The basic plan and form characterizing the I-House was established by several scholars, including Kniffen, Glassie, and Noble. All agree upon the following criteria: side-facing gables, one room deep, a minimum of two rooms wide, and two full stories high. Additional features of the I-house vary from region to region. Construction materials range from brick and stone to frame and logs. Chimneys may be inside end, outside end, and either single or paired on the center of the roof ridge. Floor plans are likewise highly inconsistent, including lateral or rear appendages, four rooms of variable size, and the presence or lack of a central hallway. Decorative elements range from the simple to the highly ornate, including Greek Revival, Italianate, and Gothic Revival embellishments. Most scholars agree that the I-House was more common in a rural setting, but that it did occur in an urban form, particularly in small midwestern county seats. In regard to social structure the I-House became a symbol of economic attainment in an agriculture-based society and was generally regarded as a move up the housing hierarchy. Some contend that it represented the fine houses built by the rural, upper-class farmer; hence, the “Farmer’s Mansion” appellation was an appropriate description.

Roney’s Point is a stage station ten miles from Wheeling. The original owner of the land was Roney, and its peculiar conformation, a high ridge ending in a point on the south side of the road, gave it the name of Roney’s Point. It is a familiar name, and was a lively place during the palmy days of the road. On the north side of the road, at Roney’s Point, a large stone tavern was kept by one Ninian Beall, prior to the year 1828. He was succeeded by James Beck, Mrs. Sarah Beck, Moses Thornburg, and Jacob Beck, in the order named. James and Jacob Beck were not relatives. The old Simms line of stages stopped at this house when it was kept by James Beck, and it was the stopping place of the Good Intent line, when kept by Jacob Beck.

the Stone Tavern at Roney’s Point, West Virginia, was built soon after the National Road was surveyed through Ohio County in 1806. The tavern provided a stopping place for travelers along the first Federal highway. The stone building can be contrasted with the unique stucco motel built a hundred years later, on the property, that was constructed to take advantage of a resurgence in highway traffic following the invention of the automobile.

The early information on the tavern is difficult to find in the sparse county records that were kept. It is known that the original 246 acres of land on which this tavern stands had been purchased by Ebenezer McKinley in 1804 for $500.

He later sold 251 acres to Ninian Beall in 1819 for $3500, which leads one to assume that either McKinley had built the tavern or he recognized how profitable his land had become since being bisected by the National Road. Unfortunately, the land books are not available before the 1840s to identify when any buildings were added to the property and the census data for 1810 only lists the head members of the household and not their occupation.

Ninian Beall had gone to Kentucky from Maryland hoping to take up land in what was a vast new territory following General Anthony Wayne’s defeat of the Indians in Ohio about 1794. The claim of land was in dispute, however, and the family members later polled a keel boat up the river landing at the forks of Wheeling Creek where Fort Henry then stood. Ninian took up a tract of land back of the fort and settled on it before buying the land at Roney’s Point. Other family members continued north along the Ohio River to Brooke County before they decided to settle. Ninian later moved his family to Licking County, Ohio, and raised a large family.

Located on the northeast corner of the intersection of the National Road and Roney’s Point Road (which runs north), and Dallas Pike (which runs south). The tavern is on the same level as the roadbed and rests approximately five feet from the north side of the road. The west wall runs directly along Roney’s Point Road. To the east is a large gravel parking lot and Little Wheeling Creek is a few yards to the north.

The tavern is Federal in style, having an I-house form, with later Italianate details added in the 1870s. The front walls are made of thick cut sandstone blocks with the side and rear walls being a rougher fieldstone^[8]. The south, or front façade, has five bays with a center round arch recessed doorway with keystone. The paneled door has a fanlight transom and a paneled moulding on the inside jamb and under the arch. The doorway is reminiscent of the one at Shepherd Hall, a 1798 stone mansion built by Moses and Lydia Shepherd, which was listed to the National Register in 1970. The first floor has four new 1/1 double-hung windows while the second floor has five earlier 4/4 openings. All the front windows have stone sills, and lintels^[9] with recessed roundels^[10] at the corners. The Italianate entablature^[11] has a block design with paired decorative brackets. There is a plaque at the southwest corner of the building recognizing the National Old Trails Road which was the name for the transcontinental highway between 1912 and 1926. The plaque was placed by the Wheeling Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution. An interior chimney is to the left end and the tavern has a cross gabled asphalt roof.

A wing was added in two stages to the right of the front façade in the 1920s. It is made of brick with two stories and two bays. On the first floor is a round arch window with fanlight over a multi-light window. At the right corner is a paneled door with fanlight transom. There is an entablature across the first floor. The second floor has two pairs of windows with a narrow upper sash.

The west façade has the gable end over the front rooms of the tavern and the rear ell extending to the north. Over the gable end is wood siding that was used as billboard. On the first floor are four new 1/1 double-hung windows. The second floor has two 4/4 light windows, all the openings have stone lintels and sills. Attached to the north end of the ell is a two story red brick addition with two bays on each floor of the west façade. This addition was used as a post office for the Roney’s Point community.

