Located along Route 11 in the Shenandoah Valley south of Staunton in Augusta County, the Mint Spring Tavern property comprises an 18th-century Federal-style dwelling and several contributing buildings that supported its commercial role as a tavern, stagecoach stop, post office, general store, and tourist home throughout the 19th and 20th centuries.  The one-and-a-half story house of unhewn logs on a stone foundation dates to circa 1749, and the Mint Spring Tavern is a rare surviving example of a Scots-Irish settler’s home on the early American frontier. The house has two 18th-century additions of log construction, and it underwent a circa 1812 Federal renovation, which remains its primary architectural style today. Among the tavern’s contributing buildings are an 1837 general store that also served as a post office and a likely 19th-century slave cabin. The property includes the remains of a portion of the former Junction Valley Turnpike, which was a plank road built in 1853 to improve a 60-mile stretch of the Great Wagon Road between Staunton and Buchanan. Mint Spring operated initially as an illegal tavern by 1779, and then a licensed ordinary beginning in 1816.  Mint Spring Tavern’s additional commercial functions included a general store in 1837, official designation as a post office in 1841, and finally as a tourist home serving motorists traveling along America’s new federal highway system in the 1930s and 1940s.