Abingdon

Abingdon surprised me in the specific way that small American towns can surprise you when they have decided, against all economic logic, to be excellent at something. I had read about the Barter Theatre in passing — it was mentioned in a Virginia tourism article alongside seven other things that had not interested me — but I had not understood what it meant until I was standing in front of it on Main Street, reading the placard that explained the Depression-era founding: Robert Porterfield, an actor who had lost his work in New York, came home to southwest Virginia and opened a theater in 1933 where local farmers could trade produce for admission. Twenty-five cents or the equivalent in food. The theater survived the Depression on this arrangement and has been running continuously ever since. It is the oldest professional theater in the United States still operating in its original building, and on the night I attended — a production of a new play by an Appalachian playwright — the audience was a mix of locals in casual clothes and visitors who had driven two hours from Knoxville. The play was about a mining family in eastern Kentucky. The performance was as good as anything I have seen in a large city.

Main Street Abingdon is the kind of street that American preservationists dream of in the abstract and almost never achieve in reality. Nineteenth-century brick storefronts, continuous on both sides, housing a hardware store and a wine bar and a bookshop and a pottery studio in approximately equal measure. The town has a population of eight thousand. It has four restaurants that cook seriously. The Black Rooster, a meat-forward kitchen with a wine list curated around natural producers, was serving a country ham terrine with muscadine preserves on the night I visited, and I ate it at the bar and listened to the chef talk to the server about sourcing and felt the familiar pleasure of finding a place that gives a damn in a context where it has no financial obligation to do so.

The Virginia Creeper Trail begins in Abingdon and runs thirty-four miles east through the valley of Whitetop Laurel Creek to the town of Damascus and beyond, following the bed of an old narrow-gauge railroad that once hauled timber and iron ore out of the mountains. The trail is gravel, mostly flat to gently rolling except for the drop down from Whitetop Mountain on the eastern end, and it passes through a landscape of unusual beauty: limestone creek bottoms, overhanging sycamores, the occasional restored trestle bridge suspended over a fast hollow. I rented a bicycle in Abingdon one morning and rode toward Damascus, stopping at the creek every mile or so, and arrived in Damascus at noon smelling of creek water and feeling approximately twenty years younger.

Damascus itself — where the Appalachian Trail, the Virginia Creeper Trail, and several other long-distance trails converge — has a culture of its own, small and rooted in the particular religion of the long walk. Trail Days, the annual hiking festival held each May, brings thousands of current and former thru-hikers to a town of under a thousand residents. I missed it by three weeks and still felt its residue in the way the café owners talked about the hikers, with the tone of parents describing difficult but beloved children.

Back in Abingdon, the morning I left, I ate breakfast at the Starving Artist Café — a place whose name I had resisted out of prejudice and which turned out to serve the best buckwheat pancakes I have eaten in Virginia, with local sourwood honey and apple butter made from the orchards in the upper valley. The owner was also one of the servers, and she talked about Abingdon the way people talk about a place they chose intentionally, with full knowledge of what they were giving up by not living somewhere larger. That quality — of deliberate belonging, of a life constructed against the grain of convenience — is something the town radiates.

When to go: May for the Virginia Creeper Trail when the dogwoods are in bloom. October for fall color on the trail and the surrounding hollows, and for the Barter Theatre’s fall season, which is typically the strongest of the year. Winter is quiet but the theater runs year-round, and the restaurant scene is unaffected by season.