The second floor has 4/4 double-hung windows and the first floor has a window at the left corner which is covered by plywood. To the left of the opening is a small 1/1 square window.

From the east façade the rear addition which fill-in the original L-shape form are visible. To the left the gable end of the original tavern is visible with its fieldstone walls. Below it is a low shed roof over the brick addition.

To the north, or rear façade, the additions are also visible with the gable end of the stone tavern’s ell visible to the right with the two story addition projecting out towards the creek. To the left is a gable end over the center two story addition with wood shingles in the peak over the brick walls. To the left is the rear of the brick addition, fronting the National Road, and across the first floor is the one story addition with ribbon windows.

Located approximately ten yards to the northeast of the tavern is the contributing Stone House Auto Court built in 1922 by Frank Ehrhart. Once there were two identical buildings which faced each other across a courtyard. However, the one on the east was razed in 1983 due to its poor condition after a fire in the late 1970s. The remaining building is a unique ten-unit elongated one story building with a lower level garage. The building is constructed of square tile block with stucco covering.

After the advent of the automobile in the early twentieth century, traveling by car became a popular national pastime. The National Road became more heavily used than it had been in the days when lines of wagons waited to cross bridges. Like the tavern, the Stone House was built to cater to the needs of travelers. The long building has ten units with billboards along the road promoting individual baths and steam showers, plus the garage for the automobile below each unit.

The east, or front façade, has ten bays with a full wooden porch supported by Doric columns with square rails on the balustrade. The main floor is elevated and was reached by a stairway on the south end of the porch. Part of the stairs is now missing but the top newel post^[12] remains. Each of the ten bays on the main floor had a center door with a four light opening. There are sidelights as well as six-light transom. On the lower level each of the ten bays had a door with five horizontal panels, sidelights with three lights, and a six-light transom.

The rear, or west façade, has ten bays on each level. Each bays of the lower level is a garage door made up of three sections. A section consists of two lower vertical panels with a square four light window above. Centered above each garage bay on the main floor is a single window.

The south façade parallels the National Road. There is a decorative wooden trim on the wall surface under the peak of the gable end and surrounding a small horizontal window. Being the façade seen from the highway there is painted in large black letters “Stone House” to denote the name of the motel. Extending to the right is the wooden porch.

The Stone Tavern and Auto Court, together on the same property, uniquely represent different periods of National Road history, highlighting a shift from horse-drawn vehicles and stagecoach stops to the stabling of the automobile. The tavern had a long use as a restaurant well into the twentieth century. Today both buildings are excellent examples of West Virginia’s National Road history.

This stone building was built as an inn five years after the original surveyed route of the National Road was completed to Wheeling in 1806. Approximately six years later, in 1817, two stone bridges were built diverting the highway to the other side of Little Wheeling Creek and thus bypassing the inn.

George Feay first purchased 150 acres in Ohio County from William Shepherd in 1801. He later acquired 148 acres on Little Wheeling Creek in 1805. This land had been part of a military land grant to David Shepherd in 1774 and was devised through a will to his heirs before being sold to Feay. The property included land on both sides of Peters Run Road.

According to local history George and a brother built the stone inn to take advantage of the traffic using the National Road, which followed Little Wheeling Creek through Ohio County. Once the highway was diverted to the other side of the creek it is unclear how long the inn continued to operate. A deed from 1836, when the property was passed down in the family to Joseph Feay, uses a grist mill dam as a boundary point and mentions that a saw mill was bequeathed to other heirs. Obviously there were other nearby commercial operations taking advantage of the water power from the creek and the highway as a means to transport products to markets. The History of the Pan-Handle published in 1879 lists the residence of Joseph Feay as one of the landmarks documenting that the inn had eventually become a residence.

After Joseph Feay’s death in 1897 the property passed to his heirs, which included Edmund and Sarah Roe. A city plat book shows the partition of the Feay farm into lots in October 1905. The lots were laid out to the north of the house along Peters Run Road. In 1910 the heirs sold the then 91.78 acres to Elzie Courtland Burkham and his wife, Cleopatra. The Burkhams had part of the property again partitioned into lots which is recorded on a city plat map dated September 1922. They immediately began selling lots and continued to do so for several years. The U-shape court with access to Peters Run Road to the east is now called Burkham Court. The Feay house had the rear door oriented to the court at that time.

The inn lies on the south side of Burkham Court approximately 120 yards of the old stone S-bridge, and 100 yards west of the present 1934 steel truss bridge at the junction of Peters Run Road and the National Road. Constructed of fieldstone the I-house style of the inn is early folk with later Italianate details. The two and a half story building has three bays on each floor of the north façade facing Burkham Court. This north façade is actually the rear of the old inn. The center bay is slightly off center to the right with the door on the first floor. The door has a large center pane of glass. There is a metal shed awning over the doorway. The windows are all 1/1 double-hung with a slight projecting hood moulding. There are two end chimneys on the gable roof. Under the eaves are a later Italianate alteration to the house of paired decorative brackets, and dentils^[14] to the wide fascia board.

