Appalachian Community Histories – Paintlick, Tazewell County: The Indian Paintings of Paint Lick Mountain
In western Tazewell County, Paintlick is one of those Appalachian places whose name carries more history than a modern road map can hold. It appears today as a small community name, close to places like Green, Rockhouse, Paintlick Place, and Maiden Spring. On the map it may seem quiet, but above it rises one of the most remarkable historic landscapes in Southwest Virginia.
Paint Lick Mountain is best known for the ancient pictographs painted on a high rock face above the Cove near Maiden Spring. These images, long called the Indian Paintings, have drawn the attention of local families, nineteenth century writers, federal ethnologists, Virginia historians, and modern archaeologists. They are rare not only for Tazewell County, but for Virginia and the eastern United States.
The story of Paintlick is therefore two stories at once. One is the story of a rural mountain community, with roads, farms, schools, churches, post office references, and family names that entered the record over time. The other is older and harder to read, written in red pigment on stone by Native people whose exact identity and purpose remain unknown.
The Pictographs Above The Cove
The Virginia Department of Historic Resources identifies the site as Indian Paintings on Paint Lick Mountain, DHR ID 092-0007. It was listed on the Virginia Landmarks Register on May 13, 1969, and on the National Register of Historic Places on December 2, 1969.
The official DHR summary describes the pictographs as being located on a rock face high on Paint Lick Mountain in Tazewell County. The images stretch in a horizontal line along an irregular exposure. They include simple forms interpreted as thunderbirds, human figures, deer, arrows, trees, and the sun. The red medium came from iron oxide, a natural pigment available in the mountain landscape.
That pigment is part of what gives the place its name. Paint Lick Mountain was not simply a scenic ridge. It was a place where color came out of the earth. Encyclopedia Virginia explains that soft mudstone rich in iron oxide, also known as hematite, provided a source for the red pigment used on the rock. Pieces of that material could have been ground and mixed with a binding substance, or held directly in the hand and applied to the rock surface.
The exact date of the pictographs is unknown. The people who made them are also unidentified. Older sources sometimes tried to assign them to the Cherokee or Shawnee, but modern archaeological summaries are more careful. Encyclopedia Virginia identifies them as likely made by Virginia Indians of unknown identity at an unknown time. That caution matters. The pictographs are evidence of Native presence and spiritual expression, but they should not be forced into a certainty that the sources do not support.
Twenty Images On The Mountain
Modern scholarship generally counts twenty documented pictographs at Paint Lick Mountain. Some are geometric. Some resemble animals. Some are human forms, and some combine human, animal, and geometric traits.
The most realistic forms include a running deer and a bird in profile. Other bird forms are more mysterious, including single birds in flight, a two headed bird, and a faded image that appears to show two birds joined together. One abstract image is made of concentric circles with two L shaped appendages that resemble legs and feet.
DHR’s summary stresses the rarity of the site. Painted pictographs like these are among the few prehistoric paintings still known in eastern North America. Encyclopedia Virginia goes further for the state itself, noting that only two known examples of such pictographs have been documented in Virginia, the other being at Little Mountain in Nottoway County.
The images have not survived untouched. Weathering and vandalism have occurred. Even so, DHR notes that the works remain relatively legible. The 1969 National Register nomination already warned that the pictographs were continuing to weather and that some vandalism had taken place. That same form recommended preservation treatment and improved access only with the owner’s consent.
That last phrase is important. The site is privately owned, and access is restricted. Its importance does not make it a public trail or roadside stop. The survival of the pictographs depends on respect for the land, the owners, and the fragile rock face itself.
The First Written Accounts
The pictographs were almost certainly known locally before they entered print. Encyclopedia Virginia states that the first published reference appeared in an 1871 geologic report for Southwest Virginia. A few years later, Charles B. Coale gave one of the most vivid early descriptions in The Life and Adventures of Wilburn Waters, published in Richmond in 1878.
Coale wrote about visiting Tazewell County in August 1871 and staying with General Rees T. Bowen in the Cove. On Bowen’s property, he saw what he called strangely painted rocks. He wrote that the paintings had been a wonder and mystery to those who had seen them, and that they were already present when the Bowen family first settled the Cove. Coale’s dating and interpretation must be handled carefully, but his account is valuable because it preserves local memory from the nineteenth century.
He described figures that he believed represented horses, elk, deer, wolves, bows and arrows, eagles, Native people, and other devices. He also noted that the paint was found near the rocks and that a Bowen family member had used the same coloring material for dyeing linsey, a homespun wool and linen cloth. Whether every figure was correctly identified or not, Coale’s account shows that the pictographs were tied in local memory to the land, the mineral pigment, and the early settler families of the Cove.
