Glencoe Museum and Gallery (Glencoe)

Gabriel C. and Anne Radford Wharton's house is one of Radford's few examples of Italianate residential architecture. Constructed of dark-red brick on a stone foundation, the house has a slightly projecting two-story front pavilion, segmental-arched windows, and an asymmetrically placed porch with elaborate sawn brackets. A complex deck-on-hip slate roof shelters the house. In addition to its center-passage plan, the house retains much of its original decoration, including wooden pilastered mantels. Like other houses in the area that predate the city's boom period, Glencoe is oriented toward the river rather than the developed streets to its southeast. Wharton, a former Confederate army officer and a county General Assembly representative in the 1870s, was among the earliest entrepreneurs to identify the mining possibilities of the western Virginia coalfields. He founded the New River Railroad, Mining, and Manufacturing Company in 1871 and later sold the company to financiers associated with the Norfolk and Western Railroad. In 1998, following an extensive restoration, the house opened as a museum.