A remarkable survival is this large version of the wooden taverns commonly built in Virginia courthouse towns and villages in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Alexander Boyd Jr. seems to have begun construction of the two-story tavern about a decade before the town was established. By 1812 the double-pile, center-hall main block had single-story wings with front doors entering noncommunicating rooms. In the 1870s, Holt raised the wings to two stories. Two-story porches running the full length of the wings and attached to the porch of the main block tie the building together. Subsequently a south (left) addition was constructed, incorporating a store that, like most of the tavern, survived the twentieth century with relatively little change.