Appalachian Community Histories – Bluefield, Tazewell County: From Pin-Hook to Graham and Virginia’s Tallest Town
On the Virginia side of the state line, tucked against the mountains of Tazewell County, Bluefield carries a history larger than its present size suggests. It was not born as Bluefield. Its earliest remembered identity was Pin-Hook, a small place tied to road, water, livestock, and settlement before the coal and railroad age remade the region. Then came the railroad, the Pocahontas coalfields, outside capital, town plats, brick banks, lodges, schools, churches, stores, hotels, and eventually the name Graham. Only in 1924 did the town take the name Bluefield, binding itself more closely in name and identity to its larger sister city across the West Virginia line.
The story of Bluefield, Virginia is not simply a story of a town changing names. It is the story of a mountain community becoming a gateway. Its streets were shaped by the Norfolk and Western Railway, by the opening of the Pocahontas coalfields, by the ambitions of land companies and local businessmen, and by the people who worked in coal, railroads, stores, schools, churches, cemeteries, and homes. The old commercial district along Virginia Avenue still preserves much of that story in brick, stone, and street lines.
Pin-Hook Before Graham
Before the town became Graham, local memory and historical records point to a place known as Pin-Hook, sometimes written Pinhook or Pin Hook. The name is usually connected to cattle pens or a small creek in the area, reminders that this was once a rural crossing place rather than a railroad town. By the 1860s, the area that later became the commercial heart of Bluefield was already known by that older name.
This early settlement sat in a landscape of narrow valleys, ridges, and routes that had long shaped life in Tazewell County. The mountains did not isolate the community completely. They directed movement through corridors. Roads, water, and later rail lines determined where people gathered, where stores appeared, and where towns could grow.
When coal development began to transform southwest Virginia and southern West Virginia, Pin-Hook’s location became far more important. It stood close to the route that would connect agricultural Tazewell County with the Pocahontas coalfields to the north. In a few short decades, a place remembered for cattle pens and local settlement would become a planned railroad town.
The Coming of the Railroad
The great turning point came with the Norfolk and Western Railway and the rise of the Pocahontas coalfields. In the 1880s, the railroad pushed into the region, connecting the New River line with the newly opened coalfield. Graham, as the town soon became known, stood near the junction of railroad lines that served both local commerce and the wider coal economy.
The National Register nomination for the Bluefield Commercial Historic District describes the town as a commercial center that served the coalfields and rural areas from its incorporation forward. Although coal was not mined in the town itself, Bluefield’s merchants, bankers, manufacturers, and residents benefited from the demand created by nearby mining communities. Coal camps needed food, tools, household goods, building materials, banking, professional services, and transportation connections. Graham helped supply those needs.
In 1883, Norfolk and Western trains carried coal out of Pocahontas through Graham toward Radford. By 1886, coal from the Pocahontas region was moving toward the railroad’s coal piers at Lambert’s Point in Norfolk. This tied the mountain coalfields to Atlantic markets, and Graham sat along that chain of movement.
Bluefield, West Virginia became the larger railroad headquarters city, helped by its location and the railroad’s operational needs. Graham did not become the same kind of railroad center, but it still thrived as a junction, a distribution point, and a commercial town. The difference between the two Bluefields would shape both communities for generations.
Graham Land and Improvement Company
The Town of Graham was incorporated in the 1880s and named for Col. Thomas Graham, a Philadelphia capitalist connected to the railroad and regional development. The Graham family and the Graham Land and Improvement Company became central to the town’s early planning and promotion.
The historic district nomination notes that in 1890 J. Dickinson Sergeant conveyed eighty acres to the Graham Land and Improvement Company. That land became the central part of the Town of Graham and included much of today’s historic commercial district. The company filed “Plan D” of the Town of Graham in Tazewell County deed records in February 1890. That plat laid out the grid of streets and blocks that still shapes the old downtown.
Some street names changed over time. Wister Street became Virginia Avenue. Morton Street became South College Avenue. Yet the underlying town plan remained recognizable. This is one reason the Bluefield Commercial Historic District matters. It preserves not just old buildings, but the shape of a planned railroad-era town.
Newspaper advertising from the 1890s promoted Graham as a place of opportunity. The Graham Land and Improvement Company advertised land, railroad access, and industrial promise. Early hopes included furnaces, hotels, lumber, supply businesses, and other industries. The town was being sold as part of the wider Appalachian industrial boom.
Building a Downtown
The earliest business district was not immediately the brick downtown people remember today. The 1893 Sanborn Fire Insurance map of Graham showed a growing but still young town, with stores, churches, dwellings, and frame buildings along its principal streets. Sanborn maps are especially useful because they recorded building footprints, materials, uses, streets, and other details for fire insurance purposes. For historians, they are snapshots of a town’s physical life.
