The Mountain Valley Preservation Alliance recently (June 2017) hosted some excellent tours of the unspoiled town of Fincastle, county seat of Botetourt County near Roanoke, Virginia. The tours began, appropriately enough, at the courthouse, which is one of those intricate architectural history puzzles. Thomas Jefferson provided a design for the county’s courthouse in the 1810s, and an ambitious domed courthouse was constructed, but how much the building owed to Jefferson’s design is unclear. The current building is mostly a reconstruction resulting from a 1970 fire but the Doric portico and circuit court wing survive from the antebellum period.

The time-forgot part of Fincastle is experienced on the back streets, dotted with small clapboarded log houses. The houses don’t date all the way back to the town’s founding in 1772 but they’re evocative of the early days. Fincastle displays a trait seen in other western Virginia towns but obscured by later development: the elevated and peripheral placement of its older churches. Sacred hilltop siting probably dates back to pre-Christian times in western culture with a boost from the Bible (City on a Hill etc.), and peripheral siting reserved room at the heart of town for commercial development and got congregations out of the stink and clamor of downtown.

The churches are Greek Revival gems, with temple fronts, Doric columns in antis (Fincastle Presbyterian), and Asher Benjamin-inspired window treatments (Fincastle UMC). St. Mark’s Episcopal has a Greek pediment above lancet-arched Gothic Revival windows (antebellum western Virginia builders were no purists). Something that caught my eye on the tours was the fancy cast iron crestings over the windows of the Victorian house now operated as 25 E. Main B&B. The crestings reminded me of similar ones on the window lintels of Rockwood, a spectacular Pulaski County house designed and built by Lynchburgers R. C. Burkholder and John P. Pettyjohn in 1874-75. Meanwhile, across from the Botetourt County Courthouse, architect Barry Rakes is diligently rehabilitating a mysterious log house, adding another gem to Fincastle’s architectural crown jewels.

Main Street in Fincastle, Virginia