A landmark recent listing in Harrisonburg highlights ongoing efforts to chronicle the broader history of The Green Book in Virginia.

By Austin Walker | DHR National Register Program Manager

In the early decades of the 20th century, travel presented a contradictory dilemma for Black Virginians: while the rapid proliferation of automobiles promised a new level of mobility and independence, the often deeply entrenched systems of racial segregation established by Jim Crow laws made any journey through the South a highly uncertain prospect. The ability of Black travelers to discern where they might safely or comfortably stop, without being subjected to humiliation or hostility, became known as “travel craft,” and relied on accumulating as much knowledge as possible ahead of a trip in order to carefully navigate local custom and avoid potentially hazardous interactions.

Beginning in the 1910s, a new geography of roadside commercial establishments that served Black travelers began to emerge, ranging from hotels, motels, and tourist homes to restaurants and service stations. Initially, such businesses still relied on roadside advertising and word-of-mouth to reach potential customers. Within two decades, however, these informal networks would coalesce into a new source of knowledge with much greater reach – travel guides specifically for Black travelers.

Perhaps the most widely known of these guides is The Negro Traveler’s Green Book, published by Victor Hugo Green, a letter carrier from New York, from 1936 to 1967. Over the course of three decades, The Green Book evolved into an expansive list of hotels, restaurants, guest houses, service stations, drug stores, beauty parlors, barber shops, night clubs, and recreational areas, broken down by state, that would serve Black travelers. Green utilized a network of postal employees to help market the guide to Black-owned businesses, and struck a deal with James A. Jackson, a Black marketing executive at Esso, to coordinate its distribution to Esso gas stations. During its thirty years of publication, The Green Book ultimately included over 10,000 listings.

According to extensive research compiled by Anne Bruder, Susan Hellman, and Catherine Zipf for The Architecture of the Negro Traveler’s Green Book, approximately 304 places across Virginia were listed in The Green Book between 1936 and 1966. Based on a statewide survey conducted in 2024, 59 of those resources have been confirmed to still exist today.

Among them is the Ida Mae Francis Tourist Home in Harrisonburg, which became the first property in Virginia to be listed on the state’s Landmarks Register for its significant association with The Green Book in June 2024. Built around 1908 for Ida Mae Francis and her husband, shoemaker Henry William Francis, the two-story, Craftsman-style dwelling sits at the corner of North Mason and East Rock Streets in the city’s historically African American Newtown neighborhood. The house’s interior features several notable architectural elements, including an elaborate mantel with lionhead carvings, a colonnaded screen, French doors, and decorative faux wood painting.

Below: Interior photographs showing the house’s ornate lionhead mantel and other Craftsman-style details. Photo credit: Dan Pezzoni/DHR, 2024

After Henry Francis’s death in 1912, Ida Mae began taking in boarders and short-term guests as a source of income, catering to an African American clientele during the era of segregation – a common entrepreneurial enterprise for married or widowed Black women at the time. By the 1920s, Ida Mae and her daughter, Mary, were taking in guests from across the nation who came through Harrisonburg’s thriving Black community. Dr. George Washington Carver is said to have stayed in the house in 1928 while traveling to give a lecture at nearby Bridgewater College.

Though not much is known about Ida Mae’s tourist home during the 1930s and ‘40s, the business would reach a nationwide audience beginning in 1954, when the “Mrs. Ida M. Francis Tourist Home” made its inaugural appearance in that year’s edition of The Negro Travelers’ Green Book. The home would appear in several subsequent editions, continuing until the Francis family ceased operating their residence as a boarding house in 1962. By that time, Ida Mae Francis was 87 years old, and the house had become an important fixture in the social life of Harrisonburg’s African American community, providing safe lodgings for a steady stream of Black travelers and tourists for nearly five decades.

The Ida Mae Francis Tourist Home is also important as a survivor of another major force impacting Virginia’s Black communities during the mid-20th century – urban renewal. While the block on which the house stands still retains several historic homes, a large swath of the Newtown/Northeast neighborhood immediately to the north and west was fully razed and redeveloped during the 1960s after the city declared eminent domain over the area with the help of funding from the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Today, the only remaining trace of the original Mason Street still runs in front of the Francis house, which now looks out onto large-scale commercial development.

While the Ida Mae Francis Tourist Home is the first property in Virginia to be designated as a state landmark for its significance as a Green Book site, it isn’t the first Green Book-associated site to be listed on the state and federal Registers. The Attucks Theatre in Norfolk (listed in the Virginia Landmarks Register in 1981 and in the National Register of Historic Places in 1982) appeared in the 1939 Green Book edition under its then-name, the Booker T. Theatre. According to the Virginia Cultural Resource Information System (VCRIS), 25 additional Green Book-associated resources contribute to listed historic districts across 14 Virginia cities and towns. In nearly all of these cases, however, associations with The Green Book are not currently noted in the Register documentation.

In addition to the statewide survey of extant Green Book sites, The Green Book in Virginia initiative has produced a draft Multiple Property Documentation (MPD) form, which provides a thorough and robust historic context that will help to facilitate the future nomination of other surviving Green Book sites in Virginia. For now, the Ida Mae Francis Tourist Home will continue to harbor a small piece of Virginia’s Green Book history.

The National Register nomination for the Ida Mae Francis Tourist Home was prepared by architectural historian J. Daniel Pezzoni of Landmark Preservation Associates in Lexington. Historical research on the house was conducted by Mark Metzler Sawin, Professor of History at Eastern Mennonite University. Additional assistance was provided by current owner William Reed and his daughter, Deanna Reed, Dr. Carole L. Nash (Mountain Valley Archaeology, James Madison University), and Mollie Amelia Godfrey (James Madison University).

The Negro Traveler’s Green Book in Virginia MPD was prepared by Kalya Halberg, Ashlen Stump, and Lena McDonald of Commonwealth Preservation Group in Norfolk. Field survey was completed by CPG staff members Paige Pollard, Marcus Pollard, Kayla Halberg, Katie Paulson, Ashlen Stump, Victoria Leonard, Katrina Smith, Sami Moore, and Celina Adams.

To explore a comprehensive list of identified Green Book sites in Virginia and beyond, visit The Architecture of the Negro Traveler’s Green Book.

To view digitized editions of The Green Book, visit The New York Public Library Digital Collections.