By the early twentieth century, Graham’s downtown had taken on a more substantial form. Brick and stone buildings replaced many of the earlier frame structures. Banks, stores, professional offices, restaurants, supply houses, and lodge halls lined the commercial streets. The district became the place where rural Tazewell County met the coalfield economy.
Harman Lodge No. 222, built in 1895, is one of the most important surviving examples. The DHR summary identifies it as the oldest extant building in the Bluefield Commercial Historic District. It housed a pharmacy on the first floor and meeting rooms above, a typical arrangement in small Appalachian commercial towns where one building often served several functions.
Banking became especially important. The town’s commercial life is represented by institutions such as the Bank of Graham and First National Bank. Banks did more than store money. They symbolized confidence, investment, land sales, business expansion, and the belief that Graham had a future.
A Different Kind of Coalfield Town
Graham’s relationship to coal was different from that of Pocahontas or many other company towns. Pocahontas was directly tied to coal company development. Graham was not founded as a coal company town. It was a railroad and commercial town that grew because of the coalfields nearby.
That difference mattered. Graham served miners, railroad men, farmers, merchants, professionals, and families, but it did not develop only around a single mine or company. It was a market town, a supply point, and a civic center. Its businesses depended on the coal boom, but its identity was broader than coal alone.
The National Register nomination also notes that Graham did not develop the same rowdy entertainment reputation as some nearby coalfield towns. Its commercial district included stores, banks, offices, restaurants, and supply houses rather than a landscape dominated by saloons. That detail helps explain how local leaders wanted the town to be seen. Graham was ambitious, but it also wanted respectability.
Schools, Churches, and Community Life
A town is never only its businesses. Graham’s identity also grew through its schools, churches, lodges, cemeteries, and neighborhoods. The DHR architectural survey of Tazewell County records that schooling in Graham began when the community was still known as Pinhook. A small school was built around 1884. In 1887, Joseph Greever built a brick college that later became known as Epworth Institute and Graham College.
High school classes began in the early twentieth century, and a high school building was later constructed on the site of Graham College. Education became one of the ways the town marked its growth from settlement to established community.
Churches appeared early as well. Graham Methodist was founded in 1880. Andersons Chapel, later known as Bethel Methodist Church, was organized by the Black Methodist congregation in 1883. Tabernacle Baptist began in 1885, Graham Presbyterian in 1887, and St. Mary’s Episcopal in 1892. These churches reveal a community taking root across denominations and across racial lines, though in the segregated patterns of the era.
Fraternal organizations also shaped civic life. Harman Lodge stood prominently in town, and its building remains one of the district’s most important landmarks. Lodges, churches, schools, and banks all helped Graham become more than a railroad stop. They made it a town with memory, leadership, and institutions.
Historic Homes and Local Leadership
Bluefield’s historic houses tell another part of the story. The Alexander St. Clair House, built in 1879 and 1880, stands as a reminder of the older Tazewell County world that overlapped with the coming railroad age. Alexander St. Clair was a banker and farmer, and the house is an important example of late nineteenth century architecture in southwest Virginia. The Virginia Department of Historic Resources identifies it as a documented work of local builder Thomas M. Hawkins.
The Walter McDonald Sanders House, completed in 1896, reflects the prosperity of the late Victorian period. DHR describes it as a large brick Queen Anne style house on College Avenue, once part of a much larger Sanders family farm. Today the Sanders House Center is associated with local history, preservation, and community events. Its survival connects present-day Bluefield with the families, farms, and ambitions that shaped Graham during its early boom years.
These houses remind us that Bluefield’s history was not confined to downtown storefronts. It also lived in family farms, residences, outbuildings, roads, and the social networks of local leaders.
Maple Hill Cemetery and Black Bluefield
Maple Hill Cemetery is one of the most important places for understanding Bluefield’s deeper community history. The town has owned and operated the cemetery since 1890. Located in West Graham, it became the resting place for generations of local residents.
The African American section of Maple Hill Cemetery carries special historical weight. Virginia historical marker documentation states that about 300 African Americans were buried there between the 1890s and the mid-twentieth century, including some people who had been born enslaved. The marker connects this burial ground to the long presence of African Americans in Tazewell County and to the labor that helped build the town.
Black residents worked in coal, railroads, masonry, cooking, midwifery, service trades, churches, and other parts of community life. Their labor helped create Graham and Bluefield, but their stories were often separated, underrecorded, or neglected in public memory. The cemetery forces the town’s history to become more complete. It reminds visitors that the building of Bluefield was not only the work of land companies, railroad officials, and businessmen. It was also the work of Black laborers, craftsmen, church members, families, mothers, ministers, miners, cooks, and railroad workers whose names deserve recovery.
