During Confederate Gen. John B. Floyd’s unsuccessful Kanawha Valley campaign with Gen. Henry Alexander Wise, Floyd made his headquarters here on August 17-18, 1861, while Wise camped on Big Sewell Mountain. An inscription carved over the front door says that in 1862 the tavern was the headquarters of the Chicago Gray Dragoons. The original Chicago Dragoons enlisted in April 1861 for three months and were sent to West Virginia in June; after most of the men returned to Chicago when their enlistments expired, their captain, Charles W. Barker, recruited two companies called the McClellan Dragoons, which after November 1862 became Companies H and I of the 12 Illinois Volunteer Cavalry. The tavern served as a headquarters for both sides during the war and, according to local tradition, also served as a hospital. Its owner, William Tyree, was captain of Company C, 22nd Regiment Virginia Infantry (CS), also known as the 1st Kanawha Regiment, in which two of his sons, Andrew and Joseph Tyree, also served. Organized in July 1861, the regiment fought at Carnifex Ferry and Droop Mountain, took part in many battles in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, and disbanded in the spring of 1865. Thomas J. Jackson, later nicknamed Stonewall, stayed here in August 1855 while hoping to visit his mother’s grave in Westlake Cemetery; William Tyree, who had attended her burial, took him there, but the grave was unmarked and Jackson was not sure he had seen the spot. The building may be the oldest standing structure in Fayette County: Charles Skaggs received a patent for 400 acres here in 1792, his son Joseph Skaggs may have built the earliest portion, George Hunter later bought the property and sold it to William Tyree in 1834, and standing midway between Charleston and Lewisburg on the James River and Kanawha Turnpike, it was sometimes called the Halfway House. As recently as 1927, the wife of Tyree’s son Joseph operated the tavern, and it is a private residence today.