Gordonsville, Virginia has been a crossroads of American life for more than two centuries. On this self-guided walking tour, you'll trace how every shift in transportation – from stagecoach to steam engine to automobile – left its mark on this small town. You'll also discover how the women excluded from its formal economy turned that exclusion into one of the most remarkable entrepreneurial stories in American history.

The tour starts at the Gordonsville Visitor Center on Main Street, where you'll walk north past sixty years of railroad-era architecture – merchant homes with elaborate porches, four historic churches built within thirty years of each other, and a street whose survival owes everything to the town's gradual decline. Along the way, you'll visit the site of Gordon's Tavern, where a historical marker lists Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, and Lafayette among those who stopped here.