Circa-1741 Caroline County Home of the Hoomes Family
200 South Main Street, Bowling Green, VA 22427
Research updated May 2026
Age
All Ages
Cost
Free
Private residence — exterior viewing only from the public street.
Access
Limited Access
Public sidewalk in Bowling Green
Equipment
Photos OK
Est. 1741 · National Register of Historic Places (1969) · Virginia Landmarks Register · Hoomes Family Estate · Revolutionary-Era Lodging Site
Old Mansion stands at 200 South Main Street in Bowling Green, the seat of Caroline County, Virginia. Construction is documented at around 1741, making the building one of the oldest surviving residences in central Virginia.
The house was built by the Hoomes family and originally bore the name The Bowling Green. When Major John Hoomes donated land for the new Caroline County courthouse, he gave permission for the surrounding county seat to take the name of his estate. The town that grew up around the courthouse adopted Bowling Green as its name; the family residence became known thereafter as Old Mansion.
The original front section of the building is a one-and-a-half-story brick structure with a jerkin-head roof and dormers, characteristic of mid-eighteenth-century Virginia plantation architecture. A frame addition with a gambrel roof was added at the rear in the late eighteenth century, expanding the house while leaving its original profile intact.
George Washington and the Marquis de Lafayette are documented in the property's history as having stayed at Old Mansion during the Revolutionary War period. The building was added to the Virginia Landmarks Register and the National Register of Historic Places in 1969, and the Library of Congress's Historic American Buildings Survey holds a photographic record of the exterior and selected interior features.
The property remains a private residence and is not open for public tours.
Sources
Caroline County folklore connects the apparition reports at Old Mansion to Colonel John Waller Hoomes, the eighteenth-century owner whose family built the residence. The Caroline Home and Garden series The Restless Spirits of Caroline County treats the property as one of the county's enduring haunted homes and frames the lore within the broader pattern of plantation-era family residences whose ghost stories center on identifiable original owners.
Because Old Mansion remains a private residence and is not interpreted as a paranormal site, the lore exists primarily as a piece of regional Caroline County tradition. The home does not host investigations, and accounts have not been collected through any institutional channel.
For visitors interested in the building, the substantive draw is the architecture and Revolutionary-era provenance documented by the Virginia Department of Historic Resources and the Library of Congress.
Notable Entities
View the colonial-era brick residence from the public sidewalk. Old Mansion is a private home and not open to visitors. The Library of Congress HABS photographs document the building's exterior in archival detail for those wanting closer examination.
Every HauntBound history is researched from documented sources. We clearly separate verified historical fact from paranormal folklore.
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