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Yarbrough house and 5 other houses open for Historic Garden Week

Virginia Living has a look at the history of the Yarbrough house, one of the homes open for next month’s Historic Garden Week:

The house was built by William Yarbrough, who, with Miles Turpin, owned Turpin and Yarbrough Tobacco Co., housed in the nearby Pohlig building. The partners married sisters and built identical houses next door to one another. “Nobody wanted to have the nicer house or the worse house,” says Waite, the director of the Museum of the Confederacy. Work was completed in the summer of 1861; the war had started in April. By the end of the 19th century, the basement had been converted to a doctor’s office and examination rooms, and the mosaic tile floor in that room today dates to that period. In the 1940s and ’50s, the main house and two-story servants’ quarters held 13 apartments. That was before S. Douglas Fleet bought the property in 1967 and began to restore it.