Elaine Jager, founder and owner of Elaine B. Jewelry in Ferndale, is an artist first and a jeweler second. The Charlottesville, Virginia, native trained in metal material studies and apprenticed with a master jeweler, but she was also a glassblower who worked part-time in her family’s restaurant business.

“I was always an artist,” Jager said. “Jewelry just became a way to make a living with my art.”
Step inside the more than 150-year-old structure, whose rooms sit underneath Power Road, as owner Rick Hatfield points out, and it feels like not much has changed. Fieldstone walls hearken back to what Hatfield said is a circa 1832 foundation, with century-old greenhouses around back.