Just look for the old black coach in front of the broad white building and you’ve found your welcome in a sleepy little town along West Virginia’s Greenbrier River.
Lewisburg’s General Lewis Inn will celebrate its 80th birthday in 2009, offering hospitality in buildings that go back to 1834. Every bed is antique, and two are old-fashioned rope beds that third-generation innkeeper Jim Morgan has to tighten twice a year. “You really can sleep tight here,” he says of the old adage that arose from the rope-bed era.
Stop by the handmade walnut-and-pine front desk and begin your trip back in time. Patrick Henry and Thomas Jefferson stood at this 1760 desk when they registered in the Sweet Chalybeate Springs Hotel, one of the area’s many mineral-spring resorts over the centuries. Then, try to take in all the tools, guns, utensils and musical instruments in the Memory Hall.
Then it’s up to the bedroom to drop the bags and look for the walls that no longer stand plumb and the floors that no longer hold level. Regulars come to love every crooked inch of The General Lewis.
Romantics may head for the Garden Queen room, with a canopy bed and a sitting area overlooking the gardens.
Soon, kitchen aromas act like an old country dinner bell, calling you to the cozy dining room carved from the 1834 Withrow House, the historic core of the inn. Some nights, Jimmy Costa may be playing the dulcimer, banjo, fiddle or guitar over your fried chicken and West Virginia mountain trout.
Afterward, find a rocker in the living room and sip your after-dinner drink to the snap of the fire. You may get drowsy, as generations of visitors have done, surrounded by the antiques that Jim Morgan’s grandparents first gathered for their inn 80 years ago.