WYTHEVILLE, Virginia — Most people meet this town zooming past it at 70 mph.

Interstate 77 comes up out of North Carolina. Interstate 81 runs down the Great Valley toward Bristol. They cross here, share a few miles of pavement, and then split again. Truckers stop for diesel. Families stop for a bathroom. Then they are gone.

They miss the better road.

U.S. 11 runs right through downtown as Main Street. In this part of Virginia, it is also called the Lee Highway. Before that it was the Great Road, the wagon road that carried settlers south out of Pennsylvania and Maryland and down the valley toward Cumberland Gap. Virginia now signs the corridor as the Wilderness Road: Virginia's Heritage Migration Route. About 10 miles east, at Fort Chiswell, long hunters set out in 1761 for the country beyond the mountains.

On March 10, 1775, Daniel Boone and some 30 axmen set out from the Long Island of the Holston, near present-day Kingsport, Tennessee, to cut a path through Cumberland Gap into Kentucky. Hundreds of thousands of settlers followed, and many of them came down this valley to get there.

That was 250 years ago. Virginia and Kentucky spent last year marking the anniversary with reenactors, relay hikes, and a ceremonial ax carried from Kingsport to Fort Boonesborough. This year the country marks its own 250th.

The two anniversaries belong together. The road came first. It carried the push west before there was a United States to push. And the people who stopped along the way, who decided the next valley was far enough, built Appalachia.

They are still building it. That part of the story is happening on Main Street right now.

On East Main, Skeeter's has been selling hot dogs with mustard, onion, and chili since 1925.

Sit at the counter at Skeeter's, and you are in the same building where a future first lady was born.

Farron Smith owns that building. She and her husband, Bill, bought it in 1989. It came with the hot dog shop. It also came with the second floor, where Edith Bolling was born on October 15, 1872, the seventh of 11 children.

Smith did not need anyone to tell her what she had.

"We always knew it was the birthplace and knew its history, its place in history," she said.

She had rented the space first. She ran a dance school on the ground floor. When the couple bought the building, they made a deal with themselves: Raise the children, pay for college, then turn to the house.

"This would be our way of giving back to a community that we love," she said.

The Smiths formed a foundation in 2006. The Edith Bolling Wilson Birthplace Museum opened on October 15, 2008, Edith's birthday. In 2010, they bought the old George Wythe Hotel across the street, where Edith had stayed on her last trip home, and reopened it as the Bolling Wilson Hotel.

"We really didn't know what we were getting into," Smith said.

What they got into is a rare thing. No other first lady's birthplace in Virginia is a........

© Townhall