Present Woodburn Road was once a major route to Earlysville, passing through several large antebellum plantations and crossing the Rivanna River at a now-vanished bridge. After the Civil War, a community of whites and African Americans, called Cartersburg, grew up along this road. The freedpeople, including the Armstead, Gofney, Key, Winn, and Woodfolk families, purchased one- to eight-acre plots of land on the edges of the former plantations. They farmed their small, steep plots and worked as farmhands, blacksmiths, railroad employees, ministers, domestic servants, and laundresses. Today many houses are unoccupied, bought by the state in the 1980s for a highway that was never built.