Bluefield College on the Hill
Education took on a larger regional role with the founding of Bluefield College, now Bluefield University. In 1919, the Baptist General Association of Virginia studied the need for a junior college in southwestern Virginia. Bluefield residents offered land and money to help bring the institution to town. In 1922, the college opened its doors.
The school’s own history presents the founding as a partnership between Virginia Baptists and local Bluefield leaders. The college was meant to serve students in southwestern Virginia and Appalachia. Its hilltop campus became one of the town’s defining institutions and expanded Bluefield’s identity beyond commerce and railroads.
The presence of the college also tied the town to a wider educational mission. Students came to Bluefield not simply to pass through on a train or buy goods on Virginia Avenue, but to study, live, worship, and build futures. In that sense, Bluefield’s role as a gateway continued, but education became part of the road.
Becoming Bluefield
For most of its early history, the town was Graham. That changed in 1924. Virginia’s official charter history records that the place was formerly the Town of Graham and that its name was changed to Bluefield in 1924. The town’s own history says that a referendum on June 10, 1924, approved the change to Bluefield, Virginia.
The name change was more than a legal adjustment. It reflected the close relationship between Graham and Bluefield, West Virginia. The two communities shared a border region, a railroad economy, commercial ties, and a common public identity. The renaming was celebrated with a mock marriage ceremony between officials of Bluefield, Virginia and Bluefield, West Virginia.
The ceremony was symbolic, but the symbolism mattered. The town was not giving up its past. Graham remained in street names, institutions, family memory, and local speech. Yet the new name Bluefield placed the Virginia town more openly beside its West Virginia neighbor. It acknowledged that both communities had grown from the same coalfield and railroad world.
Floods, Change, and Survival
Like many Appalachian towns, Bluefield faced changes that tested its old downtown. The decline of coal and rail activity, shifts in shopping patterns, automobile-oriented development, and repeated flooding all affected the historic commercial district. The National Register nomination notes that flooding from Beaver Pond Creek and Whitley Branch contributed to the loss of historic buildings in parts of town.
Yet the old core survived enough to tell the story. Virginia Avenue, Graham Avenue, Spring Street, and South College Avenue still preserve the shape of the early town. Historic buildings remain as evidence of the period when Graham stood at the edge of the Pocahontas coalfields and served miners, farmers, railroad men, merchants, and families.
Preservation does not mean freezing a town in time. It means recognizing what still speaks. In Bluefield, the surviving downtown speaks through masonry walls, old banks, lodge halls, former stores, cemetery grounds, church histories, college buildings, and names that refuse to disappear.
Why Bluefield’s History Matters
Bluefield, Virginia matters because it shows how Appalachian towns were built at the meeting point of local life and industrial ambition. Pin-Hook was rural and local. Graham was planned, promoted, chartered, and tied to railroads and coal. Bluefield became a border town with a shared regional identity, carrying both Virginia and West Virginia associations in its name.
Its history includes Philadelphia capitalists and local landowners, Norfolk and Western trains, Sanborn maps, deed books, schools, churches, Black cemetery sections, college founders, brick commercial blocks, and families who stayed through boom and decline. It is a town where the Appalachian coal economy can be read in architecture, but also where the story reaches beyond coal into education, religion, race, preservation, and memory.
Today Bluefield calls itself Virginia’s Tallest Town. The phrase fits more than its elevation. The town’s history rises in layers. Pin-Hook remains beneath Graham. Graham remains beneath Bluefield. Beneath all three are the people who built, buried, taught, worshiped, worked, traded, traveled, and remembered in the mountains of Tazewell County.
