/sessions/157
Virginia General Assembly, House of Delegates. Journal of the House of Delegates of the Commonwealth of Virginia. Richmond: Commonwealth of Virginia, 1871. https://books.google.com/books/about/Journal_of_the_House_of_Delegates_of_the.html?id=GT0SAAAAYAAJ
Leonard, Cynthia Miller, comp. The General Assembly of Virginia, July 30, 1619–January 11, 1978: A Bicentennial Register of Members. Richmond: Virginia State Library, 1978. https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000769364
Virginia Department of Historic Resources. “Court Street Baptist Church.” Virginia Landmarks Register and National Register of Historic Places. Accessed June 11, 2026. https://www.dhr.virginia.gov/historic-registers/118-0156/
Chambers, S. Allen Jr. “Court Street Baptist Church.” National Register of Historic Places Inventory/Nomination Form. Richmond: Virginia Department of Historic Resources, 1981. http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/hhh.va1127
Pezzoni, J. Daniel. “Rockwood.” National Register of Historic Places Registration Form. Richmond: Virginia Department of Historic Resources, 2005. https://www.dhr.virginia.gov/VLR_to_transfer/PDFNoms/077-0045_Rockwood_2005_Final_Nomination.pdf
Virginia Historic Landmarks Commission. “Daniel’s Hill Historic District.” National Register of Historic Places Inventory/Nomination Form. Richmond: Virginia Department of Historic Resources, 1982. https://www.dhr.virginia.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/118-0198_Daniels_Hill_HD_1982_Final_Nomination.pdf
Virginia Department of Historic Resources. “Thomas Claiborne Creasy House.” National Register of Historic Places Registration Form. Richmond: Virginia Department of Historic Resources, 2014. https://www.dhr.virginia.gov/VLR_to_transfer/PDFNoms/227-5003_CreasyHouse_2014_NRHP_Final.pdf
Virginia Department of Historic Resources. “Fairview.” National Register of Historic Places Registration Form. Richmond: Virginia Department of Historic Resources, 2009. https://www.dhr.virginia.gov/VLR_to_transfer/PDFNoms/005-0006_Fairview_2009_NR_FINAL.pdf
Virginia Department of Historic Resources. “Court House Hill/Downtown Historic District.” National Register of Historic Places Registration Form. Richmond: Virginia Department of Historic Resources, 2000. https://www.dhr.virginia.gov/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/118-5163_CourtHouseHillHD_2000_NRfinal_nomination.pdf
Lee, Anne Carter. “Robert C. Burkholder House.” SAH Archipedia. Society of Architectural Historians. Accessed June 11, 2026. https://sah-archipedia.org/buildings/VA-02-BD54
Ryan, Richard H. Robert C. Burkholder of Lynchburg, Virginia: A Typical Victorian Architect. Master’s thesis, University of Virginia, 1981. https://books.google.com/books/about/Robert_C_Burkholder_of_Lynchburg_Virgini.html?id=RIiANwAACAAJ
Chambers, S. Allen Jr. Lynchburg: An Architectural History. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1981. https://www.mullenbooks.com/pages/books/123776/s-allen-chambers-jr/lynchburg-an-architectural-history
Wells, John E., and Robert E. Dalton. The Virginia Architects, 1835–1955: A Biographical Dictionary. Richmond: New South Architectural Press, 1997. https://archive.org/details/bwb_T2-ERT-433
Pezzoni, J. Daniel. Bedford Alum Springs Hotel Report. Lynchburg, VA: Liberty University Department of History, 2021. https://www.liberty.edu/arts-sciences/history/wp-content/uploads/sites/68/Bedford-Alum-Springs-Hotel-Report.pdf
The American Architect and Building News. “Building Intelligence.” January 29, 1881. https://books.google.com/books/about/The_American_Architect_and_Building_News.html?id=0bAzAQAAIAAJ
Pollock, Edward, ed. Sketch Book of Lynchburg, Va.: Its People and Its Trade. Lynchburg, VA, 1887. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ea/Sketch_book_of_Lynchburg%2C_Va._Its_people_and_its_trade_.._%28IA_sketchbookoflync00poll%29.pdf
Lynchburg Virginian. “Returned.” November 20, 1874. Quoted in J. Daniel Pezzoni, “Rockwood,” National Register of Historic Places Registration Form, 2005. https://www.dhr.virginia.gov/VLR_to_transfer/PDFNoms/077-0045_Rockwood_2005_Final_Nomination.pdf
Court Street Baptist Church. “Humble Beginnings.” Accessed June 11, 2026. https://courtstreetbaptistchurch.com/humble-beginnings/
Find a Grave. “Robert Calhoun Burkholder, 1826–1914.” Memorial ID 18757029. Accessed June 11, 2026. https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/18757029
Author Note: Robert C. Burkholder’s reported Lee County birth is worth preserving, but it should be handled carefully because surviving sources do not all agree on his birthplace. This article follows the strongest records first and treats his buildings, public service, and church work as the surest evidence of his life.