The Generals Are Still Here

Lexington, Virginia, asks very little of you on arrival. What it gives you in return is considerably more complicated. The setting for the small town of 7,000 inhabitants is both beautiful and strangely captivating. You first come for the history. Lexington is a town that rewards the visitor who slows down enough to feel what is unresolved about it.  Few towns of Lexington’s size have asked so much of, or given so much to, American history. That quality, it turns out, is most of what makes it worth the trip.

The main street runs perhaps six blocks before it finds a traffic light. There are coffee shops, a hardware store that still carries things you did not know you needed, a handful of restaurants that would hold their own in a city four times the size, and bookstores that suggest the town reads seriously. On any given afternoon, cadets from the Virginia Military Institute walk the sidewalks in gray wool uniforms, and students from Washington and Lee University move between them with the easy confidence of people who have decided they are exactly where they belong. It takes about twenty minutes to walk Lexington end to end. Most visitors take considerably longer, because places keep stopping them.

Lexington sits in the Shenandoah Valley in Rockbridge County, at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Horse farms occupy the larger tracts outside of town, their fences running along contours of expansive pasture. The Maury River flows south through stands of sycamore and hemlock. The mountains sit at the valley’s edge in the particular way Blue Ridge mountains do, not dramatic, exactly, but permanent-feeling, as though they have been watching the town sort out its considerable complications for a long time and expect to keep watching.

Virginia Military Institute was founded in 1839, the first state-supported military college in the country, and its post occupies the southern edge of town with a self-contained authority. The parade ground is the center of it, a wide rectangle of grass where cadets drill in the late afternoon and from where, in 1864, the entire Corps of Cadets marched north to fight as a unit at the Battle of New Market. Young men, some barely past boyhood, pressed into a Union line in the Shenandoah. They broke it. Ten cadets did not come home.

The VMI Museum, housed in Jackson Memorial Hall, is one of the better military history collections in the South and warrants more time than most visitors give it. The artifacts are specific and serious: the bullet-pierced rain slicker that Thomas Jonathan Jackson was wearing when he was shot by his own men at Chancellorsville, items belonging to George Marshall, VMI class of 1901, who went on to design the postwar European recovery and earn a Nobel Peace Prize. The museum does not shy from complexity. It does not need to. The record is complicated enough on its own terms, and the collection is honest about that.

Jackson taught natural philosophy at VMI for a decade before the war. His former home on Washington Street, a few blocks from campus, has been preserved as a museum.  You will notice, if you are paying attention, that the town carries certain conversations quietly, without resolution, the way a family carries a disagreement that is too old and too deep to be finished over dinner.

The hill immediately above VMI belongs to Washington and Lee University, separated from the military institute by a stone wall and a century and a half of proximity that has produced as much rivalry as friendship. The campus is handsome in the way that old Virginia institutions tend to be, wearing its red brick, white columns, and a lawn that takes itself seriously. University Chapel, once called “Lee Chapel” before 2021, anchors the lower end of the main colonnade, a calm and well-proportioned building that draws visitors who arrive in the spirit of something between tourism and private reckoning.

Robert E. Lee accepted the presidency of what was then Washington College in the autumn of 1865, four months after Appomattox. He led it until his death in 1870 and is buried beneath the chapel, along with members of his family. Traveller, his horse, is interred outside the chapel wall. The recumbent marble statue of Lee in the lower chamber is the kind of thing that gives you pause, not because it is overwrought — it is not — but because of what it asks you to think about while you are standing in front of it. The university carries his name. That name has for years been the subject of a serious institutional argument about what it means to carry it. The University Board of Trustees voted to keep the name at the same time it changed Lee Chapel’s name. The chapel itself offers no opinion. It simply holds the man.

Beyond the chapel, Washington and Lee is a working university of genuine academic reputation, its law school particularly well regarded. Graduates of W&L Law include two Justices of the United States Supreme Court. The campus is open to visitors, and the bookstore is worth a stop. The Williams School of Commerce at the school and the Reeves Center collection of ceramics and decorative arts are less well known than they deserve to be. 

Lexington’s commercial center is compact enough that a morning’s walking easily covers it. The Lexington Visitor Center on East Washington Street is a reasonable first stop for maps and orientation, though the town is small enough that orientation comes quickly on its own. The Georges hotel provides the most characterful accommodation in the area and sits within easy reach of the town’s sites and Natural Bridge State Park to the south.

For food, Haywood’s on Main has established itself as the most serious kitchen in town, its menu rooted in Virginia ingredients without the self-consciousness that phrase sometimes implies. The Palms has been feeding students and locals for decades with the reliability that only institutions achieve.  On Saturday mornings, the farmers market on Main Street carries the particular energy of a market that actual residents use rather than one that exists for visitors, which is the more interesting kind.

The Stonewall Jackson House on Washington Street and the George C. Marshall Museum on the VMI post are both worth the entry fee. The Marshall Museum, in particular, tends to be undervisited, which is a reasonable summary of Marshall’s place in popular memory: indispensable to the American century, and somehow never quite famous enough. The exhibit on the Marshall Plan is as good an explanation of that extraordinary undertaking as you will find anywhere. 

Natural Bridge, fifteen minutes south on US-11, is now a Virginia state park and is considerably better for it. The bridge itself is a 215-foot limestone arch spanning Cedar Creek, which Jefferson called the most sublime of nature’s works. It repays the short hike down to it. Standing beneath it is not the same experience as reading about it, which is worth remembering. The cedar forest surrounding it is quiet, old, and uncrowded on weekdays.

The Chessie Nature Trail follows the Maury River south from Lexington along a former railbed, offering an easy and genuinely lovely walk through bottomland and woodland, with the river alongside. The trail runs about seven miles to Buena Vista. The Blue Ridge Parkway is accessible within thirty minutes and offers the long views that the valley itself withholds. The Virginia Horse Center, just north of town on Route 39, hosts equestrian events throughout the year that are open to spectators and provide a grounding reminder that this is, whatever else it may be, working horse country.

Stonewall Jackson was born in Clarksburg, Virginia, a town that is now in West Virginia. He is buried in the Lexington Cemetery, a quiet municipal burial ground a short walk from the VMI post. His grave is marked by a bronze statue of Jackson himself, facing south, that rises above the surrounding grave stones. The cemetery is well kept and unhurried, the kind of place where locals walk dogs in the morning. Schoolchildren visit on field trips. Veterans leave small flags. Around him, in the same ground, lie the ordinary dead of Lexington, the merchants, the professors, the farmers from the surrounding county, going about the eternal business of keeping the man company.

Lexington is best in the shoulder seasons. Spring arrives in the valley with dogwood and redbud sometime in April, and the farmland south of town turns a particular shade of green that seems improbable. Fall brings the Blue Ridge color, which peaks in mid-October and is worth planning around. Summer is warm and humid, and the town fills with visitors on Civil War touring circuits; not unpleasant, but busier. Winter empties the students out and leaves a quieter Lexington that has its own appeal: the colleges’ architecture is more visible without the leaf cover, the mountains seem closer in the cold air.