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.
“My parents were good friends with the owners, and Mr. McLeod was the chef, and he would let me go downstairs to play the jukebox, and he would give me some quarters.” This 1961 photograph shows the Carver Inn at the corner of Preston Avenue and Albemarle Street in Charlottesville.
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 wi.