Today’s building is just south of Charlottesville, Virginia, in the sparsely populated countryside and wine country. It’s a beautiful place to drive around, with narrow, winding roads and lots of trees, hills, and lovely old stores and churches. One such store is the Simeon Market, a few miles from James Monroe’s Highland.

Now there’s a good chance you already know how this building began life. But if not, here’s a local article from late 2019, describing the creation of the new Simeon Market business, after the building suffered a period of vacancy. It’s nearly 100 years old, meaning it was constructed in the mid-to-late 1920s. It’s a café and sandwich shop, with a distinct bakery business under the same roof, launched by a Charlottesville restaurant owner.

We stopped here for lunch on a recent long weekend—a trip which also inspired this post—and for about $10, you get a really excellent sandwich, with generous locally sourced ingredients on fresh-baked baguettes. It’s not cheap, but it isn’t pretentious either. The idea that there’s something inherently pretentious about local eating strikes me as very narrow and modern. Simeon Market is a throwback to how business was once unselfconsciously done, a point I elaborated, for example, in this piece on Staunton, Virginia, with a reference to its notable restaurant scene. This local food is great for wine-county daytrippers, who in turn are enriching the region’s economy. It all works together.

Now, back to the building. It began as a filling station, or gas station. The giveaway is the overhang, where the pumps would have been located. Many of these filling stations were either attached to a living quarter, or to a garage designed to look like a small house. Many also housed small country stores. These are solid and adaptable little buildings, and quite a lot of them survive throughout the countryside, long before the Interstates aggregated roadside businesses around exit ramps. Many have been renovated, some remain gas stations, and many are also abandoned. Here’s one south of Winchester, Virginia that hasn’t fared so well.

I yesterday about how it’s unfortunate to see the built environment change too much too quickly; it’s nice to have landmarks and layer of built history in a place. It’s great to see old and largely obsolete structures like this with new life, and at the same time rebuilding a local economy and small business network.

Related Reading:

What Do You Think You’re Looking At? #23

What Do You Think You’re Looking At? #12

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