Sources & Further Reading
National Park Service. “National Register of Historic Places Registration Form: Bluefield Commercial Historic District, Tazewell County, Virginia.” Prepared for the Virginia Department of Historic Resources, 2024. https://www.dhr.virginia.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/143-5083_Bluefield_Commercial_HD_2024_NR_Nomination_FINAL.pdf
Virginia Department of Historic Resources. “Bluefield Commercial Historic District.” Virginia Landmarks Register and National Register of Historic Places, 2024. https://www.dhr.virginia.gov/historic-registers/143-5083/
Virginia General Assembly. “Charter: Bluefield, Town of.” Virginia Legislative Information System. Accessed June 25, 2026. https://law.lis.virginia.gov/charters/bluefield/
Town of Bluefield, Virginia. “About Town of Bluefield.” Accessed June 25, 2026. https://www.bluefieldva.org/our_community/about_town_of_bluefield/index.php
Town of Bluefield, Virginia. “Maple Hill Cemetery: History.” Accessed June 25, 2026. https://www.bluefieldva.org/departments/maple_hill_cemetery/history.php
Virginia Department of Historic Resources. “16 New State Historical Highway Markers Approved.” March 23, 2021. https://www.dhr.virginia.gov/blog-posts/16-new-state-historical-highway-markers-approved/
Historical Marker Database. “Maple Hill Cemetery, African American Section.” Accessed June 25, 2026. https://www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=188246
Virginia Department of Historic Resources. “Walter McDonald Sanders House.” Virginia Landmarks Register and National Register of Historic Places. https://www.dhr.virginia.gov/historic-registers/143-5022/
Virginia Department of Historic Resources. “Alexander St. Clair House.” Virginia Landmarks Register and National Register of Historic Places. https://www.dhr.virginia.gov/historic-registers/092-0016/
Virginia Department of Historic Resources. “Tazewell County.” Virginia Landmarks Register and National Register of Historic Places. https://www.dhr.virginia.gov/location/tazewell-county/
Worsham, Gibson. Historic Architectural Survey of Tazewell County, Virginia. Richmond: Virginia Department of Historic Resources, 2001. https://www.dhr.virginia.gov/pdf_files/SpecialCollections/TZ-045_Tazewell_AH_Survey_2001_GWorsham_report_cost_share.pdf
Sanborn Map Company. “Sanborn Fire Insurance Map from Graham, Tazewell County, Virginia.” Washington, DC: Library of Congress, May 1903. https://www.loc.gov/resource/g3884gm.g3884gm_g090261903/?st=gallery
Library of Congress. “About This Collection: Sanborn Maps.” Accessed June 25, 2026. https://www.loc.gov/collections/sanborn-maps/about-this-collection/
Richmond Dispatch. “Graham Land and Improvement Company Advertisement.” March 21, 1890. Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn85038614/1890-03-21/ed-1/?sp=4&st=text
Roanoke Daily Times. “Graham, Tazewell County, Va.” April 9, 1890. Virginia Chronicle. https://www.virginiachronicle.com/?a=d&d=RDT18900409.1.2
Roanoke Daily Times. “The Graham Land and Improvement Company.” April 1, 1890. Virginia Chronicle. https://www.virginiachronicle.com/?a=d&d=RDT18900401.1.4
Tazewell County Circuit Court. “Genealogy Research.” Virginia’s Judicial System. Accessed June 25, 2026. https://www.courts.state.va.us/courts/circuit/Tazewell/genealogy
Tazewell County, Virginia. “Clerk of the Circuit Court.” Accessed June 25, 2026. https://tazewellcountyva.org/government/clerk-of-the-circuit-court/
Library of Virginia. “Tazewell County Microfilm.” Accessed June 25, 2026. https://www.lva.virginia.gov/collections/ccmf/VA/VA273
Tazewell County Public Library. “Genealogy.” Accessed June 25, 2026. https://tcplweb.org/genealogy/
Library of Virginia. “Digital Collections.” Accessed June 25, 2026. https://www.lva.virginia.gov/collections/digital-collections
Tazewell County Historical Society. “Tazewell County Historical Society.” Accessed June 25, 2026. https://www.tazewellhistorical.org/
Harman, John Newton. Annals of Tazewell County, Virginia from 1800 to 1922. Richmond, VA: W. C. Hill Printing Company, 1922. https://archive.org/details/annalsoftazewell01harm
Pendleton, William C. History of Tazewell County and Southwest Virginia, 1748–1920. Richmond, VA: W. C. Hill Printing Company, 1920. https://archive.org/download/historyoftazewel00pendrich/historyoftazewel00pendrich.pdf
Bickley, George W. L. History of the Settlement and Indian Wars of Tazewell County, Virginia. Cincinnati: Morgan and Company, 1852. https://digital.library.pitt.edu/islandora/object/pitt%3A31735054780675
Leslie, Louise. Tazewell County. Johnson City, TN: Overmountain Press, 1995. https://books.google.com/books/about/Tazewell_County.html?id=OzMqly1hYhUC
Leslie, Louise, and Terry Wayne Mullins. Tazewell County. Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2006. https://books.google.com/books/about/Tazewell_County.html?id=Wa4ZbnjpuYEC
Bluefield University. “History of BU.” Accessed June 25, 2026. https://www.bluefield.edu/about-bluefield-university/history/
Bluefield University. “Quick Facts.” Accessed June 25, 2026. https://www.bluefield.edu/about-bluefield-university/quick-facts/
Armbrister, David M. Lighthouse on the Hill: The Bluefield College Story. Bluefield, VA: Bluefield College, 2007. https://www.bluefield.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/history-of-bc.pdf
Author Note: Bluefield’s story is a reminder that Appalachian towns often carry more than one name, one economy, and one memory. If you have old photographs, church records, school memories, family stories, or business records tied to Graham or Bluefield, they may help preserve a fuller account of the town’s past.