Woodlawn tells Goochland's post-Revolution history and road travel story

Woodlawn sits at Broad Street Road and old Three Chopt Road, about 5 miles west of the Henrico County line, and it still reads like a place where Goochland’s past and present meet. Built by Elisha Leake, a Goochland County miller and Revolutionary War veteran, the house moved from private dwelling to tavern stop because travelers were already using this corridor. That is why Woodlawn matters now: it explains how the county grew along roads, not just around farms and houses.

A Revolutionary-era house built for a growing county

The Virginia Department of Historic Resources identifies Woodlawn as property 037-0035 in Goochland County, a large brick dwelling built in the last quarter of the 18th century. Leake’s background matters as much as the brickwork. He was not just a landowner, but a miller tied to the county’s agricultural economy and a veteran of the Revolutionary War, part of the generation that turned independence into settlement and production.

Woodlawn’s preservation history is also firmly documented. The property was listed in the Virginia Landmarks Register on July 6, 1971, and in the National Register of Historic Places on December 16, 1971, under reference number 71000978. Those dates place the house among the county’s formally recognized historic places and show that its importance was not just local nostalgia. It was accepted as part of Virginia’s historic fabric more than 50 years ago.

Goochland County itself was founded in 1728, and county tourism materials say it has 27 historic sites registered on the National or State Register for Historic Places. Woodlawn is one of the most visible of them because its story is still legible from the roadside. That visibility is part of its value, and part of what makes the property vulnerable when modern development starts to crowd old alignments.

Why a tavern appeared here in 1806

In 1806, Woodlawn was leased to John Trevillian, who opened a tavern there. The location was not accidental. It sat on Three Chopt Road, the historic route that later became U.S. Route 250, and that made the property useful to travelers moving through central Virginia.

This is where Woodlawn becomes more than a house with a historic plaque. It was part of the infrastructure of travel and hospitality, the kind of place that served people moving between Richmond and Charlottesville long before those names became shorthand for modern commuting and regional growth. A tavern at this site made sense because the road made sense. The road made sense because Goochland was already a corridor county, not a backwater.

A Goochland History post from April 10, 2013 placed Woodlawn at the intersection of Broad Street Road and old Three Chopt Road, just 5 miles west of the Henrico County line. That same roadside setting explains why the house remains easy to spot from the road, even with trees and highway noise around it. The house does not sit apart from the county’s transportation story. It sits inside it.

Three Chopt Road and the older map beneath Route 250

The road itself carries the larger story. VPM explained on April 1, 2024 that Three Chopt Road likely got its name from three notches cut into trees to blaze the trail, a reminder that colonial travel depended on physical marks in the landscape. The route was an east-west corridor across central Virginia, linking the Richmond area with Charlottesville.

A Charlottesville historical marker says Three Notch’d Road, also called Three Chopt Road, ran from Richmond to the Shenandoah Valley and was superseded by Route 250 in the 1930s. A Virginia Transportation Research Council report describes it as one of the most significant east-west routes from Richmond to the Valley from the 1730s. Put together, those details show that Woodlawn sits on top of a long transportation chain: trail, colonial road, tavern stop, modern highway corridor.

That matters for Goochland because old road patterns still shape where pressure falls today. Broad Street Road and the Route 250 corridor are not just places people drive through. They are the spine of development, the edge of preservation, and the line where historic identity can either stay visible or get buried under piecemeal change. Woodlawn makes that tension concrete because it is still anchored to the road that gave it purpose.

What to look for at Woodlawn and why it still matters

If you stop at Woodlawn, the most important details are not abstract. They are the ones that connect the house to the county’s larger story:

• The house is a large brick dwelling from the last quarter of the 18th century, built by Elisha Leake.

• Leake was both a Goochland County miller and a Revolutionary War veteran, linking the site to the county’s early economy and the postwar generation.

• John Trevillian opened a tavern here in 1806 because the site sat on Three Chopt Road, later U.S. Route 250.

• The property sits at Broad Street Road and old Three Chopt Road, about 5 miles west of the Henrico County line.

• Woodlawn was formally recognized in 1971 by both the Virginia Landmarks Register and the National Register of Historic Places.

That combination is what makes the site so revealing. It is not just a surviving house, and it is not just a stop on a heritage trail. It is evidence that Goochland grew through movement, commerce, milling, and roadside exchange, then kept growing along the same lines even as the road became a highway.

Woodlawn also shows what historic corridor protections are really trying to save. If the road edge loses its historic visibility, the county loses more than an old house. It loses the ability to read how the settlement pattern began, how travel shaped local business, and why Broad Street Road still feels like a boundary between past and future in Goochland County.