c. 1812, Mr. Lamkin; later additions. U.S. 29 Business, approximately 0.25 miles south of VA 130/669
Now almost lost among late-twentieth-century big-box commercial structures along this highway, this is the largest of Lamkin's buildings. The tavern was a stage stop with a bar in the basement. From the early nineteenth century when houses were built on raised, usable basements, dining rooms lost their colonial place of honor and moved to the basement and, as here, sometimes tavern bars did too. The two-story brick tavern, originally rectangular and only five bays wide, nevertheless is stylistically allied with the larger and more complex Edgewood (AH5) in Amherst. Both are carefully crafted neoclassical buildings with a two-story, three-bay central portico crowned with a pediment.