In 1749 the Virginia House of Burgesses divided Goochland County to establish Cumberland County. William A. Howard, an associate of Thomas Jefferson's master builder, Dabney Cosby, built the present Cumberland County courthouse between 1818 and 1821. The unusual temple-form, Jeffersonian-Classical building has a finely executed Tuscan portico on the long side instead of the end and stands only one story high. Howard also designed the diminutive brick clerk's office to the east, completed in 1821. Today, the two buildings stand near the center of the village with a jail dating to about 1823, a nineteenth-century well, and a 1901 Civil War monument.