8 Virginia Roadside Stands Tourists Blow Past Without Ever Knowing What They Missed
Virginia has handed the governor’s Century Farm certificate to more than 1,600 families across the state.
A lot of those farms sit along a road you’ve probably driven.
These are the Virginia roadside stands tourists drive straight past without ever knowing what they missed.
Critzer Family Farm
Critzer Family Farm sits on Route 151 in Afton, directly across the road from Blue Mountain Brewery, one of the busiest stops on Nelson County’s wine and cider trail.
Cars turn into that brewery’s lot all weekend long.
Almost none of them turn into the farm across the street, where u-pick strawberries in May give way to blackberries, then peaches, then pumpkins by October.
Critzer runs a recorded phone update before each visit, since a warm week can pick a field clean days ahead of what the calendar promises.
A cup of the farm’s own strawberry ice cream costs less than a flight at the brewery across the street.
The line is shorter too.
Graves Mountain Farm & Lodges
Graves Mountain Farm & Lodges has worked the same land in Madison County since 1850, one of the oldest Century Farms in the state.
The farm sits along Route 670, minutes from the Old Rag Mountain trailhead and the Whiteoak Canyon and Rose River Falls trails inside Shenandoah National Park.
Hikers stream past every weekend, headed for the mountain.
Many never stop at Graves Mountain’s own market, deli, and tackle shop, open until 5 p.m. on weekdays and 7 p.m. Friday through Sunday, with fresh peaches, sandwiches, and fishing gear for the river below.
A hiker who times a weekend trip off Old Rag can still swing by before the market closes.
During peach season, the shop blends its milkshakes from fruit grown right on the farm.
Wade’s Mill
Almost nobody exits Interstate 81 for Wade’s Mill.
Thousands of cars pass the turnoff every day between Staunton and Lexington, a few minutes off the interstate in Raphine.
Inside, stone-ground flour, grits, and cornmeal still come from millworks that opened by 1750, one of the oldest operating mills in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley.
The water-powered stones run the same way they did before the United States existed.
Saunders Brothers Farm Market
Saunders Brothers Farm Market in Piney River is best known to landscapers as a wholesale boxwood nursery, growing the shrub for garden centers across the mid-Atlantic for more than 60 years.
That reputation is exactly why drivers on Route 29 keep going.
The same address runs a public farm market with homegrown produce, jams, and ice cream, open six days a week.
It’s closed Sundays.
A boxwood order from Saunders Brothers can end up on a landscaper’s truck three states away, while the market’s own peaches never leave Nelson County.
Psst! How much do you know about Virginia’s roadside farm stands? Take our quiz and see how many you get right.
Chiles Peach Orchard
Chiles Peach Orchard sits on Greenwood Road in Crozet, a short detour off the wineries and cideries that make up Route 151’s Brew Ridge Trail near Charlottesville.
Wine-trail visitors assume the orchard is pick-your-own only, so they skip it on the way to the next tasting room.
The farm market and bakery inside sell fried pies and cider donuts without anyone stepping into an orchard row.
Picking isn’t required.
The donut flavor changes with the season, peach in summer, apple once the fall crop takes over.
Marker-Miller Orchards
Thousands of commuters take the Route 37 exit at Cedar Creek Grade every day without ever finding Marker-Miller Orchards.
The exit carries traffic bypassing downtown Winchester, headed to the hospital, to work, or through town on Route 50 and Route 522.
Almost none of it turns down Cedar Creek Grade toward the orchard, two miles from the interchange.
Marker-Miller has farmed that land long enough to carry Virginia’s Century Farm designation.
Its bakery turns out apple cider donuts every day the market is open, alongside pick-your-own raspberries, blackberries, peaches, and pumpkins depending on the month.
The donuts never see it.
What Marker-Miller’s Century Farm Title Means
Marker-Miller Orchards, one of the Virginia roadside stands on this list, shares its Century Farm title with 1,623 farms statewide, including Graves Mountain Farm & Lodges.
Earning it takes three things under Virginia law.
The same family has to own the land for at least 100 consecutive years.
A descendant has to still live on it or farm it.
The farm also has to earn more than $2,500 a year selling what it grows.
Nothing in the program requires the family to keep farming after that.
Nothing stops them from selling the land the day after the certificate arrives.
Homestead Creamery
Homestead Creamery runs a dairy farm store in Wirtz, on Booker T. Washington Highway between Roanoke and Smith Mountain Lake, a route thousands of lake-bound drivers take every summer weekend.
The store still bottles its milk in old-fashioned glass, the kind a customer returns for a deposit.
Almost nobody expects that anymore.
Homestead’s farm market closes Sundays.
Its deli counter keeps even shorter hours than the store around it, open just a few hours over the lunch stretch.
Boaters heading to Smith Mountain Lake pass the turnoff without knowing a bottle of glass-packed chocolate milk is sitting in the cooler.
Shockley Farms
Many drivers racing down Route 13 toward the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel never see the turn for Shockley Farms.
The market sits on Seaside Road in Cape Charles, reached by turning off Route 13 at a Corner Mart.
Shockley Farms sells sweet corn, tomatoes, and a rotating list of Eastern Shore produce from its covered outdoor stand.
Many drivers are headed somewhere else entirely, trying to beat traffic backing up on the bridge-tunnel span.
Eastern Shore tomatoes ripen through the same humid summer stretch that makes the drive down Route 13 miserable in a car with no air conditioning.
Shockley’s stand is one of the few reasons to slow down for it.
By fall, the same lot fills in with a corn maze and a pumpkin patch, so the reason to turn off Route 13 just changes with the season instead of disappearing.
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A wave of local chains disappeared from Virginia shelves in the ’80s and ’90s, bought out or renamed until barely a sign remained.
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The stools at Skeeter’s in Wytheville have held customers since 1925, and the chili recipe hasn’t changed in all that time.
The rest of the menu at diners and lunch counters from the coast to the coalfields has emptied out around it, even as the food itself lives on in memory.
