The Pest House Medical Museum

401 Taylor Street / Lynchburg, VA 24501 / (434) 847-1465

The Pest House, or House of Pestilence, was Lynchburg's first hospital. It was located at the outermost edge of town, on land next to the Public Burying Ground (or City Cemetery). Throughout the 1840s and 1850s those infected with contagious diseases like smallpox, cholera, and scarlet fever, were quarantined in the Pest House.

The small, white-frame "Pest House Medical Museum" building--now located in the Old City Cemetery--was moved to the Cemetery in 1987 from Dr. John J. Terrell's farm in Campbell County, Rock Castle. The structure was originally built in the 1840s and served as Dr. Terrell's medical office after the Civil War. In 1987-88 the Southern Memorial Association restored the building to recreate and interpret medical science of the era. The medical office and Pest House exhibits have been joined in this museum to give a more complete picture of nineteenth-century medicine, while still telling two very separate stories.