Like many Southwest Virginia counties, Smyth County is divided into a series of mountain ridges and valleys. The valleys here correspond to the three forks of the Holston River. During the second half of the eighteenth century, Middle Valley, the widest and most fertile, attracted...
Shortly after the formation of Smyth County in 1832, the courthouse town of Marion was established near the south bank of the Holston River. Time, fires, and bursts of rebuilding brought on by prosperity have eradicated almost all architectural traces of the town's early history. Instead...
Saltville is renowned for its prehistoric animal fossils, found in an enormous salt marsh on the western edge of town. Thomas Jefferson mentioned in his Notes on Virginia (1787) a mastodon tooth sent to him by Arthur Campbell, who established the valley's first saltworks at...
Formed in 1776 during the early months of the Revolution, Washington County was one of the first localities known to be named for George Washington. Carved out of the now-extinct Fincastle County, Washington is located at the south end of the Valley of Virginia but is so cut up by...
Abingdon began in the 1760s as a small community of log houses and taverns known as Wolf Hills. When the settlers constructed Black's Fort in 1776, the community became known by that name, and in 1777, the first Washington County court met here. In 1778 it became the county...
The City of Bristol began as the small incorporated town of Goodson in 1856, the same year the Virginia and Tennessee Railroad arrived in the community. Named in honor of its founder, Colonel Samuel Goodson, the town was situated immediately north of the town of...
Scenic mountains, spectacular waterfalls, farms, crossroads towns, and industry make up the character of Giles County. Established in 1806, the county takes its name from William Branch Giles, governor of Virginia from 1827 to 1830. The mostly rural county is watered by the New River and...
The seat of Giles County since 1808, Pearisburg is situated on a plateau at the base of Angel's Rest Mountain and overlooks the New River. The town takes its name from George Pearis, who donated the land to the county in 1808. Like other government-oriented communities, Pearisburg...
The scenic village of Newport, situated in the narrow Greenbrier Branch Valley at the base of Gap Mountain, epitomizes the small rural crossroads communities that once thrived in western Virginia. It sprang up in the 1830s as a commercial and industrial center at the...
Named for its site by the “narrows” of the New River, where it passes between Peters and East River mountains, the town was settled in the late eighteenth century. Originally a small crossroads community at the intersection of the Pearisburg-Tazewell Turnpike (now VA 61) and the...
Born during the turmoil of the Civil War, Bland County was formed in 1861 from parts of neighboring Wythe, Tazewell, and Giles counties. Named for Revolutionary War patriot Richard Bland from eastern Virginia, the county was settled during the mid-eighteenth century by people of Scots-...
As early as 1749, land speculators held huge tracts in this region of fertile valleys separated by rugged mountain ridges. Yet settlement had to wait another half century because frequent skirmishes with Native Americans made the area a bloody battleground. Not until the late 1700s,...
Tucked in a valley just north of the Clinch River, Tazewell's county seat—first called Jeffersonville or Tazewell Court House—was platted in 1800. The town's twenty half-acre lots were confined within its constricted valley until large residential sections to the south and...
In the early 1880s, engineer Jedidiah Hotchkiss convinced E. W. Clark and Company, the Philadelphia owners of the Norfolk and Western Railroad, to extend their line into Southwest Virginia. The purpose was to transport coal from the massive Flat Top seam that ran from northern...
Intermittent but fierce conflict with Native Americans made settlement in the trans-Allegheny region extremely risky until the latter part of the eighteenth century. Nevertheless, in 1748 Colonel James Patton of Augusta County led an expedition into this area of spectacular mountain...
In 1818, the county seat moved from its first location at Dickensonville to a hilly site on Cedar Creek near the center of the county. The town was laid out in thirty-eight lots lining Main Street and named Lebanon, apparently from the biblical mention of the Cedars of...
Mountains, creeks, and valleys generally run northeast to southwest in Scott County and unlike the gorge-like valleys in other southwestern Virginia counties, here they have wider rolling landscapes. The northern region is dominated by Powell Mountain, and the central by Clinch Mountain...
Buchanan County is known for its almost impenetrable mountainous and rugged terrain. Most of the county's habitable land is found in narrow valleys created by winding rivers and creeks. Hemmed in by high mountain slopes, residents sometimes have competed with the railroad, highway,...
Grundy, Buchanan County's only incorporated town, was named for Virginia-born Tennessee statesman Felix Grundy and has served as the county seat since 1858. The town experienced a wave of prosperity at the turn of the twentieth century when a number of large lumber companies located in...
Dickenson County is characterized by steep mountains cut with deep narrow valleys formed by the Pound, Cranesnest, Russell Fork, and McClure rivers. The last county to be created in Virginia, Dickenson was formed in 1880 from parts of Russell, Wise, and Buchanan counties. It was...
In 1882 the county seat of newly formed Dickenson County was moved from Ervinton to Clintwood, a small village in the northwestern area of the county. The town was named in honor of Major Henry Clinton Wood, a state senator from nearby Russell County, whose political support...
Formed in 1856 from Lee, Scott, and Russell counties, Wise County was named in honor of Henry Alexander Wise, governor of Virginia from 1856 to 1860. Consisting of a series of ridges, hollows, steep gorges, and plateaus, the county remained sparsely populated from the earliest Scots-...
Initially known as Prince's Flats after William Prince, who is believed to have built the first house in the area in 1785, Norton remained a small settlement until the Louisville and Nashville Railroad and the Norfolk and Western Railroad arrived in 1891....
The small community of Stonega extends along both sides of VA 600. Built between 1896 and the late 1920s, it was the first of more than a dozen company towns erected by the Stonega Coke and Coal Company for its employees. Stonega contains the three types of houses typical of coal towns...
The Stonega Coke and Coal Company built this small community in 1923 for its employees and their families. Derby was the last coal company town established in Virginia and it was viable until the nearby coal resources were exhausted in 1956, after which the company sold the houses and the...
Situated in the westernmost corner of Virginia, Lee County is perhaps the most remote area of the commonwealth. Residents are fond of stating that the county is closer to four other state capitals than it is to Virginia's capital, Richmond. A spirit of self-reliance and independence has...
Keokee was a model company town designed by New York architect and planner William L. Coulter in 1906 for industrialist Charles P. Perin of New York City. As president of the Keokee Coal and Coke Company, which in 1910 was absorbed into the Stonega Coke and Coal Company, Perin was...
Vermont is small, but noteworthy in excess of its size, and significant beyond its well-known stereotypes. The Green Mountain State's popular image epitomizes New England—handsome barns overlooking grazing cows in rolling pastures, white country churches punctuating hillsides of...
The first county organized in Vermont, in February 1779, Bennington consists of seventeen towns in the southwest corner of the state, bordering Massachusetts and New York. The towns near the New York border encompass from north to south the drainages of the Batten...
The first permanent settlement in Vermont, Bennington has remained one of its most important and architecturally rich communities. The town includes one of the greatest concentrations of early architecture in the state; outstanding examples of nineteenth-century...
