Juliana and Ann Streets run parallel through downtown Parkersburg, stretching from Riverview Cemetery on the north end to 9th Street on the south. The names come from the two daughters of Alexander Parker, the Virginia officer who acquired the land in the 1780s as a Revolutionary War land grant and in whose honor the town was officially named Parkersburg in 1810. The district covers a small but architecturally remarkable area: 116 contributing buildings, mostly residences, in a continuous sequence that documents Parkersburg's prosperity from the 1830s through the early 20th century. The National Register added the district in 1977, making it one of the earliest such listings in West Virginia.

Peter G. Van Winkle was one of the most prominent figures of early Parkersburg. He served as the city's mayor, as president of the Northwestern Virginia Railroad, and as one of the two original United States senators from the new state of West Virginia after its admission to the Union in 1863. The 1836 house he built at Juliana and Ann predates his political prominence; it was the residence of a successful young Virginia attorney and businessman. The structure has been modified continuously since - the third floor and north wing were added in the years 1875 to 1899, along with the late-Victorian decorative elements that give the house its current rooftop complexity. The entrance reversal from Murdoch Avenue to Ann Street happened during that same period of expansion.

Most of the district's 116 contributing buildings date from the period 1875 to 1915 - the years when oil and gas money flooded into Parkersburg, when the population doubled and tripled, and when the city's leading families built or remodeled their homes on a scale they could not have imagined a generation earlier. The architectural styles are the ones that defined late-19th and early-20th-century American domestic prosperity: late Victorian in its many subtypes, Colonial Revival as it came into fashion after 1890, and especially Queen Anne, with its asymmetrical massing, polygonal corner towers, and decorative shingled wall surfaces. The district is, like Avery Street to the east, a working catalog of American residential architecture during the period.

Not every Van Winkle property survived. The Peter G. Van Winkle House at 600-602 Juliana Street - a separate, later residence built by or for the senator himself - was demolished in 1994, twenty-eight years after the district's National Register listing. The demolition is one of those local controversies that historic-preservation advocates remember and use as an example of what happens when listing alone does not protect a building. The National Register, despite popular perception, is primarily an honor and a research tool. It does not, by itself, prevent demolition. Local protections - zoning, historic-district ordinances, conservation easements - are what actually keep buildings standing. The 1994 loss prompted Parkersburg to strengthen its local preservation framework. The remaining 116 contributing structures benefit from that strengthening.

The Julia-Ann Square Historic District is still a residential neighborhood. The houses are still houses. Some have been subdivided into apartments. Some have been restored to single-family use after decades as boarding houses or duplexes. Several function as bed-and-breakfasts. The neighborhood holds an annual house tour that draws visitors from across the state. Like Avery Street and the adjacent Parkersburg High School-Washington Avenue district, Julia-Ann Square works because it is alive - because people still live there, raise children, mow lawns, repair gutters, and gradually pass the houses down to the next generation. A historic district is not a museum. It is a neighborhood that has agreed, collectively, to preserve the things that make it distinctive. Julia-Ann Square has been doing that for almost 50 years.