Fried Chicken Capital and Founding Crossroads: A Gordonsville Tour

Gordonsville, Virginia has been a crossroads of American life for more than two centuries. On this walking tour, you'll trace how every shift in transportation – from stagecoach to steam engine to automobile – left its mark on this small town. You'll also discover how the women excluded from its formal economy turned that exclusion into one of the most remarkable entrepreneurial stories in American history.

The tour starts at the Gordonsville Visitor Center on Main Street, where you'll walk north past sixty years of railroad-era architecture – merchant homes with elaborate porches, four historic churches built within thirty years of each other, and a street whose survival owes everything to the town's gradual decline. Along the way, you'll visit the site of Gordon's Tavern, where a historical marker lists Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, and Lafayette among those who stopped here, and where Lafayette addressed a crowd from the porch during his 1824 farewell tour of America.

You'll also walk down Baker Street past the site of an 1878 school where young women studied astronomy, trigonometry, and calisthenics, and stand before Christ Episcopal Church, one of the finest small Gothic Revival buildings in Virginia. The tour ends at the Exchange Hotel, a building that operated briefly as a fine hotel before becoming a Civil War hospital treating 70,000 soldiers, then a Freedmen's Bureau school where formerly enslaved teachers taught others to read.

On this 45-minute tour, you'll have a chance to:

• Hear how African American women built a platform economy selling fried chicken through open train windows, earning Gordonsville the title Fried Chicken Capital of the World
• Visit St. Mark's Catholic Church – now the public library – built by Irish railroad workers in 1884
• Pass the site of the Gordonsville Female Institute, the 1878 private school for young women studying a range of topics aligned to their literary and ornamental curricula.
• Learn how the Gordonsville Chair Factory furnished the Virginia House of Delegates
• Spot a Dr Pepper ghost sign that has been fading on a Main Street wall since the 1940s
• Explore the Exchange Hotel museum's preserved surgical instruments, Stonewall Jackson's church pew, and Freedmen's Bureau case dockets

Gordonsville held the whole country in it. This tour shows you exactly how.