First Advertisements of the Virginia & Tennessee Rail Road ?

[NW Mailing List]

 Bruce,This is fabulous! I was eager to read this since we knew the V&T wasn't completed to Mt. Airy/Rural Retreat and points west until later that year. Yes, the train stopped at Wytheville, and the party continued on to Abingdon via carriage according to the Dispatch dated June 18.
This dispatch has a very entertaining paragraph about a stop at the Rural Retreat, a breakfast house located 12 miles west of Wytheville, on the 'Macadamized Road', aka The Great Road, now Highway 11 more or less. The Rural Retreat 'breakfast house' was the location of the Rural Retreat Post Office since the early 1830's, and it was located a few miles north of the V&T tracks. The party continued on the Great Road, through Mount Airy, to Abingdon.

It is still a mystery why the V&T didn't name the original station 'Rural Retreat' instead of 'Mount Airy', given that it was about equidistant from both, but even though the Rural Retreat Tavern had a post office, Mount Airy was an actual planned community (with an interesting history of its own). The Mount Airy Depot operated as such until 1871 when the name was changed to Rural Retreat. The Rural Retreat Post Office had been moved prior to 1870, from the Tavern on the Great Road, to a building a block away from the Mount Airy Depot.
    On Thursday, January 13, 2022, 11:04:55 AM PST, NW Mailing List <nw-mailing-list at nwhs.org> wrote:  
 
 On Thu, Jan 13, 2022 at 6:44 AM Abram wrote:

  Were I not so taken-up with administering my Turnip Plantation and its associated fortune, I would scour every know source and piece together into one document every scrap of information on the V&T's early operating history.  But since I am presently engaged, this would be a good task for the Consulting firm of Blackstock Bundy Hamilton & Sandermann, Advisors, LLC.

While poking around in the newspaper archives served up by the Library of Virginia (https://virginiachronicle.com/ -- a great time sink), I came around a series of articles about travel through Southwest Virginia. In June of 1855, the Daily Dispatch, a Richmond newspaper, carried a series of stories about a trip to Southwest Virginia. Seventeen members of the Richmond Board of Trade were invited by the Virginia and Tennessee Railroad to travel along the rail line to both view the railroad and to see the country that it passed through. The series of articles chronicles their trip. See https://nwhistory.info/articles/SWVA.php
Bruce in Blacksburg

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