Room And Board

What Do You Think You're Looking At? #189

I saw this old photo on a Facebook group post, with the poster asking:

I have this picture from 1953. My father in law was a truck driver and traveled a bit. I believe this to be in Virginia per the sign stating Restaurant Old VA Raw Sea Food. Crabtree’s Diner. I will gladly send this picture to someone who would appreciate it or the historical society in the location of this place. Can anyone point me in the right direction? Thanks!

The comments helped identify it, and it is still standing. Even if it was pretty new in 1953—and from the look of the gas station building next door, I think it could be rather older than 1953—that’s over 70 years old. One of the commenters dug up a classified ad involving the diner from 1947, so it’s at least from the ’40s. (Someone in the comments even said their grandfather owned the restaurant!)

It’s in a fairly rural area a bit south of Fredericksburg, Virginia, just off Route 301, an older highway that’s a treasure trove of old pre-Interstate Americana.

Here is the building today, which was an Italian restaurant a few years ago and is now a barbecue joint:

It doesn’t look quite the same, but I’ll show you what the modifications were. The part of the building to the right/facing us in the images, is the same. In the old photo, it has a door flanked by sets of two windows on the side, and what looks like a door and three windows on the front. Currently, the front appears modified, but the side indicates it’s the same structure:

Maybe the perspective in the old photo is screwy, but it looks to me like the stone-cladded piece was sort of appended onto the diner structure and got bigger now compared to then. Or maybe the diner was appended onto the stone part. Here’s a postcard, showing the (also still-standing) motel next door and just the stone structure:

Anyway, you can see that the diner portion in the old photo has a lot of small windows, a non-stone front, and a lower roofline. But the middle segment of the restaurant today is stone, with the same roofline, and a lot fewer windows. My guess is that the diner was simply given a fresh facade at some point, to line up with the rest of the building. Notice that where the diner part of the building used to meet the stone part, there’s a change in the tone of the stone. That’s where the new front was built. (If that was a true diner, as in a pre-fab car, it is still under there. See this example of a “hidden” diner in a strip plaza.)

Now the gas station/auto garage building. That, unfortunately, is not original. A few years ago it looked like this. It’s the same placement as the original Esso station, but it’s a newer building, of the (roughly) 1950s-1970s box variety:

However, despite the condition it was in, it has also been fixed up, and is now the barbecue joint’s smokehouse:

From far away, all of these things kind of look the same—there were thousands, tens of thousands, of little restaurants and auto shops and motels back in the day. But at some point the common becomes rare, and the familiar becomes unfamiliar. And every practically identical old workaday building has real people and unique stories behind it.

As you can well see, I think they’re worth telling.

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Related Reading:

Living In The Motel

What Do You Think You’re Looking At? #2

What Do You Think You’re Looking At? #5

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