Roy Gladding still remembers the summer of 1964, when Mary Poppins came to the DAW Theatre on Prince Street. He was a kid then, one of the neighborhood regulars who walked over on a Saturday and crossed the street after for a Coke at the drugstore. Gladding is Tappahannock's mayor now, and the DAW's marquee has been dark since the theater closed in 1998, its final screening a showing of Titanic. For most of three decades it sat gutted, waiting.
Prince Street had already taken its own hit before any of this began. A fire tore through part of the block in the summer of 2022. Downtown's recovery since then didn't come from one grand plan. It arrived in pieces, spaced out over years: a centuries-old tavern building reopened using a state grant back in 2023, a shuttered movie house finally got a real number attached to it this spring, and a canceled festival came back for the first time in nine years in May. None of it happened by accident. Trace who is behind each project and how it gets paid for, and the same handful of names and the same funding formula keep showing up, block after block.
The Theater Finally Has a Number Attached to It
In April 2026, the Gazette Journal reported that the DAW Theatre had been added to the National Register of Historic Places. That listing is not just a plaque. It opens the building up to state and federal historic tax credits, the kind of funding that can make a project like this financially possible instead of theoretical.
The building itself has a strange arithmetic to it. When Edward F. Sinnott designed the DAW in 1938 and 1939, the 500-seat house cost between $25,000 and $30,000 to build. Sinnott also designed the Henrico Theatre outside Richmond, itself now on the National Register. Bringing the DAW back today carries a price tag of $3.3 million.
What changed is leadership and structure. Beth Sharpe took over as board chair, bringing experience from Tappahannock's Main Street revitalization work, and the foundation reorganized its fundraising under a banner called "Our Town, Our Theatre." The campaign splits into three tracks:
- Project-based giving tied to specific stages of the restoration
- Personalized gifts that put a donor or business name inside the theater permanently
- An annual fund called "Keeping the Lights On" for long-term upkeep
The foundation's stated goal is to raise $1 million of that $3.3 million locally, on the theory that local dollars unlock matching state and federal historic tax credit funding on top. Sharpe is also set to host a behind-the-scenes podcast for the project called "Talkies," meant to walk residents through the restoration as it happens rather than announcing it after the fact.
Sharpe's other title matters just as much here.
The Festival Ran the Same Play, Just Faster
RivahFest returned to downtown Tappahannock on May 23, 2026, the first time the festival had run since 2017. That's a nine-year gap. For fifteen years before that, RivahFest had been a fixture on the third Saturday of June, until the volunteer groups that ran it needed to start being compensated to keep showing up, and the event quietly stopped.
The revival was co-chaired by Erin Kelley and the same Beth Sharpe from the DAW project. They made a deliberate choice to move the date off its old June slot and onto the Saturday of Memorial Day weekend instead, despite knowing it would complicate traffic flow through town. The reasoning was about tourism math, not tradition. As Sharpe put it to the town council before the event:
"One of the biggest tourism challenges we face is getting people to stay here multiple, consecutive nights."
A three-day weekend gives a visitor a reason to book Friday and Saturday instead of driving in for the afternoon. The 2026 lineup leaned into that same instinct, tying programming to the nation's 250th anniversary with puppet shows on Blackbeard and the Boston Tea Party performed by Shades of Our Past, alongside music from Grayson Torrence, a former RivahFest Idol winner and past American Idol contestant, plus Skilly, Soul Expressions Band, and a Tom Petty tribute act called Full Moon Fever RVA. Crab races and carnival rides ran next to colonial-era demonstrations, which is a strange combination on paper and apparently exactly the point in person.
A Tavern Proves the Formula Isn't Just for Nonprofits
The same mechanic shows up in a very different kind of project a few blocks over. 1710 Tavern occupies the oldest building in Tappahannock, the former Emerson's Ordinary and Henley House at 314 South Water Lane, restored with help from a $250,000 Industrial Revitalization Fund grant secured through Ross Simpson Properties. The project used no local tax dollars up front. Instead, the town recoups its investment through meals and sales tax generated once the doors are open, which is a different flavor of the same bet the DAW is making with historic tax credits: pair public incentive with private capital, and let a vacant historic shell earn its keep again.
The tavern employs 35 people, including two chefs who relocated to Tappahannock from Richmond, with most of the rest of the staff drawn from the Middle Peninsula and Northern Neck. It sources produce and other ingredients from Sion House Farm, Garner's Produce, Pammy's Produce, and Riverview Farm and Winery, all named suppliers rather than a generic "local sourcing" line. As of this spring, the restaurant was holding a 4.8 out of 5 rating across 171 reviews on Restaurant Guru, with the she-crab soup and chicken and waffles among the most mentioned dishes. Brunch only runs on Sundays, reservations are recommended most nights, and parking is street parking only, a small friction that is really just evidence of a downtown built for foot traffic from an earlier era rather than for the volume it's pulling in now.
Where the Three Threads Actually Meet
Lay it out on a map and the whole story fits inside two blocks. The DAW sits at 154 Prince Street. RivahFest's stages went up along that same Prince Street corridor. 1710 Tavern is one block over on Water Lane. The Tappahannock Farmers' Market runs at the scenic crossroads in the historic downtown, with a view of the Rappahannock River, on the third Saturday of every month from April through October. That schedule puts the next market on August 15, with monthly dates continuing through October 17.
None of these four things required each other to happen. But they all drew on the same small pool of volunteers, the same handful of public funding tools, and the same stretch of real estate that had been sitting underused for years. That's a more useful way to understand what's happening downtown than treating each reopening as its own isolated piece of good news.
What This Actually Means If You Live Here
If the pattern holds, the next building worth watching is whichever one goes quiet next. A vacant storefront on Prince Street or Water Lane isn't just an empty window anymore. It's a candidate for the same playbook: find the grant, find the volunteers willing to run point, and give it a few years.
None of this requires an agent to appreciate. It's worth paying attention to what your own town is doing with its old buildings, whether or not a move is anywhere on your radar. But if you're weighing a change in Tappahannock, or just want to talk through what a place like this is actually worth right now, The Ward Collective is glad to talk. Let's Connect.
