Michie Tavern: Seventeen Miles by Horse and Wagon

The tavern you see near Monticello today is not where it was built. Moving it here meant taking it apart and hauling it seventeen miles.

Scottish immigrant William Michie established an ordinary, a colonial-era roadside inn, in seventeen eighty-four in northern Albemarle County, along the old Richmond Road. Travelers stopped there for food, drink, and lodging for over a century. By the nineteen twenties the building was deteriorating and its location too remote for visitors.

In nineteen twenty-seven, new owners had the entire structure painstakingly numbered, dismantled timber by timber, and hauled seventeen miles to its present site half a mile below Monticello. Workers reassembled it at the new site, and it was opened to visitors. Today Michie Tavern operates as a working tavern museum, one of the oldest intact hostels in Virginia, serving a colonial lunch and interpreting everyday life in the Virginia backcountry.