The Piedmont, Virginia's “Foot of the Mountain,” begins at the crest of the Blue Ridge Mountains, descends eastward into rolling countryside, and stops at a broken line of mountains roughly delineating western Southside. The central and western counties of the Piedmont included in this volume...
Bounded on the northwest by the Blue Ridge Mountains and the Blue Ridge Parkway and on the southeast by the James River, Nelson County ranges from rugged mountains and forests suitable for logging to gentle slopes with orchards and vineyards, and to good bottomlands that now often lie...
Goldmine, New Town, and Stumptown are company housing sections of Schuyler, a quarry town that in 1925 had 1,000 workers. In 1916 the Virginia Alberene Corporation moved its operations from Alberene in Albemarle County to Schuyler and built housing, a commissary, schools, a hotel (...
In 1761, as the French and Indian War was winding down, Amherst County was formed from Albemarle County. The county was named for Jeffrey Amherst, a British commander in North America during the later part of the war and absentee governor of Virginia from 1759 to 1768. Amherst, a...
Although Madison Heights has fallen victim to urban sprawl from Lynchburg, traces of the early town of Madison survive. It was created in 1791 at the same time that John Lynch of Lynchburg was authorized to build a tobacco warehouse and inspection station at his...
Formed from Lunenburg County in 1753, the county was named for John Russell, fourth Duke of Bedford, who earlier had been in charge of colonial affairs. With the Blue Ridge Mountains as its northwestern border, including the distinctive Peaks of Otter known as Sharp Top and Flat Top,...
Established in 1792 as Liberty, the seat of Bedford County, the town suffered a devastating downtown fire in 1884 but was quickly rebuilt in the boom times of the early 1890s and renamed Bedford City. By the mid-twentieth century, the commercial center,...
The tiny community of Forest takes its name from Poplar Forest, the land-holding inherited by Thomas Jefferson's wife, Martha, in 1773 from her father, John Wayles. On this tract, Jefferson's house, Poplar Forest (BD26), was a...
The City of Lynchburg lies at the northeastern corner of Bedford County and is bordered by Amherst and Campbell counties. Quaker entrepreneur John Lynch founded Lynchburg in 1786. The original forty-five-acre tract, now the heart of downtown, lay on a steep hillside...
Lynchburg's compact downtown extends along Main and Church streets between 5th and 12th streets, an area only slightly larger than the original forty-five-acre townsite, which it encompasses. Banks and stores line Main Street, with parallel Church Street containing civic buildings...
Sometimes known as Lynchburg Hill, this neighborhood, centered on Court and Clay streets between 5th and 12th streets, occupies a relatively level ridge high above the downtown business district. The area developed early as a choice residential area, and some of the city's...
Centered on Federal Street between 8th and 12th streets, and extending to Harrison and Jackson streets on either side of Federal, this neighborhood was the first large-scale residential development beyond Lynchburg's original town boundaries. Although it contains a panoply of...
Diamond Hill developed as a fashionable neighborhood prior to the Civil War, when a number of Greek Revival houses and one or two Gothic Revival cottages and Italianate mansions were built along Washington Street, on a high ridge south of downtown. A second wave of building...
Brick-paved Madison Street between 1st and 5th streets is the main thorough-fare of this hill neighborhood. Like the others, Garland Hill had an initial antebellum surge of development, followed by a second wave in the 1890s. Antebellum houses on the southwest side of the...
This neighborhood on the fringes of downtown was developed on property that originally belonged to the Point of Honor estate (BD53). Its development followed much the same patterns as the others: an initial period of...
Lynchburg's major residential neighborhood, extending northwest of downtown, is reached from downtown via Rivermont Bridge, which crosses Blackwater Creek just beyond Main Street. A local engineer, Major Edward S. Hutter, is credited with platting Rivermont in 1890 as a streetcar...
Generated in part by the establishment of industrial parks, in the 1950s Lynchburg began to spread to the west and south, annexing small communities. The Lynchburg Expressway (U.S. 29) encouraged this growth, as did the development of Lynchburg Regional Airport (...
The Blue Ridge Mountains edge the western border of Franklin County, the Piedmont forms its heartland, and the northeastern edge is rimmed with expensive lake developments. From the legacy of its Scots-Irish bootleggers in the mountains to its wealthy new settlers in Smith Mountain...
The pre-Revolutionary town of Rocky Mount, county seat of Franklin since its inception, is also a factory town working to reinvent itself. As in many old Piedmont towns, the governmental uptown Main Street follows a ridgeline that provided drainage for early dirt roads. With the...
Henry County lies mainly in the rolling Piedmont of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Its hilly terrain is broken by an occasional mountain peak and flattened by rich bottomland and sandy soils. Formed from Pittsylvania County in 1777, Henry was the first Virginia county to be established after...
Set in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, Martinsville was named for General Joseph Martin, a frontiersman, soldier, and statesman. When the western portion of Henry County was broken off to form Patrick County in 1790, Martinsville was named the county...
In Patrick County the hills of the Piedmont meet the Blue Ridge Mountains. Except in the steep, forested mountain areas, dairying, cattle, peach and apple orchards, and tobacco are the basis of the economy, and forests provide lumber. Most of the population is scattered throughout the...
Fields of tobacco, peanuts, soybeans, cotton, grazing livestock, and large sweeps of forest make up the heartland of Southside, Virginia's Outer Piedmont. Its undulating landscape lies west of the Fall Line and south of the James River. To the west, a sequence of isolated mountains separates...
Situated in the gentle hills of central Piedmont, Campbell County was formed in 1781 from part of Bedford County and, at the suggestion of Patrick Henry, named for William Campbell, a Revolutionary War hero who had died suddenly the same year. General Campbell, Scots-Irish like most...
Rustburg takes its names from Rust Meadows, part of the fifty acres donated in 1784 by Jeremiah Rust for the county seat of Campbell. A number of substantial brick structures built in the mid-nineteenth century reflect the locality's healthy economy during that period....
Altavista, the largest town in the county, was the creation of two brothers and two railroads. In 1905, when surveys determined where the line of the east-west Virginian Railway would intersect with the existing north-south Southern Railway, John E. and Henry L. Lane—who were building...
The name Appomattox is synonymous with the words “defeat” and “victory” in the minds of Americans. Here ended the four-year-long struggle between two ideologies, the remnants of which continue to be rallying points today for differing opinions over the Civil War's meaning and its...
The source of Buckingham County's name is a mystery. Perhaps it was named for Buckinghamshire in England or the Duke of Buckingham. Some contend that it was named for Buck River, now called Willis River, or Archibald Cary's tract, Buckingham, on Buck River. In any case, the county...
The site of Buckingham, then known as Maysville, was established in 1818 as the county seat and a courthouse was built. Despite some losses, this linear courthouse village has retained a remarkable cohesiveness. Because of his construction work on the...
Buckingham slate was being quarried at Arvonia by the mid-eighteenth century and was soon famous throughout Virginia. But because its weight made transportation difficult and poor quarrying techniques further decreased its marketability, it was only after the Civil War that it was widely...
