Wedding DJ at The Martha Washington Inn & Spa in Abingdon, VA

The Space

General Francis Preston built this brick residence in 1832 for $15,000, and the building has carried several lives since: a family home, then in 1858 the site of Martha Washington College, one of the country’s early colleges devoted entirely to women, which operated for seventy years until the Great Depression closed it. During the Civil War the building served as a hospital, with student volunteers staying on as nurses for wounded soldiers.

The Prestons’ original living room is now the inn’s main lobby, and a Dutch-baroque grandfather clock over nine feet tall, shipped from England by a Preston daughter, still stands in the East Parlor. A tunnel once connected the inn to the neighboring Barter Theatre in the 1930s and 40s, a physical link between two of Abingdon’s oldest institutions that guests can still trace on a walk through town.

Capacity & Layout

The inn holds 63 guest rooms, split between 14 suites and 49 standard rooms with a range of bed configurations, so a wedding party and out-of-town guests can be housed across a real range of room types rather than one standard layout repeated 63 times. That range matters for a multi-generational guest list where needs vary from a family suite down to a single traveler’s room.

As a member of Historic Hotels of America, the official program of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the inn’s event spaces sit inside a building whose rooms were not built to a standard hotel floor plan, so each space carries its own scale and character. That means a planning walk-through matters more here than at a purpose-built ballroom, since the room your reception fills was not designed for it originally.

Amenities

The natatorium, with its retractable roof, lets guests swim indoors or under open sky depending on the weather, and the outdoor grounds add a jacuzzi, a fire pit, an 18-hole mini golf course, and tennis and pickleball courts, giving a wedding weekend real activities to fill the hours between the rehearsal dinner and the ceremony rather than just waiting around a hotel lobby.

Sisters American Grill handles dining on-site, and overnight guests receive a complimentary glass of port along with a full American breakfast served from 7am to 10am. Past guests have included Eleanor Roosevelt, President Harry Truman, Lady Bird Johnson, Jimmy Carter, and Elizabeth Taylor, a guest list that says something about the level of stay the inn has hosted for close to two centuries.

Location & Getting There

The inn sits in historic downtown Abingdon, close enough to walk to the Barter Theatre and the rest of the town’s historic district, so guests do not need a car once they have checked in. Tri-Cities Regional Airport is about 28.7 miles away, the longest airport drive among the venues in this area, worth building into the timeline for guests flying in from out of state.

Because the inn’s function spaces are original rooms inside a nearly two-century-old building rather than a modern ballroom, expect walls, moldings, and furnishings that soften and absorb sound differently than a purpose-built event room; a DJ working here should plan a setup that fits the room’s actual scale rather than assuming the open floor of a standard hotel ballroom.