Avoca

This expansive and exuberant residence stands on the former site of Green Level, Colonel Charles Lynch's house, where he is buried in a walled graveyard. Among his other Revolutionary War activities, Lynch was superintendent of the lead mines in Wythe County that furnished materials for the western arsenals. Built long afterwards, Avoca is a fine Queen Anne confection with hints of Colonial Revival reflected in its lessened verticality and use of classical motifs. The asymmetrical two-and-a-half-story wooden house showcases a rich variety of windows, a dramatic corner tower, a one-story wraparound porch with a pedimented entrance beneath a balcony, swag decorations, Doric entablatures, metal cresting on the hipped roof, and horizontal as well as vertical sheathing. Completing Avoca's richness are outbuildings that mostly date from the second half of the nineteenth century. They include a pyramidal-roofed smokehouse, a brick kitchen, a dairy, and a shed-roof office attached to an early-twentieth-century tenant house. The house was built for Thomas and Mary Fauntleroy, Lynch family descendants, whose family owned it until 1981 when it was given to the Town of Altavista. It is now a handsomely restored museum house.