A long-gone structure that stood on Charlottesville’s Preston Avenue in Virginia and became a Green Book-era lodging for such luminaries as Louis Armstrong and Thurgood Marshall will soon be commemorated with a state historic marker.
At its June meeting, the Virginia Board of Historic Resources approved the text of the plaque to honor what was once the Carver Inn.
“Hopefully we can bring some memories with the marker and how important it was,” the marker’s initiator, Edwina St. Rose, told The Daily Progress.
A Charlottesville native and retired administrative judge, St. Rose said that her interest in the Carver Inn began in childhood during the Jim Crow era when her parents would take her there for a cheeseburger and the chance to listen to music in the basement.
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That chef was Theodore McLeod, who with business partner Beatrice Bradley Fowlkes eyed the large Victorian house at the corner of Preston Avenue and Albemarle Street in the mid-1940s. As McLeod would later say in a 1971 Daily Progress article, the two Black entrepreneurs saw a for-sale sign that stipulated that bids would be accepted “by caucasians only.” McLeod said that he and Fowlkes paid a lawyer $500 to submit their winning bid.
Back when they opened the 10-room inn in 1947, Black travelers were largely consigned to small guesthouses. The Carver, by contrast, was “the only Negro hotel in Charlottesville,” according to John Hammond Moore in his history of Virginia’s Albemarle County.
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