April 2004

Travel: Mountain Magic

Sugar Tree Inn offers elegant rusticity and a 40—mile view

by Jo Ann M. Hofheimer

Bed and Breakfasts can be tricky. The harborside place in St. Michaels looked so welcoming, but a clanking halyard kept us up all night. The Georgian mansion outside Charlottesville was beautifully decorated, but the mustiness in those old walls played havoc with our sinuses. So it goes.

But less than a mile from the Blue Ridge Parkway, down a steep and twisting road, lies a magical place for mountain lovers and hikers. Sugar Tree Inn is just what a mountain inn should be: elegantly rustic, historic but comfortable, convenient but worlds away. It’s easy to spend several days there, hiking and returning each afternoon in time to grab a rocker on the front porch and watch the sun go down over the Blue Ridge, a 40—mile view. By the time the stars come out, after a superb dinner, you can’t help but be at peace with the world.

Authenticity is what makes this place different. The inn is composed of several buildings constructed from abandoned 18th—and 19th—century log buildings. Dr. Rick Meeth, a local seminarian and preservationist in Rockbridge County, found three log cabins, a church, a barn, a school and a general store. He dismantled them, numbering each log, and stored them. When he started building Sugar Tree in 1977 as his home, he worked with local people using the original construction methods. Dr. Meeth found recipes for chinking (placing the mortar between the logs) and researched how to notch logs to interlock securely. Stone foundations came from a local quarry. Interior walls are made from reclaimed chestnut logs, once the mainstay of the local economy but lost to blight by 1925.

For the rest of this story, you can order the April 2004 issue of Hampton Roads Magazine.