Court House Hill is the most architecturally distinguished neighbourhood in Lynchburg, sitting on a promontory above the James River with a view that explains why this hill attracted the city's most prosperous residents. The district contains about 50 acres of Federal, Greek Revival, Gothic Revival, and Italianate buildings, most dating from the city's tobacco-wealth period of the mid-19th century.
The streets are steep and the walking is best done slowly. Church Street in particular has a remarkable concentration of 19th-century religious architecture: St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Court Street Baptist Church, and the Church of the Good Shepherd all stand within a few hundred metres of each other, each in a different style. The neighbourhood survived the Civil War without the damage that destroyed so much of the South's urban fabric.