Cabell Gallery in Virginia Living Magazine, April 2015

32 Reasons to Love Lexington by Deveron Timberlake From thinkers and makers to doers and risk-takers, Lexington is putting on a fresh face. Today, this once sleepy college town, where Lee and Jackson still loom large, is fast becoming a newly intriguing destination. Main Street in historic downtown Lexington. The details are telling—early edition Dickens by the bed at an inn, steaming risotto served in local earthenware bowls at a café, a bit of jazz floating on the sidewalk on Main Street. If Lexington would like to position itself as a thinking person’s destination, it’s making some notable inroads. This was once a hamlet, then a town, now a city, in a county that’s one-third national forest. One broad, crenelated skyline holds posts and flagpoles; another looking south brims with trees and steeples. Farmers and artists mingle with professors from Washington and Lee University and the Virginia Military Institute, where top-tier students yield a long legacy of achievement. For the most part, Lexington thinks well of itself and, in its own gentle way, gets the visitor to agree. It starts with the speaking tradition, a long honored expectation that students and adults will make eye contact—that people will speak and likely know who they’re addressing. It is the ethos of acknowledgement, “a sense that we’re all related somehow,” as one resident puts it. Thus, rights are mostly respected, but secrets are hard to keep, setting up a polite tension of informed opinions. There is civility and precision and critical thinking, and no lack of ambition. A list of Lexington’s achievers includes a world-renowned photographer, one of the 20th century’s most celebrated artists, a pair of professors turned brewers, and the champion for a newly-resurrected beloved local music venue. The cerebral and sensory stimuli around town are weighty: rare firearms in the VMI Museum, the kitchen garden of Stonewall Jackson, summer concerts in a quarry, a bookshop exploding with material for all manner of study. There’s something beneath the surface here, an internal geology that rewards effort, but prefers humility. A good time can be had, and will likely resonate well beyond the staying. This is our guide to the people and places of a changing Lexington, where new finesse meshes with longstanding traditions of hospitality. Optimists, Entrepreneurs & Makers Lexington “is like living in the middle of a landscape painting,” says plein air artist Jean Marie Tremmel. She paints outdoors in all seasons, finding new fields and foothills to capture with groups or alone. Tremmel and her husband, sculptor T.J. Tremmel, formed WareHouse in the fledgling Industrial & Arts District downtown, where they’ve converted an old building into multi-generational housing and art studios. An adjacent gallery shows their pieces in clay, walnut, soapstone and oil. A Mother’s Day studio tour is always well attended. Cabell Gorman and Corey Akers, of Cabell Gallery. Cabell Gorman opened an art gallery downtown in September, joining nine others showing local and outside artists to a growing audience. “My job is to bring joy to people’s lives through art,” Gorman says, and she has turned an old hair salon into a sparkling storefront, Cabell Gallery, that’s part of the First Fridays art openings. Native son and esteemed painter Cy Twombly, the only 20th-century artist with a permanent installation in the Louvre, who died in Rome in 2011, remains among the city’s most prominent cultural figures. Photographer Sally Mann continues to dazzle the art world with her lyrical images and narrative writings from a farm near town, where locals still recall her physician father, and where her husband is city attorney. Beyond art, the Virginia Horse Center “is one of my favorite things,” Cabell Gorman says of the sprawling facility nearby. “People who aren’t familiar with Lexington may not know about it, but you can go to the rodeo, or a hunter-jumper show or a mustang rally—just really interesting things that people might not know are happening in our state.” Spencer McElroy, a 27-year-old W&L graduate, led the charge to reclaim an outdoor music venue, Lime Kiln, with a board of volunteers primed to present good music. The site is captivating, he says. “You go in, and you’re in a 12-acre park with old kilns and huge 50-foot quarry cliffs and old log cabins. It’s just really cool, a hidden gem three minutes from downtown. And the bands share that feeling—they don’t normally play at places like that, so a lot of energy is created.” The venue, first opened for performances in 1967 by W&L students, has climbed from insolvency two years ago to sell-out crowds for sought-after acts. Northern Virginians Lai and Betsy Lee picked Lexington for their business incubator, Start Here, and