Sat. May 23 - Sun. May 24 | 2026
Abingdon, VA
The Barter Weekend
An evening at America’s longest-running professional theatre, tucked inside one of Virginia’s most overnightable small towns.
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 bookable in one click.
Get the full story for the weekend.
Where you’re going: into a little colonial-era town, 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 (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 place, enjoy the theatre, and forget your car till Sunday.
Photo by By Steven C. Price
Photo by Jerrye & Roy Klotz, MD
This weekend 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
You’re reserved and pre-paid for Saturday night. Queen suite, two travelers.
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 we passed through here, and King Louis Philippe of France, too, and Henry Clay.
This was a makeshift hospital during the Civil War, and The Tavern once counted down the 12 days of Christmas, on Instagram, by sharing photos of old bed numbers still visible in 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. $185 food and drink credit. 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 — well 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.
The 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 the cave as a refrigerator of sorts.
A cave that once housed wolves chasing Daniel Boone lurks beneath a place that once 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, longest continually-running theatre of its kind, and a winner of the Tony Award. Its revolving company of actors have included Gregory Peck, Patricia Neal, and Hume Cronyn; it’s high-grade theatre in this little town in the hills.
The play this Saturday night is The Savannah Sipping Society by Jones Hope Wooten (actually a collective of playwrights: Jessie Jones, Nicholas Hope and Jamie Wooten).
“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.”
Photo via Visit Abingdon
You have tickets for two. Show starts at 7:30pm.
Book it all in a click.
This Overnight includes:
Your stay at The Martha Washington Inn. Reserved for two. Saturday, May 23, 2026.
Tickets for two to Barter Theatre’s production of The Savannah Sipping Society. Saturday evening, 7:30pm.
Dinner for two at The Tavern. Pre-theatre, early, reservations at 5pm. $185 food and drink credit; order right off the menu.
Images in our stories may be sourced from publicly available materials, and are used to represent places as they exist. All rights remain with their respective owners.