The Madison-Barbour Rural Historic District is located in central Piedmont Virginia about twenty miles east of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Straddling the Virginia horse belt, the district encompasses about fifty square miles in western Orange County. The district is one of the best-preserved and most scenic rural landscapes in the upper Piedmont. The gently rolling, semi mountainous terrain is broken intermittently by broad stretches of level ground. A web of roadways, many of which date to the colonial period, offer the traveler frequent and expansive views of unspoiled countryside. The district is distinguished today, as it has been since the eighteenth century, by unusually large landholdings. The wealth generated by these large tracts of exceptionally productive, well-drained soil encouraged landowning families to erect some of the finest country houses in the state. The district's name refers to two of the area's most prominent landholding families: the Madisons and the Barbours. Both families produced political leaders of national stature, and both erected architecturally important plantation complexes--Montpelier and Barboursville--that still stand. In all, the district contains some 886 contributing architectural resources, including over three hundred dwellings running the gamut of national styles and vernacular forms and reflecting a broad socio-economic spectrum. Best known for its large estates with imposing Federal and Georgian-style mansions, the district also contains exemplary groupings of agricultural buildings and locally significant religious, commercial, and transportation-related structures. Too, the Madison-Barbour Historic District retains a high degree of integrity as a historic landscape, illustrating the long-term interaction of human and natural forces. Its buildings, and three railroad depots. The district's ill contributing "structures" are related mainly to agricultural production, but also include elements such as bridges, culverts, garden walls and gateways. Other contributing resources include one object and twenty cemeteries. Noncontributing architectural elements include 319 buildings (mostly post-1940 houses and farm buildings), 137 structures (mostly recent outbuildings and farm structures), and twenty-two objects (mostly mobile homes). In addition, the district contains important archaeological resources. Archaeological investigations have identified 205 contributing sites within the nominated boundaries of the Madison-Barbour Rural Historic District. Mostly located within the 3500 acres subjected to systematic surveys, these sites span the entire period of human occupation in the region, from before 8000 BC to the twentieth century AD. The sample documented through archaeological survey is representative of a wide range of both prehistoric and historic site types in Virginia's northern Piedmont and its diverse environmental settings. Archaeological investigations have shown these sites to be in a good state of preservation, a situation enhanced by the rural nature of the nominated acreage. - NRHP, 19 November 1990