The Martha, the Tavern, the Stage
An evening at America’s longest-running professional theatre, tucked inside one of Virginia’s most overnightable small towns.
This Summer in Abingdon:
Photo via Barter Theatre
Stay in a history-strewn hotel that served as a women’s college through the most turbulent days of the Civil War.
Dress for the theatre: take in a show at a one-of-a-kind playhouse that once traded cabbages for orchestra seats.
Pre-theatre dinner should be carefully plotted, and this town has just the place.
As always, your stay, meal and local experience are all pre-arranged, booked for you in a tap.
Get the full story for the weekend.
Abingdon, VA | Through August, 2026
Where you’re going: into a colonial-era village, packaged neatly into the handsome hills of Southwest Virginia.
Why here?
Photo via Visit Abingdon
We’re partial to walkable weekends.
Our dream jaunt transportation mechanics are these: park your car at the hotel, then entirely forget you have one until Sunday morning at 11am-ish.
Not always possible, and there are certainly exceptions that take a little farther-flinging to really appreciate. But this weekend, once you get there, you’re staying put.
Abingdon, VA is a town that we’re going to do our best to resist calling quaint. That always feels vaguely condescending, to sum up a whole town and its offerings and locals with a word, even if you mean well, and there’s just something haughty to it (“Where I’m from is much fancier than this!”)
But it’s so quaint, Abingdon.
Read on or
Image via Encyclopedia Virginia
The town was founded in 1778, and it comes with a printed map’s worth of Revolutionary sites and lore; there are the pleasingly aged patinas of weathered brick, and shops burning just-right amalgamations of scented candles that condense into a wonderful, overall here-smell.
And walkability really only matters if the waypoints are amazing, which they truly are in this place.
You can check into the Martha Washington Inn (known as The Martha and worth doing even if it was located on some tundra, much less here), and trundle down to Virginia’s oldest tavern for dinner. Then shuffle over to one of America’s legitimate cultural treasures: The Barter Theatre, founded during the Great Depression.
It’s a place that once accepted corn or cabbage or goats, or anything, practically, that you could come up with in those economic times, in return for seeing something onstage that transported you away.
So settle into Abingdon, walk the town, enjoy the theatre, and forget your car till Sunday.
Photo by By Steven C. Price
Photo by Jerrye & Roy Klotz, MD
This summer in Abingdon, discover…
The stay.
The Martha Washington Inn
The building that would become the present-day inn (and it’s a beautiful one) was originally built as a retirement home for War of 1812 hero and Virginia congressman Francis Preston.
But this place had some of its most notable times years later as Martha Washington College, a women’s school that welcomed its first students in 1860, on the eve of the Civil War. Operating in one of that conflict’s most active theaters, the school’s earliest students converted to wartime nurses on a campus that became both a barracks and a field hospital.
The college named after a first lady also helped educate a future one: Edith Wilson, wife of Woodrow, who by many accounts did a good deal of the government-running after the president’s stroke.
Back to now: The Martha, as a hotel, is sweeping and beautiful; and it does the blending-old-features-with-new-comforts balance very well. It’s right across the way from the theatre.
Photos via The Martha Washington Inn & Spa
Reserved and pre-paid one Saturday night.
The day.
Historic Downtown Abingdon
A terrific, red-bricked historic district that’s fully strollable, and full of interesting, not-kitsch shops and galleries.
You walk out of your hotel, there you are on the cobbles of it all.
There’s the Glass Peacock, which specializes in extraordinary stained glass; Shady Business (custom lamps and lampshades, of course); and A Likely Yarn for all your knitting needs.
So much else. The shopping is good, the atmospherics are superb.
Photo: Visit Abingdon
The find.
Photo via Abingdon Arts Depot
The Arts Depot
The old railroad freight station at the edge of downtown has been converted into working studios for artists across several disciplines.
A lot of the art is shoppable.
The food.
Photo via The Tavern/Instagram
The Tavern
Completely earns the “The” distinction.
It’s the oldest tavern in Virginia, for one thing, built in 1779. Most of the structure is original; the walls, the beams. The ceiling is good and low, with a pleasant slope and waver to it. It’s the same one that Andrew Jackson sat under when he passed through here, and King Louis Philippe of France, too, and Henry Clay.
This was a makeshift hospital during the Civil War, and the old bed numbers are still visible on the walls of the upper rooms.
The food is varied, but with a German thrust, and you can get Jagerschnitzel or Kassler Rippchen (or just good old Tavern Onion Soup).
Our kind of spot, perfect for pre-theatre, steps from the show, history on the walls, doesn’t get better.
Dinner for two, already taken care of. Order right off the menu.
The tucked away.
The Cave House
We almost started the whole Overnight with this story.
There’s a fairly unassuming Victorian house just off Main Street, and its basement — or underneath the house, anyway — has a Daniel Boone story.
The legend, which we will absolutely believe, is that in 1760, a party led by Dan’l was moving through this region when they were attacked by wolves. The animals’ lair was a hillside cave, and Boone named the whole area Wolf Hills.
That cave still exists beneath this house, which has its own long post-wolf history. It once housed actors for the Barter Theatre, and also served as a post-show cafe that used it as a refrigerator of sorts.
That a cave housing wolves that chased Daniel Boone lurks beneath a place that later housed Ernest Borgnine (it did!). It’s a wonderful pile-up of history.
Original photo by w_lemay
The evening mood.
The Barter Theatre
It’s a theatre evening.
The Barter Theatre opened in 1933, during the Great Depression, as local farmers’ crops wasted in the fields without buyers. But the Barter had a trade proposition: “With vegetables you cannot sell,” the theatre promised, “you can buy a good laugh.”
Admission was 35 cents or the equivalent value in something. “Four out of five theatre goers paid their way with vegetables, dairy products and livestock,” says the Barter.
This is a professional Equity house, the longest continually-running theatre of its kind, and a winner of the Tony Award. Its revolving company of actors has included Gregory Peck, Patricia Neal, and Hume Cronyn; it’s high-grade theatre in this little town in the hills.
Plays in rep this summer include The Savannah Sipping Society by Jones Hope Wooten, running through August 8:
“Four very different Southern women, all strangers,” says the Barter of the play, “decide it's high time to reclaim the excitement their lives once held.”
After that it’s Grandma Gatewood Took a Walk (chronicling a 67-year-old’s unexpected solo trek on the Appalachian trail).
Photo via Visit Abingdon
You have tickets for a Saturday evening show.
All booked for you in a tap.
This Overnight includes:
Your one-night stay at The Martha Washington Inn.
Tickets to a Barter Theatre production (The Savannah Sipping Society or Grandma Gatewood Took a Walk, depending on your travel date).
August 1: The Savannah Sipping Society
August 8, 15 & 22: Grandma Gatewood Took a Walk
Dinner for two at The Tavern. Pre-theatre, early, reservations at 5pm. $180 food and drink credit for two travelers, or $95 for one traveler. Order right off the menu.
So how does this work?
No payment is needed just yet. Request your reservation below, and we’ll make sure the weekend is ready on our end: then we’ll email you a secure payment link along with meal reservation times and event details (unless you’re on a strict schedule, let us arrange the times to ensure all the components flow together nicely. You just arrive).
Once you’re booked, we’ll send you all the key details: check-in, addresses, and reservation notes. For now, just let us know you’d like us to get going.