At a Hickory Fork Road crossroads in Virginia, Francis Stubbs opened a store between 1811 and 1818, a tavern was later built across the street, and behind these businesses stood a simple house of a style common throughout Virginia where Dr. Walter Reed was born in 1851. In the 1800s, as the Methodist Episcopal Church became the largest religious denomination in the U.S., circuit rider Lemuel Reed traveled among churches in Gloucester, Mathews, and King and Queen Counties, and his family of six lived in this house temporarily, welcoming Walter on September 13, 1851, before moving across the street to a new parsonage and then to another circuit in 1852. The crossroads properties were sold to William Roy Jones in 1852, and he and his wife Isabella built their home on the tavern lot, calling it Belle Roi; in 1890 the local post office took the name Belroi. Walter Reed later earned medical degrees from the University of Virginia and Bellevue Hospital Medical College in New York, joined the Army Medical Corps in 1875, and in 1893 joined the faculty of the new Army Medical School in Washington D.C. He led an investigation into the cause of typhoid fever and then in Cuba headed an Army board investigating yellow fever, whose experiments proved mosquitoes were the vector; yellow fever was controlled by removing standing water where mosquitoes breed. Reed died in 1902. His friend William Borden campaigned to have a hospital named for him, leading to the opening of Walter Reed Army General Hospital in 1909; renamed Walter Reed Army Medical Center in 1951, it closed in 2011, and the name was transferred to the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland. The birthplace building was acquired by the Medical Society of Virginia in 1926, transferred to the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities in 1968, continued in preservation by the Gloucester Preservation Foundation in 2004, and is maintained and managed by the Fairfield Foundation.