William Barksdale, owner of a tobacco factory, built one of the town's most refined houses, a richly decorated three-part frame building with a two-story central block and one-story flanking wings. One of the first tripartite plans in town, it has shell-carved niches flanking the drawing room's paneled chimneypiece, neoclassical moldings, and decorative ironwork for the front stairs. In 1800, Barksdale sold the house to merchant and high-roller William Haxall, who raised the wings to two stories and gave the house its current configuration (and encumbered the property with heavy debts from his gambling on horse racing). In the 1880s the house was divided into apartments for various descendants, but a twentieth-century restoration has returned it to its former splendor.