Eagle Tavern, or Hotel, stood at the center of social and political life in Watkinsville for more than a hundred years. Its oldest section, built in the first decades of the 1800's in the “Plain Style,” has two rooms upstairs and two downstairs, with separate first-floor doors leading to the tavern and to a store or trading area. This earliest part was built when Watkinsville was a growing frontier town, the county seat of original Clarke County, and a crossroads for travel northward from Madison and Greensboro. In 1836 Richard C. Richardson bought the original tavern, stage-stop, and store and added to it over a period of years. After those additions were removed and the earliest section restored, the building was preserved from destruction in 1934 by Lanier Richardson Billups of Decatur, Georgia, deeded to the State in 1956, and presented as a museum devoted to the pre-Civil War, pre-railroad era when wagon and stage travel was at its height.