Charlottesville-published book examines 'lost' Va. towns

EGGLESTON — The Winnebego disgorged its passengers on Village Street, where they seemed to skulk around The Palisades Restaurant.

Owner Shaena Muldoon wondered what they were looking for.

When she asked, she got one of many history lessons this place has to teach.

The family had traveled from Indiana and Kentucky to see where their great-grandfather practiced medicine in the once-booming town of Eggleston Springs, Muldoon said.

On the same floor with a cellar and a coal chute, the doctor had offered his services in Pyne General Store. Today it is the basement of Muldoon’s 2-year-old restaurant and music venue.

From boom to bust to new stirrings of revitalization, much has changed in Eggleston.

In the 1830s, the supposed healing properties of Eggleston’s sulphur spring built a tourist destination, followed in the 1880s by the railroad.

A thriving transport hub, the community built a high school, a general store and a Chevrolet dealership. But, as with many rural communities, the Great Depression of the 1930s pointed the town’s fortunes downward.

Slowly businesses, and even the school, closed.

But the old general store remained, and in 1998 this living relic was “discovered” by Virginia Tech architecture student Kirsten Sparenborg.

From that encounter came an idea for a wide-ranging project that took Sparenborg to dozens of similarly “lost” communities across Virginia, where she interviewed residents and photographed forgotten places.

Terri Fisher, outreach coordinator for Virginia Tech’s Community Design Assistance Center, kept the project alive after Sparenborg’s graduation in 2000, revisiting the communities, taking more photographs and documenting changes.

More than a decade in the making, “Lost Communities of Virginia” — recently published by Albemarle Books in Charlottesville — documents 30 of Virginia’s historic communities. All at some point were boomtowns, growing up around tourist destinations, transportation hubs or courthouses, but having since declined in economic influence and population.

The center has raised more than half of the $45,000 publication cost through sales of “Lost Communities” greeting cards and a “sponsor a chapter” fundraiser. Pictorial exhibits and a motorcycle tour guide of the communities also have built awareness and support.

The book takes readers to towns representing most of the state, from Capeville in the eastern island county of Northampton, north to Jerome in Shenandoah County, south to Almagro in Pittsylvania County, and west to Derby in the coalfields of Wise County to the Pamunky Indian Reservation that straddles King William and New Kent counties, home to one of Virginia’s eight recognized American Indian tribes.

The book can be read, not just as a geographic scrapbook, but as an economic history, chronicling the boom and bust cycles that shaped Virginia and were fueled at various times by mining, slavery, logging and tourism trends.

The book shows “what we used to be and what we are today,” Muldoon said. “All these communities are really special in their own ways.”

In addition to Eggleston, another Giles County town, Newport, is featured in the book as well as Paint Bank in Craig County, Moneta in Bedford County, Riner in Montgomery County, Clements Mill in Franklin County and Eagle Rock in Botetourt County. All the communities profiled still exist, and some even thrive. But many have transitioned to bedroom or retirement communities. Only Eagle Rock still has a town bank.

Of the 30, Fisher said she has many favorites.

But one haunts her.

Built on the wealth that flowed from wonder-twins coal and rail, Pocahontas in Tazewell County grew at its peak to about 4,000 people. The population supported an opera house, hotels, saloons, schools and thriving immigrant communities. But today, fewer than 400 people live there, and in 2008 the community lost its beloved 99-year-old high school.

Along its streets, cast-iron storefronts and rotting buildings stand like the ghosts of prosperity, Fisher said.

The history is not all sad, however.

According to the book, Pocahontas is working to leverage federal funds to develop a modern tourism economy that would capitalize on its rich history and preserve some its historic structures.

In Eggleston, Muldoon has transformed the general store — continuously operating from 1926 to 2000 — into a popular restaurant and music venue that once again is bringing the outside world to the tiny community. Muldoon, who grew up two miles away from Eggleston in Sinking Creek, has brought jobs and hope.

In return, Muldoon depends on the town, as workers and as customers. The restaurant “couldn’t be in existence without the Eggleston community,” she said.

The book is being distributed by the University of Virginia Press, and is available online and at brick-and-mortar booksellers, Fisher said.

But that’s not the end of the story.

“The idea is that we’ll continue to collect more communities” and eventually publish another book, Fisher said.

Currently, Virginia Tech’s community design center is working on developing a self-guided driving tour of lost communities in Southside Virginia that, Fisher said, might piggyback on the success of the motorcycle tour of the original lost communities.

Fisher, the former director of the Giles County Historical Society, is the author of two other books on local history: “Giles County: Then and Now” and “Pearisburg and Giles County: Images of America.”

 Moxley reports for The Roanoke Times.