Pull off Route 29 at the Amherst exit and the strip of fast-food places and gas stations gives way, after a few blocks, to a courthouse square that has been in the same spot since 1761. The town of Amherst is the seat of Amherst County, set in the Piedmont where the foothills start lifting toward the Blue Ridge. Population just over 2,000. One stoplight that matters. The kind of town where the local bar serves both reuben sandwiches and Saturday-night live music, and where everyone calls the Briar Patch by its first name. The town is small, but the country around it - Monacan ancestral land, a women's college with 3,250 acres of forest, the longest footpath in the world - is anything but ordinary.
Amherst sits at the intersection of Route 29 and Route 60 - two roads that together stitch together a remarkable amount of the southeastern United States. Route 29 runs north to Washington and south to the Gulf coast; Route 60 runs east to the Atlantic at Virginia Beach and west to Los Angeles, where it ends near the Pacific. The town's location at this crossroads has shaped its economy since the first stage lines. Route 130, the smaller east-west road through the southern part of the county, leads to the James River and the Foot Bridge crossing - the only spot on the entire 2,200-mile Appalachian Trail where hikers cross a major river on a dedicated pedestrian bridge.
Amherst County is Monacan land. The Monacan Indian Nation, a Siouan-speaking people, has occupied the Piedmont uplands between the James and the Blue Ridge for centuries before the colonial surveyors arrived. Their tribal headquarters today sits on Bear Mountain in the western part of the county. The nation received federal recognition in 2018 after decades of work; their ancestral mounds and village sites are scattered across the region. The town and county are named for Jeffery Amherst, the British commander whose legacy on this land is complicated - the people who lived here long before that naming have outlasted the empire that did the naming.
Amherst's food scene is unpretentious and durable. The Briar Patch on Business 29 has been the town's after-work bar and weekend dinner spot for years - American comfort food, a long bar, friendly enough to absorb a passing tourist without making them feel like one. El Mariachi at the Ambriar Shopping Center is the dependable Tex-Mex. La Carreta nearby is the local favorite for the same. Country Cooking serves the kind of meat-and-three plate that defines small-town Virginia eating, salad bar included. For breakfast and budget meals, the chains along Route 29 in Madison Heights handle the through-traffic. Few of these places will appear in food magazines. All of them work.
More than 50 miles of the Appalachian Trail run through Amherst County, along ridgelines in the eastern part of the county - including Long Mountain Wayside on Route 60, and the Foot Bridge on Route 130 where the trail crosses the James. Day hikers can park at either trailhead. Through-hikers pass through Amherst by the hundreds each spring, refueling at gas stations and the occasional motel before climbing back into the woods. The town is not on the trail itself, but it functions as a quiet trail town - somewhere to do laundry, eat something that isn't dehydrated, sleep in a bed. Biking and walking the county roads is possible, but the shoulders are narrow, the curves are blind, and locals will tell you to be careful.
Just south of town, Sweet Briar College spreads across 3,250 acres of fields, woods, and pastures - the largest single landholding of any institution in the county. Founded in 1901, it gives Amherst the unusual flavor of a small Virginia town with a Georgian-Revival brick women's college as a neighbor. Day trippers can drive the college's roads, visit the chapel, walk to Monument Hill where students place daisies each Founder's Day. North and west of town, the Blue Ridge Parkway runs along the spine of the mountains, twenty miles from Amherst by back roads, with overlooks at Indian Gap and the Buena Vista Overlook. Amherst is the kind of town you stop in for an hour and discover, at hour three, that you have not yet wanted to leave.
Located at 37.59 degrees N, 79.05 degrees W in the Piedmont of central Virginia, at the intersection of US Routes 29 and 60. The Blue Ridge rises to the west. The Appalachian Trail runs through the eastern part of the county. Sweet Briar College's quad is a visible landmark to the south. Nearest airport is Lynchburg Regional (KLYH) about 14 miles south. Best viewed at 3,000 to 5,000 feet AGL in clear conditions, with the Blue Ridge providing a dramatic backdrop to the west.