Ask anyone who runs the Blackwater Creek loop on a Tuesday evening why they've started cutting through Bedford Avenue instead of finishing on the river side, and you'll get some version of the same answer: the trail's been torn up since the fall of 2024. What most people don't realize is how long that detour has actually lasted, or how much of what's opened along Bedford Avenue in the meantime has depended on it.
Lynchburg Parks and Recreation's own closure notice puts the Point of Honor Trail out of commission from Hollins Mill Road to the footbridge below Cabell Street, tied to the Blackwater CSO Tunnel Construction Project, with the city's timeline calling for the closure to run through July 2026. That's not a seasonal inconvenience. Count from the original October 2024 announcement to a July 2026 target, and you get roughly 21 months of a neighborhood's default walking and running route rerouted onto neighborhood streets. If you've been parking on Bedford Avenue instead of walking from your own door, that's why.
Twenty-One Months on a Half-Mile Stretch
The section that closed is a small piece of a much larger network. The Point of Honor Trail is a spur that connects Hollins Mill Park to the historic Point of Honor home and on to RiverWalk, part of the ten-mile system that also includes the Blackwater Creek Trail and the Kemper Station Trail. For most of that stretch's history, it's been the connective tissue between Rivermont and downtown, the route that lets someone leave a house near Rivermont Avenue and reach the James River on foot without touching a car.
Full reconstruction of a trail segment isn't a quick patch job, and the city has been upfront that this is a complete rebuild tied to sewer infrastructure, not cosmetic repaving. That scope is why the closure has outlasted a full school year and then some. It also explains something that's easy to miss if you haven't been paying attention: the businesses that filled in along Bedford Avenue over the same stretch of time weren't just catching a wave of foodie interest. They were catching foot traffic that had nowhere else to go.
Where All That Foot Traffic Went
The building most of that traffic ended up walking into sits at 2204 Bedford Avenue, a 19,000-square-foot former Dr. Pepper Bottling plant that developer Daryl Calfee's Penny Lane Properties converted into a shared retail and dining space. It opened in spring 2023, before the trail closure even started, which means it had already built a customer base by the time the detour began routing more people past its door.
Inside, Scratch Pasta Co. runs its own storefront and production space, Chef Stephanie Fees having brought the shop home after training in New York, at The Greenbrier, and at pasta school in Chiavari, Italy. Next door, Truss Crafted Food & Drink serves seasonal, chef-driven plates under Wray Warner, who co-owns the restaurant with Jill Fees. The Flour District, run by pastry chef Maria Niechwiadowicz, handles the bakery and coffee side of the building, with cooking classes on the calendar as well.
Jill Fees also owns Rivermont Refillery a short walk away, a bulk refill shop for home and personal care products. That's one entrepreneur with a financial stake in both a restaurant and a retail shop on the same stretch of pavement, which tells you something about how confident local operators have felt about this corridor even while a chunk of the neighborhood's usual foot traffic was rerouted around a construction fence.
Marsh Roots Seafood, founded by fisherman Oliver Russell, moved from a stall at the Lynchburg Community Market into its own storefront on the same corridor, bringing in fresh catch from the Virginia and North Carolina coast twice a week.
"Bedford Avenue is a really cool spot with a lot of potential and so many businesses popping up," says manager Eric Clark. "We absolutely love it here."
Golf Park Coffee has been the neighborhood's laptop-and-espresso spot since 2018. Magnolia Foods handles the beer, wine, and deli side with a regular Friday wine tasting. The Dahlia runs a Saturday brunch from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. that's become its own small ritual. Taco Jesus, a father-and-son operation from Jesús and Chef "Rudy," was still the newest name on the block as of this past March, serving modern-style corn tortillas with garlic cilantro lime slaw.
And the corridor isn't done filling in. Ms. Tina's Off the Hook, at 1205 Rivermont Avenue, cleared its pre-opening health inspection earlier this year, according to Lynchburg Agenda's running list of new food concepts across the region. That's a business that decided to open into this exact stretch of Rivermont Avenue while the trail closure was still in effect, betting on a customer base that had gotten used to walking here anyway.
Here's the rough sequence, laid out plainly:
| When | What happened |
|---|---|
| Spring 2023 | The Bedford Avenue food hall opens in the former Dr. Pepper Bottling plant |
| October 2024 | Point of Honor Trail closes for the Blackwater CSO Tunnel Construction Project |
| By March 2026 | Taco Jesus is the newest tenant on the block |
| May–June 2026 | Ms. Tina's Off the Hook clears pre-opening inspection at 1205 Rivermont Ave |
| Through July 2026 | City's construction timeline calls for the trail to reopen |
The One Habit That Never Moved
While the trail was out of commission, one Rivermont fixture kept running on schedule without interruption. The Rivermont Farmers Market sets up every Wednesday from May through October, 3 to 7 p.m., at Riverside Park on Rivermont Avenue. The vendor list reads like a snapshot of the region's small producers: Great Day Gardens Restoration Acres, Slowpoke Sourdough, River Oak Farm, Soulshine Farms, Elk Valley Acres, Rosetta Coffee, and Salty Bee Flavor Co., among others.
Riverside Park itself is worth the walk regardless of the market. At just under 50 acres, it's the second oldest park in the city, with an overlook completed in 1932 that still gives one of the better river views in Lynchburg, along with wooded trails, playgrounds, and a small historic train exhibit that's stuck around from an earlier era of the city.
The market's Wednesday rhythm didn't need the trail to function, since it sits right off Rivermont Avenue and draws people who are already driving or walking that stretch anyway. But it did mean that for nearly two years, the market was the one reliable outdoor anchor in a neighborhood where the connective trail was fenced off. If you've settled into a Wednesday habit of market first, dinner on Bedford Avenue second, that habit was built around the one piece of infrastructure that didn't go anywhere.
What Changes When the Barricades Come Down
None of this is really about a trail. It's about what happens to a neighborhood's walking patterns when one route disappears and a parallel commercial strip absorbs the traffic instead. Rivermont's historic district, laid out by the Rivermont Company starting in 1890 around a central tree-lined avenue, was built for exactly this kind of use: a street plan that assumes people move through it on foot. The city's own historic district records split the corridor into Lower Rivermont, from the Rivermont Bridge down to Bedford Avenue, Middle Rivermont, from Bedford Avenue to where Bedford Avenue crosses Rivermont Avenue again, and Upper Rivermont, running up toward the Oakwood Country Club. Three distinct stretches, all built around the same assumption that people would be walking, not driving.
When the Point of Honor Trail does come back online this summer, per the timeline the city has laid out, the neighborhood gets its river-to-downtown walking route back. That's good news on its own. But it also means the Bedford Avenue corridor stops being the only walkable option and goes back to being one of two, which is a different kind of foot traffic than it's had for the better part of two years. The businesses that opened during the closure, especially newer ones like Ms. Tina's Off the Hook, are about to find out whether people came because it was the only walk available or because they actually wanted to be there.
If you've spent the better part of two years wondering why the neighborhood suddenly felt more concentrated around one street, that's your answer. And if you've been putting off a Wednesday evening at the farmers market followed by dinner on Bedford Avenue because the walk there felt like the only option worth taking, you're about to have your usual loop back.
Rivermont has always rewarded people who pay attention to its rhythms rather than its reputation. This summer's version of that rhythm is a trail reopening at the exact moment a food corridor it helped build has to stand on its own.
If you're curious what any of this means for property values or timing along Rivermont Avenue, that's a longer conversation, and one Rucker Wynne has been having with buyers and sellers in this neighborhood for years. Reach out to schedule a consultation whenever you're ready to talk specifics.