The east side has a hipped enclosed porch added to the first floor with multiple 1/1 double-hung windows on three sides and a multi-light door on the north side. There are two windows on the second floor, and two openings on the first floor. The gable end has an eave return.

The south façade was built to be the front of the inn, facing where the National Road originally passed between the inn and Little Wheeling Creek. This façade has three bays on each floor with a center door on the first floor. A wooden open porch is on the first floor with wood shingles on the low railing wall and paired rackets under the eave over each of the four support posts.

The west façade has a single window to the right end on the first floor, two windows on the second floor and a single window to the right side of the attic level. This façade also has a gable end with eave returns.

The fieldstone architecture of the Feay Inn is rare in Ohio County. There are several instances where the front façade might be cut stone blocks with side fieldstone walls, but all the walls on the Feay building have irregular stone outlines. The I-house form is common to buildings constructed in the early part of the 1800s in Ohio County.

The Italianate details of the brackets and dentils were added during Joseph Feay’s ownership and the multi-paned windows were probably modernized to 1/1 double-hung openings at that time.

The Feay Inn is an excellent example of an early stopping place for travelers on the National Road. The fieldstone construction is an unusual building style in Ohio County but one that took advantage of the plentiful stone at hand. The inn naturally shifted from a business to a residence as the heyday of the National Road declined and the original route was changed to the opposite side of the creek bed.

the old tavern keepers of the National Road were a remarkable body of men. In many instances they were free holders, men well posted in current affairs, and influential in their respective neighborhoods. They were honorable in their dealings, and believed that every man’s word should be as good as his bond. As caterers they made no display. They had no bills of fare, printed on gilt edged paper, or fine linen, and it is doubtful if any of them ever heard the modern word Menu, yet the spreads of their generous boards would almost kindle exhilaration in the heart of a misanthrope. The thought may be attributable to change of time or circumstance, or taste, or all together, but there is an unmovable conviction in the mind of the writer of these pages, that the viands of modern hotels, lack the savoriness of the old taverns of the National Road.

as Macauley has said, we do not travel today, we merely “arrive.” You are hardly a traveler now unless you cross a continent. Travel was once an education. This is growing less and less true with the passing years. Fancy a journey from St. Louis to New York in the old coaching days, over the Cumberland and the old York Roads. How many persons the traveler met!  How many interesting and instructive conversations were held with fellow travelers through the long hours; what customs, characters, foibles, amusing incidents would be noticed and remembered, ever afterward furnishing the information necessary to help one talk well and the sympathy necessary to render one capable of listening to others. The traveler often sat at table with statesmen whom the nation honored, as well as with stagecoach-drivers whom a nation knew for their skill and prowess with six galloping horses. Henry Clays and “Red” Buntings dined together, and each made the other wiser, if not better. The greater the gulf grows between the rich and poor, the more ignorant do both become, particularly the rich. There was undoubtedly a monotony in stagecoach journeying, but the continual views of the landscape, the ever-fresh air, the constantly passing throngs of various description, made such traveling an experience unknown to us “arrivers” of today. How fast has it been forgotten that travel means seeing people rather that things. The age of sight-seeing has superseded that of traveling.

aristocratic travelers and many other European tourists were consistent in denouncing the table d’hôte of the American inn, where – usually to their discomfiture – they were compelled to sit at table with the coachman with his “grotesque habiliments”; the landlord, who might come to the table in slippers and with uncombed hair; the hostler fresh from the stables; the household servants, who were often none other than the landlady and her daughters; and the foulmouthed teamster. When such were, in the words of Sir Augustus John Foster’ “dirty, greasy, and stinking,” the experience was well-nigh intolerable.

the western American’s strong tendency to equate the desire for privacy with snobbishness. The 1821 experience of James Flint is à propos. When shown to a private apartment in a tavern in the Juniata Valley of Pennsylvania, he noted that another tavern guest, by significant glances, indicated sharp resentment. Tavern landlords were slow to provide privacy and resentful if it was sought.

The symbols of equality embodied in the simple American inn were often loyally defended by both guests and proprietors, but it appears they were quickly dropped as soon as circumstances permitted. This tractability would suggest that the patrons of the inn did not really enjoy its democratic atmosphere but, since there was no alternative, they sometimes pretended and declared that they delighted in it. Evidently those who were vocal in its defense secretly resented the communal tyranny of the wayside inn as much as did the non-conformist. The conclusion must be, therefore, that the American inn of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was a “stewing kettle” and not a “melting pot.”  People were not so much melted together in the tavern as stewed. Some resisted the process openly and other conformed because of necessity.