Old Fort Tourist Cottage Inn, Lynchburg, VA, 1934

About this postcard

A view down the Richmond Pike shows the Old Fort Tourist Cottage Inn and a Standard service station one mile south of Lynchburg. The two-story inn stands across the road in the distance, while the station's 'Standard Authorized Agent' sign and a Mobilgas pump sign sit in the right foreground. Roadside tourist cottages and filling stations like these lined American highways in the 1920s and 1930s, when auto touring created a new market for overnight lodging and gasoline just outside city limits. The inn advertised 'commercial business a specialty,' a pitch to traveling salesmen and motorists passing through. A guest who stayed three days wrote that she would come back.