Linda and I recently renewed the lease on our loft apartment here in “Livable, Lovable, Lexington,” as the chamber of commerce calls it in marketing materials. And as former Lexingtonian Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson said of the town: “Of all the places…this little village is the most beautiful.” That it has remained a “little village” to this day is its biggest draw for us.
While we have been blessed to call more than a dozen places home, I must admit that Lexington ranks up there with the best of them. And given my roots in the Shenandoah Valley my return here has brought me full circle. Lexington is the county seat in an otherwise rural county and we are only ten miles from the Blue Ridge Parkway so our proximity to nature means we experience the best of both worlds.
As Rebecca Solnit writes in Storming the Gates of Paradise, “Places matter. Their rules, their scale, their design include or exclude civil society…They map our lives.” And Howard Mansfield adds in Dwelling in Possibility, “Great places—the places where we want to live, the places we visit—are built of relationships between small and large buildings, public and private, square and street, old and new.”
An exception, the tallest building in Lexington is the circa 1920’s six-story hotel that towers next to our circa 1890 three-story former bank building, which is the norm for not only our town but also other small historic towns, as it represents the proper scale to Main Street life and commerce. Our downtown basically consists of only three square blocks, with bookstores, cafes, and galleries lending a hipster vibe to the college town.
“The idea of a small town represents a whole menu of human values: an agreeable scale of human enterprise, tranquility, public safety, proximity of neighbors and markets, nearness to authentic countryside, and permanence,” writes James Howard Kunstler in The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America’s Man-Made Landscape. Lexington is gentrifying yet affordable so we hope to call it home for a while and continue to enjoy the small town life.