Farmers Bank of Fredericksburg

The Farmers Bank building appears on the National Register of Historic Places. That's verifiable. Everything else in the prior draft — street names, construction dates, architectural details, residential use by cashiers, the 1983 listing date, the 2016 restaurant conversion, the vault-turned-dining-room — none of it traces to the brief.

What the brief actually supports: a developer named Mike Adams purchased the property from PNC Financial Services. He floated plans to turn the bank building into a restaurant and offices and put seven townhouses on the lot. The project began with the removal of a 1950s drive-through addition. The city's Architectural Review Board threw cold water on the plans. Adams filed suit. The city sent police to enforce a stop-work order on the demolition, but by then there wasn't much left to cry over.

That's the story the brief tells — not the Federal-period bank vault where you can eat dinner, but the messy 2016 fight over what gets saved and what gets torn down when a developer buys an old bank. The preservationists stepped in late. The drive-through was already gone. The lawsuit came next.

The building still stands. What happens to it remains unsettled.