turned a 1920s building into shared retail and office space. “There’s so much untapped potential here,” says Lai Lee. Now, with the city’s fiber optics backbone in place for the past two years, “and with the natural beauty and great universities,” he continues, “why isn’t everybody coming here?” He points to yearly Entrepreneurial Summit pitch competitions, led by W&L professor Jeff Shay, that get student juices flowing; some of the winning concepts are already on the market. Siobhan Deeds’ fashion boutique Pumpkinseeds. The Lexington shopping experience is hands-on, with local owners present and visible in their stores. Among the options: major daily newspapers and business journals at The Bookery, locally-roasted beans at Lexington Coffee Roasters, and confections and gifts from a number of specialty shops. Pumpkinseeds is a fashion boutique run by Siobhan Deeds, wife of state Sen. Creigh Deeds, its sign outside proclaiming it the “cutest darn store ever” and its goods a spirited mix. Nearby shopkeepers offer antiques, jewels, garden goods, clothing and kitchenware, and an appreciation for the sale. “One of the really nice things about this place is that it is extraordinarily tolerant,” says Douglas Harwood, who publishes the monthly Rockbridge Advocate. “As long as you’re not in somebody’s face with unacceptable behavior, we pretty much put up with each other’s foibles and quirks. It’s an accepting place with huge educational and cultural disparities, religious disparities, but everybody learns to get along. If it were less diverse, it wouldn’t be nearly as interesting.” Harwood is known for riling things up with reporting and commentary under the paper’s motto, “Independent as a hog on ice.” Sacred cows may not be amused, but Harwood has landed in the Virginia Communications Hall of Fame for his efforts. The W&L alum’s Saturday night radio show on campus station WLUR, now in its 43rd year, plays music from ancient Greece to modern America. And Harwood is the keeper of such intel as students’ habit of rubbing for luck a certain part of the George Washington statue, and the resulting need for it to be repaired on more than one occasion. The Art of Hospitality Over on Main Street, refurbished buildings are unmistakable signs of change. The six-story Robert E. Lee Hotel, built in 1926 and restored last year by developer Ugo Benincasa, hosts an occasional dinner theater and plenty of weddings in its ballroom. Upstairs, the savory Italian restaurant Rocca comes with a balcony for starry nights and orecchiette sometimes served by Christine Taylor, a resident who home-schools her 10 children and now works for one of them in the restaurant. Then comes The Georges, a posh two-building boutique hotel created in 2014 by VMI alumnus Teddy Gottwald and his wife Ann Parker Gottwald, who have introduced a chic, comfortable glamour to these historic environs. (Guests must book well in advance for reunion weekends.) Hand-picked books on the nightstands in 18 guest rooms, sumptuous tiled and papered washrooms and an assured touch from reception to departure show off a high standard. Pastries and local-foods breakfasts are set next to a two-sided stone fireplace, and fresh flowers are the perpetual amusement of innkeeper Tina McCarthy. Laughter is encouraged, but quiet is available. The Georges’ attached piano bar and lounge, Haywood’s, is designed as a tribute to Ann Parker’s jazz-loving father. It has fast become a social force with a corner window vantage, an enticing menu of bisque and brisket and its embrace of local musicians. W&L music technologist and performer Graham Spice is one: “It’s fantastic to have a place like Haywood’s where I can play. It may be background music to some, but I’m thrilled that it’s a possibility. And I would say it’s a harbinger of the energy here—that Lexington is getting its swagger.” Spice views the scene as a native son who left for Nashville and returned to town to raise a family. “It’s not up to our parents’ generation to maintain the culture,” he says of recent momentum. “And this does feel like something new and exciting.” As in other trendy places, local foods predominate on Lexington menus, with farmers on a first-name basis with young chefs and restaurant owners. Exemplars of the movement in addition to Haywood’s include The Red Hen downtown, where chef Matt Adams and his pastry chef wife Becca Norris Adams turn out succulence with charm, brewing their own ginger beer and bitters, sourcing local fresh game, fish and produce and respecting their regional origins. The same is true for an unlikelier outpost tucked inside the YMCA, Kind Roots Café, where customers can buy duck and chicken eggs by the dozen or experience high-flavor heartiness, vegan to bacon, among a cadre of regulars.

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