Over the past ten years, I’ve visited about that many historic homes in Western and Central Virginia. Despite certain similarities to all –for they have generally covered years of the first half of the 19th Century _ each has been beautiful.
Salem has at least one such place, the Preston House across from Wal-Mart, which the Salem Historical Society now owns and currently rents to a tea shop.
I’ve seen the show places by taking one-day bus trips to sites generally within 125 miles of the Roanoke Valley. They are popular with senior adults since they fit retirement budgets, don’t require pet sitters and often include shops specializing in various crafts; many like myself who have downsized don’t have room for more art, baskets, books and flower arrangements, but I’ve never been on a trip that I didn’t come away with an appreciation for our beautiful mountain-valley country.
I recall trips to Shenandoah and Rockingham Counties, Lexington and Staunton, the “Rock Churches” in Carroll and Floyd, Halifax County, the Moravian
Settlement in Winston-Salem, N.C. and nearby Blacksburg and Shawsville. On my own, I’ve toured Monticello and Montpelier in Virginia’s Piedmont.
The Salem Museum sponsored such a trip recently to Monroe County in Southeastern West Virginia. Centered on the small, historic town of Union, which dates from about 1800, it featured stops at an early Methodist shrine, the Rehoboth Church. When our party, guided by Virginia Savage, professional tour planner active in the Salem Historical Society, had completed our stop at the log cabin church, we soon arrived in Union.
The hilly town is filled with homes and business places dating from 150 years or more. Several of these have been converted to a museum featuring the agricultural life of earlier times, the part the Confederate-leaning county played in the Civil War and the transportation of the last century. We didn’t have time for the extensive walking tour of the town which its historical society has developed ; it includes a cemetery on top of a hill, old academies at which the children of more prosperous families were educated 175 years ago, the replica of a country store and the successor to the Methodist log meeting house dating from 1889.
The latest impressive addition to the show places is Elmwood, the restored home of Hugh Caperton, a 19th Century lawyer prominent in the pre-Civil War days. Then the mineral springs throughout the karst soil area drew many during the hot months, and as early as 1780 a home on the property was thought of as “a party place.”
Like so many of the beautifully restored houses I’ve seen on tours, Elmwood fell into dilapidation for decades. In 2000 it was bought by Chris and Anita Wszolek (pronounced “Go-lek” ) then living overseas for his job as an oil drilling contractor.
They returned four years ago, Anita Wszolek told me, and began to make real a dream they had of restoring the place to be used for weddings, reunions and other social occasions as were part of Elmwood in the old days. Rooms are available on the main floor with its beautiful mantel, windows looking out on the rolling hills and stairs going from the ground-level kitchen to the attic.
It’s reminiscent of the better-known Greenbrier Hotel just across the mountain to the north.
In Union, we had the rare sight of a real stagecoach such as used to be familiar in the western movies of my childhood. It’s in the Carriage House which also holds some other conveyances of olden days including buggies, sleighs (“cutters” to use the old name) farm wagons and baby carriages.
Now the “healing springs” are long gone, but re-living the romantic past has become a significant business for these little spots still, to some degree, isolated by the towering Alleghenies such as Potts and Peters Mountains which divide West Virginia from Virginia’s Craig County.
The long-gone village of Sweet Chalybeate near Union is set for future restoration. Some of its old brick spas will in time contribute to the glamor of the past. Flash floods, such as devastated the area in June 2016, are still untamed.
