June Tolliver House

This two-story brick Queen Anne house is typical of Southwest Virginia's boom architecture of the late nineteenth century. Dominated by twin projecting rectangular wooden bays containing one-over-one sash windows and topped by wood-shingled gables, the house's facade is an interesting interplay of projections and recessions and of brick and wooden elements. It was the home of June Morris, the woman after whom local novelist John Fox Jr. (see WI18) patterned June Tolliver, heroine of his best-selling novel The Trail of the Lonesome Pine (1908). The book, which features Tolliver as the sheltered daughter of a local family who falls in love with a mining engineer, portrays the cultural clash between natives and newcomers as a result of the region's mining boom. During the summer months the novel is reenacted at the amphitheater adjacent to the house.