African Americans who had worked as slaves on the plantations of Albemarle County sought economic independence and self-sufficiency through property ownership after emancipation. An exchange of land for labor between former slaveholder W. G. Carr and former slaves Benjamin Brown and John Coles marked the beginning of the Proffit settlement sometime around 1870. Other freedmen and women followed suit, purchasing small lots and buildings one- and two-story frame houses on what were once plantation lands.

The opening of the Proffit station rail depot and post office in 1881 brought white settlers and new commercial establishments to the area. The village grew and thrived economically between 1880 and 1930. Farmers and merchants used the rail line to ship and receive goods; the Ohio Sulphur Mining Company, which excavated a local mine in the 1920s, built a refining mill and installed a spur road to the Proffit depot.

In 1929, a University of Virginia researcher described Proffit as a fairly prosperous African-American settlement: “There are about fifteen or twenty colored families in the town. These people do not own farms, but they have little truck gardens which supply their own needs. They do not altogether depend upon this for a living, however; they work in Charlottesville and go back and forth to their homes.” Economic activity tied to the railroad depot waned in the decades that followed. “As train traffic through the village declined and the automobile made Charlottesville more accessible, Proffit gradually lost its position as a commercial crossroads.” The opening of the U.S. Route 29 in the early 1930s and the closing of the Proffit Station depot by the late 1940s transformed the once-bustling village into the quiet residential community that it is today.

Despite its easy accessibility to motorists—the village center is located just 2.5 miles east of US Route 29, on a scenic secondary road leading directly to the Charlottesville-Albemarle Airport—the Proffit Historic District is little known outside of local historical and genealogical circles. The Evergreen Baptist Church, built by the local African-American congregation in 1881 is still a locus of community activity today. Other historical structures include the Proffit Station Master’s House, built in the 1890s; the stone wall of the first Proffit Post Office, circa 1900; the one-lane, wood-decked Proffit Road bridge, rebuilt to resemble the nineteenth-century original; and several abandoned houses, built in the 1880s by African-American families whose descendents still own land and live in Proffit today.