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Brentmoor: The Spilman-Mosby house is a National Register of Historic Places property known as a 'commodious example of the Italianate Villa style
located in the heart of the community of Warrenton, Virginia.' Brentmoor was built in 1859-1861, for Edward M. Spilman, a judge of the Fauquier County Circuit Court. The Spilman family sold the house in the early
1870s to James Keith, who served as president of the Virginia Court of Appeals and John Singleton Mosby's law partner in Warrenton
In 1875 the property was purchased by John S. Mosby, the Confederate ranger who was then Northern Virginia's best known citizen. During the Civil
War, Colonel Mosby and his small band of partisans outwitted and outfought the Union Army to the extent that the region from the Potomac to the Shenandoah Valley became known as "Mosby's Confederacy." His cool,
quiet courage and the almost unvarying success of every enterprise which he personally conducted secured the perfect confidence of his men, noted one of Mosby's Rangers.
Following the death of his wife Pauline and youngest child, Mosby sold the house in 1877 to former Confederate general Eppa Hunton, who then
represented the district in Congress.
In his pattern book, The Architecture of Country Houses (1850), Andrew Jackson Downing illustrated a design for a house resembling Brentmoor which
he described as a "simple, rational, convenient, and economic dwelling for the southern part of the Union."
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