When Charles Dickens—the Victorian era’s greatest novelist—traveled through America via stagecoach in 1842, he found the experience absolutely abysmal. The coaches, he wrote, had “never been cleaned since they were first built,” and because they lacked springs, the slightest jolt was enough to dislocate a traveler’s bones. “At one time we were all flung together in a heap at the bottom of the coach,” he wrote of one day’s jaunt, “and at another we were crushing our heads against the roof. Now one side [of the carriage] was down deep in the mire. …Now the coach…was rearing up in the air, in a frantic state. …Never, never once, that day, was the coach in any position, attitude or kind of motion to which we are accustomed in coaches.”
Here in central Virginia, in the era before passenger trains (which first arrived in the 1850s), stagecoach travel—thanks to the area’s heavily rutted roadways—was really no better. Visitors to Charlottesville typically came packed aboard the Fredericksburg or Richmond stage, their trunks lashed behind and on top with mud-splattered leather belts. The scenery along the route was beautiful, no doubt, but the lengthy rides must have been exhausting. In the 1820s, for example, the stagecoach trip from Richmond to Charlottesville—a distance of only 70 miles—took more than 24 hours.
What made the traveling bearable? As any 18th- or early 19th-century American excursionist would answer: It was the taverns. Built along the main stagecoach routes, inns and taverns—the names were somewhat interchangeable—provided the rest, food and beverages that the rattled riders so desperately needed. Central Virginia history is filled with stories of the region’s many famous taverns, and the wonderful events of which they were a part. Nowadays, central Virginia is graced with a number of modern-day inns and taverns—the direct lineal descendants of those long ago way stations. They, too, have stories to tell.