Broadway Street was never built for anyone on foot. It was built wide, for mill wagons and later delivery trucks, and it stayed that way long after the looms stopped. Bill Emory, who has lived in Woolen Mills for years and has spent a good part of that time researching the mill's history, once described the street bluntly: it's a "totally uninviting place to get to if you're doing anything other than driving a car." That line has stuck around because it's still true. What's changed is that residents figured out a workaround the street was never going to give them.
It isn't a sidewalk. It's the Rivanna Trail.
The route the map doesn't dress up
Most of the Rivanna Trails Foundation's official guide reads like scenery: sandy paths, riparian woods, high bluffs over Moore's Creek. Then, on the stretch nearest the old mill, the language changes to something closer to stage directions. Hikers are told to cross a pedestrian footbridge, walk directly through the Wool Factory's own grounds, and come out on Market Street. No detour around the property, no polite skirting of the parking lot. The public trail runs straight through a working restaurant and brewery complex, by design, and has for years.
That detail matters more than it sounds like it should. It means the shortest walk from a lot of Woolen Mills front doors to dinner and a drink was never the four-lane version of Broadway. It was always the trail, cutting through what used to be a 19th-century textile mill and is now somebody's back patio.
What's waiting on the other side
The building the trail spills you into has a longer memory than most restaurants get to claim. The site held a grist mill as far back as 1795, was known as "The Charlottesville Factory" by 1840, and became "The Charlottesville Woolen Mills" in 1868 under Henry Marchant, who rebuilt it after Union troops burned the original structure in 1865. At its peak the mill ran with a staff of 50 turning out wool textiles for uniforms and railroad workers. It stayed in operation until 1962, then sat mostly idle as a storage facility for decades.
WillowTree's roughly $25 million renovation, started in 2018, is what turned that dormant footprint back into somewhere people actually go. The Wool Factory occupies about 12,000 square feet of the complex as a combined brewery, restaurant, and coffee and wine shop, with Selvedge Brewing collaborating on small-batch beers with Hunter Smith, the owner of Champion Brewing Company. Broadcloth, the sit-down restaurant inside, is the destination end of that pedestrian bridge. You don't drive to it if you live close enough. You walk the trail.
Riverview Park runs on its own clock
Head the other direction on the same trail system and you land in Riverview Park, the 26.6-acre stretch at the eastern edge of the city that Riverview Cemetery donated for public use back in 1974 and the city finished renovating into a park by 1989. The paved section of the Rivanna Trail through the park runs about 2.3 miles north, passing under Free Bridge and Route 250, and the park itself keeps standard hours of 6 a.m. to 9 p.m.
The detail worth actually remembering, especially if you walk a dog, is that off-leash access inside the park is limited to specific portions on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday only. Every other day, leash rules apply across the whole property. It's a small thing, but it's the kind of small thing that only shows up if you've actually been there on the wrong afternoon.
One Sunday when the shortcut gets crowded
For most of the year, this stretch of trail belongs to whoever lives close enough to use it without thinking about it. That changes for one day this month. Loop de'Ville, the volunteer-run trail festival, returns on Sunday, September 27, 2026, staged out of Rivanna River Company, and it turns the entire 20-mile loop around Charlottesville into an organized, free event with an optional donation.
The day breaks into a handful of ways to move through it:
- A guided 2 p.m. walk that follows the Rivanna River south toward Riverview Park, built specifically to highlight trail and stewardship projects along that stretch of the corridor
- Longer hikes and runs launching from Fontaine Research Park and Rivanna River Company at various points through the morning, ranging from a two-hour walk to the roughly nine-hour hike that's been the event's signature since 2002
- Group bike rides in slow, brisk, and fast tiers, plus a new option this year: the "RTF Super Loop," which pairs the standard 20-mile main loop with an additional 10 miles on the newer River North Trail spur, aimed squarely at experienced riders willing to take on 30 miles in one push
Seven aid stations, called Cheer Zones, are staged along the route for the day, run by volunteers pouring water and, at some stops, beer. None of it requires registration in advance for the shorter distances, and the event's own framing is straightforward about that: you can do a mile or the whole loop, on foot, on a bike, or as a volunteer.
What actually changes, and what doesn't
For one Sunday, the trail that quietly connects your block to Broadcloth becomes the busiest corridor in the neighborhood, full of runners in bibs and cyclists checking their Super Loop mileage against the aid stations. It's worth knowing that's coming, if only so you're not surprised by the traffic on Riverside Avenue or the crowd at the Riverview Park lot that morning.
But the festival is a single day layered on top of a system that works the rest of the year without any of that structure. The footbridge through the Wool Factory doesn't need a festival to justify its existence. Neither does the two-mile paved stretch through Riverview Park, or the fact that a mill built in 1868 to clothe railroad workers now pours beer for people who walked there instead of drove. Loop de'Ville just makes visible, for one weekend, the shortcut Woolen Mills has been quietly using all along.
If you're weighing what a property here is actually worth, or thinking about what it would take to sell one well in a neighborhood where the trail matters as much as the street frontage, that's a conversation Loring Woodriff Real Estate knows how to have in detail. Let's work together.
