Qualla: Camp Bartow Historic District

Camp Bartow Historic District: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Brian M. Powell (user Bitmapped on en.wikipedia), CC BY-SA 3.0. An old inn called Traveller's Repose still stands at a bend in the East Fork Greenbrier River, where U.S. Route 28 meets U.S. Route 250 at the foot of Burner Mountain. The first building went up in 1845. The current building dates to 1869, after fire damage from the Civil War prompted a rebuild. Around the inn lies a small community called Bartow, and around Bartow lies a battlefield, a Confederate cemetery containing 82 unmarked graves, the remains of four major Civil War fortifications, and a surviving section of the Staunton-Parkersburg Turnpike. The whole district was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1996.

Image: Brian M. Powell (user Bitmapped on en.wikipedia) | CC BY-SA 3.0

Camp Bartow Historic District: Traveller's Repose

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Brian M. Powell (user Bitmapped on en.wikipedia), CC BY-SA 3.0. 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 th...

Image: Brian M. Powell (user Bitmapped on en.wikipedia) | CC BY-SA 3.0

Camp Bartow Historic District: Camp Bartow Itself

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Brian M. Powell (user Bitmapped on en.wikipedia), CC BY-SA 3.0. 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 emplacem...

Image: Brian M. Powell (user Bitmapped on en.wikipedia) | CC BY-SA 3.0

Camp Bartow Historic District: Ambrose Bierce Slept Here

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Brian M. Powell (user Bitmapped on en.wikipedia), CC BY-SA 3.0. 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 call...

Image: Brian M. Powell (user Bitmapped on en.wikipedia) | CC BY-SA 3.0

Camp Bartow Historic District: Tol'able David and Greenstream County

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Brian M. Powell (user Bitmapped on en.wikipedia), CC BY-SA 3.0. 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 call...

Image: Brian M. Powell (user Bitmapped on en.wikipedia) | CC BY-SA 3.0

Camp Bartow Historic District: What Survives

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Brian M. Powell (user Bitmapped on en.wikipedia), CC BY-SA 3.0. 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 to...

Image: Brian M. Powell (user Bitmapped on en.wikipedia) | CC BY-SA 3.0