The inn originally went up in 1845 to serve traffic on the Staunton-Parkersburg Turnpike, the toll road that crossed the central Alleghenies between the Shenandoah Valley and the Ohio River. The turnpike itself was constructed between 1838 and 1846, so the inn appeared just as the road was reaching completion. Travellers Repose offered lodging and meals to wagoners, traveling salesmen, and the occasional military officer making the long journey across the mountains. The original building burned during the Civil War. The current structure, rebuilt in 1869 by the same family that had owned the original inn, kept the same name and the same function. It continued supplying lodging and meals to travelers right up until around 1940, when WPA writers visited the area to document West Virginia's landscape and history. The Repose was still operating then. It finally passed out of the family's hands in 2014 after the death of Jessie Beard Powell.

When Confederate troops established Camp Bartow on the surrounding ground in mid-September 1861, the inn became part of military life. Officers boarded there. Couriers passed through. The four major fortifications associated with the camp - trenches surrounding artillery emplacements - are still visible on the ground today, as are two additional artillery emplacements. The Battle of Greenbrier River on October 3, 1861 was fought on these grounds. After the battle, Confederate dead were buried in an unmarked cemetery that contains 82 graves. The names of most of the men buried there have been lost. They were soldiers from Georgia, Virginia, and Arkansas regiments - mostly young, mostly from far enough away that no family members ever came to identify the graves. The cemetery is still unmarked because no one could ever determine who had been buried where.

The journalist and writer Ambrose Bierce served as a Union officer in the western Virginia campaign of 1861. He passed through Camp Bartow as a soldier and remembered it for the rest of his life. In 1903, four decades after the war, Bierce published an autobiographical essay called "A Bivouac of the Dead" that described his return to the same Greenbrier valley as an older man, reflecting on the soldiers he had fought alongside and against. The essay is one of the great pieces of American Civil War memoir, and it placed Traveller's Repose into the literary record. Stonewall Jackson is also said to have lodged at the Repose at some point during the war, though documentation for that claim is thin. The inn collected stories and rumors the way old country inns do.

Joseph Hergesheimer, the early 20th-century American novelist, found in the Greenbrier valley around Bartow the setting for one of his most successful works. In 1917, Hergesheimer published a short story called "Tol'able David" set in a fictionalized version of the valley he called Greenstream County. The story became a stage play, then a silent film in 1921 directed by Henry King, then a talkie in 1930 - both successful enough that the original story stayed in circulation for decades. The 1921 silent film is now considered an early classic of American cinema, with King's direction earning critical praise. In 1922, Hergesheimer wrote another Saturday Evening Post short story, titled "Traveler's Repose," that described the inn directly. The Greenbrier valley, transformed into Greenstream County, reached audiences who would never set foot in West Virginia. They could see the place anyway, on a movie screen, fictionalized but recognizable to anyone who knew the actual location.

The Camp Bartow Historic District today preserves the inn, the battlefield, the four fortifications, the artillery emplacements, the unmarked Confederate cemetery, the section of the Staunton-Parkersburg Turnpike, and the surrounding ground where a small piece of the Civil War took place. The American Battlefield Trust and the West Virginia Land Trust acquired the core of the battlefield in 2016. The Staunton-Parkersburg Turnpike Alliance has worked on broader preservation planning. The result is a small historic district in a remote part of West Virginia that contains - in tightly compressed space - 19th-century turnpike construction, antebellum hospitality, Civil War military engineering, an unmarked mass grave, the literary memory of Ambrose Bierce, and the cinematic memory of an early Henry King film. Most visitors who pass through Bartow on US-250 today do not realize how much history sits in the few hundred acres around them.