I should’ve, could’ve picked a better day to take a walking tour of ÂÒÂ×ÄÚÉä.
After about a week of sunshine and ideal autumn temperatures, the sky had gone all charcoal and gray. The air felt sickly and damp, like the cough of a cold, and I had the wrong clothes for the weather.
While joggers in gym shorts and T-shirts loped past me on Kanawha Boulevard, I kept tugging at my thin, brown coat, wishing I’d worn something a bit more substantial and maybe brought an umbrella.
This was how I began Emma Carpenter’s walking tour of ÂÒÂ×ÄÚÉä, fretting about the incoming rain and hoping I could get to the end of the route before I got soaked.
My month spent learning about the history of ÂÒÂ×ÄÚÉä was making steady progress. Thanks to Dr. Billy Joe Peyton, I’d learned a little about the founding of the city and its years leading up to the Civil War.
Over coffee, he’d given me a crash course, but I’d also picked up a copy of his book, “Historic ÂÒÂ×ÄÚÉä: The First 225 Years,†which helped fill in some of the gaps we hadn’t covered during our talk.
It wasn’t all wine and roses.
Reading the book, I could see some of the same aches and pains that trouble the city today.
The people of ÂÒÂ×ÄÚÉä wanted growth, but progress was usually slow coming. The city seemed frequently dismissed as just another sleepy river town, though it had aspirations to be something bigger — maybe get a NASCAR track or something.
I also found out that my hometown of Pearisburg, Virginia, figured into the history of ÂÒÂ×ÄÚÉä — sort of.
On Sept. 6, 1862, 10,000 Confederate soldiers under the command of General Loring left Pearisburg and schlepped to ÂÒÂ×ÄÚÉä. It took them a week to get there on foot, owing to occasional skirmishes and, I imagine, tolls.
Loring came to liberate the valley, but Union forces didn’t see it that way. There was a battle. The Union army was driven out. General Loring took over the local printing press and dove into the very lucrative business of running a newspaper with “The Guerilla.â€
The Confederates held the city for about six weeks.
“The Guerilla†probably had to cut back on daily delivery after that.
Emma Carpenter’s walking tour offered to take me places I hadn’t been — or, rather, take me places I’d been many times but knew very little about.
I heard about the walking tour a few years ago.
It got some notice in 2021 because Emma’s aunt is actress, producer and audio book reader Jennifer Garner — ÂÒÂ×ÄÚÉä’s best-known (and honestly, favorite) celebrity.
I remember that I’d meant to write about the tour, but at the time, I think I was finishing up my summer visiting all 55 counties in West Virginia, and I was exhausted.
But better late than never. I contacted Emma through Instagram and she agreed to talk to me in between classes at Auburn University.
The walking tour was years in the making, it turned out.
Emma said her eighth-grade English teacher, Emily Patterson, assigned an end-of-year group project. Each group was tasked to pick one area building, and propose some kind of update or restoration that would draw people to the area.
“My building was the Daniel Boone Hotel,†she said.
Learning about the history of the hotel and who had stayed there made her want to learn more about local buildings and the history that went with them.
“It created this desire to want to restore historic buildings,†she said.
During Emma’s freshman year at George Washington High School, she entered and won a contest called Chipstarter, hosted by Chip and Joanna Gaines from HGTV.
The contest sent her to the Savannah College of Art and Design in Georgia, where she spent a week studying historic preservation and interior design in one of the most notable cities in the south.
“Savannah history: You can’t get much better than that,†Emma said.
In high school, she started a blog, Emma Carpenter 304, and slowly began to dig deeper into local architecture and history.
When she was a high school senior, she decided to create the walking tour through the VoiceMap phone app.
Emma impressed me. I didn’t start blogging until I was in my 30s, and the idea of my creating a walking tour of anything should terrify the public. I routinely get lost looking for plumbing or electrical supplies at Lowe’s and once had to ask for directions on how to exit a Walmart.
It wasn’t even a Super Walmart.
I started the tour on the sidewalk, above Haddad Riverfront Park, pressed the button and followed Emma’s voice, while occasionally glancing down at my phone to see the map.
Constantly looking at my phone seemed distracting, but oddly necessary — though I kept a wary eye out for walkers with dogs, joggers wearing ear buds and smokers on bicycles.
The walking tour took me down the boulevard and then back along Virginia Street toward the heart of ÂÒÂ×ÄÚÉä. Along the way, Emma served up tidbits of history, talked about the architecture of different buildings and pointed out places I could stop if I was hungry.
That last part was largely unnecessary. I am always hungry, but the walking tour wasn’t really intended for people like me, who have an encyclopedic knowledge of the city’s cheese fry and nacho offerings.
For visitors with about an hour to kill, it was a nice primer of ÂÒÂ×ÄÚÉä’s downtown, giving a dash of local color, but it wasn’t entirely a bad thing for guys like me who’ve been wandering these streets for 20 years.
The tour pointed out things I’d walked past a thousand times and put a little new light on them.
Emma also cleared up a couple of misconceptions, like my beliefs about Mortar Man, the tiny character tucked into a building wall on Capitol Street. I thought he’d been part of the city for generations, but really, Mortar Man hasn’t been in ÂÒÂ×ÄÚÉä that much longer than I have.
The end of the tour brought me back to where I started and before the minutes in my parking meter ran out.
I felt pretty good about the tour. The rain never really materialized, and I’d only gotten turned around twice.
Things change and I wondered whether Emma would ever update or add to her walking tour. That was a question I should’ve asked. The answer is likely dependent on where Emma ends up after graduation.
She told me she was studying interior design with a minor in sustainability.
“The hope is to eventually get my master’s in historic preservation and move back to ÂÒÂ×ÄÚÉä,†she said.
Emma wants to restore the city’s old buildings.
She already has a list of buildings she wants to restore. You can see all of them on her tour.
