Golfers: What are your favorite holes in the area? See if our Timesland Dream 18 is up to par and nominate your favorite.
Having spent nearly 20 years on the road driving a big rig, Eric Pelton can only guess he’s eaten at hundreds of roadside restaurants.
Some good, some bad, some ugly.
He even spent five years working in food delivery, and, as he got serious about opening his own diner, he would ask restaurant owners about their trade.
Bread was 27 cents a loaf, and coffee was 27 cents per pound when Carlton Layne opened Layne’s Market on U.S. 11 on Nov. 17, 1954. Times have changed since then, but much remains the same at this country store in Rockbridge County. “We still give credit to quite a few people who pay me once a month or whenever,” Layne, 80, said from behind the counter, where he keeps a little black book to track those transactions.
Midway between Natural Bridge and Lexington, the store’s history long exceeds Interstate 81 or U.S 11. The first business on the property was a log structure built in 1840 to support travelers along the Great Wagon Road. Later, it became a service station and had overnight cabins for tourists. Layne bought and expanded the business. When the interstate was built parallel to U.S. 11 in the early 1960s, business slowed down, but, within two years, Layne said, he was selling more than before.
Fifty-six years ago, it took a group of men $100 each and donated land to build a community center where people gathered to dance and play music around an old wood stove.
A few miles and a few decades later, the Redwood Ruritan Club and Community Center sits down the road from a Lowe’s, Walmart and Kroger, all built within the past 10 years. Read more »
The only action in Bedford, on a warm and misty Tuesday night, came from behind the windows of an old storefront on Main Street. Cars cruised by on wet streets. Pool balls collided with dull bumps inside.
Bedford is between Roanoke and Lynchburg, past the big gas storage tanks in Montvale. It’s the county seat, known for the National D-Day Memorial and views of the Peaks of Otter. Bridge Street cuts across Main in a sleepy town center of antique shops, restaurants, a hardware store and a church whose steeple once blew off in a late-summer tornado.
Spiral wood shavings fall around the boots of Daniel Foster, 67, in his woodworking shop in Blacksburg.
Their inward curls resemble the scroll at the end of the viola he is carving by hand from a sheet of maple from eastern Europe.
“You can make a violin out of most anything. All you need is a box, a vibrating string and hair to make a bow, you can make something that passes for a violin,” he said.
“It’s easy to make a bad one … but to play on a superb instrument is just thrilling.”
