Stokesville, Augusta County, Virginia: Company Town and End-of-Track for the Chesapeake Western Railway

Geier, Clarence R.

Built at the onset of the 20th century, the town of Stokesville was founded, thrived and became lost to history in a period of roughly 13 years. Established in 1901, the history and productivity of the town was intertwined with the planning and construction of a local railroad identified as the Chesapeake Western Railway. The town became end-of-track for the railroad and was, in fact, a company town created to extract, process and ship the wealth of natural resources within the interior mountain landscape. Stokesville is one example of numerous short-lived communities established in the last half of the 19th century in the Appalachian and Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. It was towns such as this, often funded by northern capitalists, that contributed to a post-Civil War economic recovery of the Shenandoah Valley and western Virginia. While the discussed research is grounded in field archaeology, the manuscript includes discussions of: post-Civil War railroading in the Valley; the methods of laying track in the late 19th century; the economic impact of the CW Railway; the importance of coal to attracting financial backing for the Railway; the nature and importance of lumbering and the harvesting of tanbark; and the railroad, industrial, and residential features that were Stokesville. As the only known study of a company town of a type that provided economic prosperity to many areas of western Virginia, if only briefly, care is taken to interpret the available photo record and architecturally document the very small number of remaining, period structures that illustrate the intended ephemeral nature of the the company town.

219 pages, 2025.