The Holbrook-Ross neighborhood was a thriving African American professional and commercial neighborhood in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This district served the large Black population that migrated to Danville from the surrounding countryside after the Civil War. Although legally freed, African Americans were still segregated by law and tradition from white professional and commercial services. They formed their own communities, and Holbrook-Ross, the home of Danville's first generation of Black professionals, was the most fashionable of them all, with Holbrook Street as its finest. The coming of racial integration in the 1950s and 1960s, along with the attendant increased mobility and affluence, urban flight, and social dislocations of the period, led to the decline of this neighborhood that has made a comeback. Holbrook-Ross formed around Danville School, the first for Black students, built in 1878 at the southern end of the neighborhood, now the site of the Westmoreland School complex.