In 1888, the site entered a wider scholarly record through Garrick Mallery of the Bureau of American Ethnology. In his federal study of Native pictographs, Mallery reported painted characters at Paint Lick Mountain, three miles north of Maiden Spring in Tazewell County. He described the characters as painted in red, blue, and yellow and cited Coale’s book as an earlier source.
Mallery’s notice was brief, but it mattered. It placed Paint Lick Mountain within a broader North American study of Indigenous picture writing and rock art. What had been a local wonder on a Tazewell County mountainside became part of a national ethnological conversation.
Maiden Spring And The Bowen Landscape
Paint Lick Mountain cannot be separated from nearby Maiden Spring. The National Register nomination for Maiden Spring connects the Bowen family landscape to the Paint Lick Mountain pictographs and gives the archaeological file numbers connected with the site, including 44-TZ-13.
Maiden Spring itself is one of Tazewell County’s important historic places. The nomination identifies it as a long standing Bowen family property and discusses Rees Bowen I, who is traditionally credited with settling at Maiden Spring in the eighteenth century. The same nomination says Bowen is credited with discovering the prehistoric pictographs near the summit of nearby Paint Lick Mountain.
The older family tradition gives Maiden Spring its name through a story of a doe at a bold spring bursting from the rocks. Whether read as family memory, frontier tradition, or local legend, the story shows the way landforms in Tazewell County became tied to names. Springs, licks, gaps, mountains, and coves were not abstract geography. They were landmarks of settlement, travel, hunting, farming, danger, and memory.
Paint Lick Mountain stood in that same world. The mountain was visible, useful, and storied. The pigment in the earth gave it a name. The pictographs gave it mystery. The nearby spring and Bowen settlement tied it into written county history.
A Mountain Of Stone, Iron, And Color
The geology of Paint Lick Mountain helps explain why the pictographs could exist there. The 1897 U.S. Geological Survey description of the Tazewell Quadrangle names Paint Lick among the mountains whose summits are formed by the Clinch sandstone. The same geological setting includes red and iron bearing formations in the broader Tazewell landscape.
This is not just background detail. Rock art depends on rock, pigment, and place. Paint Lick Mountain offered a prominent stone surface and a local source of mineral color. Encyclopedia Virginia notes that eroded fragments of soft mudstone rich in iron oxide occur near the pictographs. The material was part of the mountain itself.
The result is one of the most visually direct links between the Native past and the physical Appalachian landscape in Tazewell County. The figures were not painted with imported color. They were made from the mountain. The red image and the red earth belonged together.
From Local Wonder To Historic Register
By the twentieth century, Paint Lick Mountain was no longer known only through local memory. It appeared in official place name and map sources. Henry Gannett’s 1904 U.S. Geological Survey Gazetteer of Virginia listed Paint Lick as mountains in Tazewell County, with elevations ranging from 2,500 to 3,500 feet, and also listed Paintlick as a post village in Tazewell County.
The National Register nomination in 1969 gave the pictograph site a formal preservation status. The nomination was prepared by Colonel Howard MacCord of the Virginia State Library. It classified the property as a site, described it as about one acre, and marked it as difficult to access. It placed the site in the pre Columbian period and in the areas of Aboriginal, Prehistoric, Art, and Archaeology.
The language of the 1969 form reflects its time. It speculated that the images may have been made by the Shawnee or perhaps the Cherokee. Modern sources do not present that as settled fact. Still, the nomination was significant because it recognized the pictographs as rare, fragile, and nationally important.
After that listing, archaeological attention continued. Encyclopedia Virginia notes investigations or studies connected with the site in 1871, 1888, 1975, 1980, and 2009. Photographs were taken, comparisons were made, and the condition of the site was assessed over time. W. J. Hranicky’s 1987 study, Virginia’s Paint Lick Mountain Pictographs, became one of the key specialized archaeological sources for comparing and analyzing the images.
Paintlick As A Community
The community name Paintlick belongs to the human geography below and around the mountain. It appears in official and semi official sources as a Tazewell County place name. The 2023 Virginia Department of Transportation county road map shows Paintlick and Paintlick Place near Green, Rockhouse, and Maiden Spring.
Older sources point to community life that reached beyond the pictographs. Paintlick had a post village listing in the 1904 USGS gazetteer. Newspaper leads from the Virginia Chronicle archive show that Paint Lick and Paintlick appeared in local papers through the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These notices are the kind of records that preserve everyday history: schools, residents, clubs, church events, agriculture, visitors, local meetings, and community news.
One especially useful lead is the News Progress from October 25, 1951, which referenced Paint Lick School as a one room school at Paintlick with nineteen students. That small detail opens a door into the community’s mid twentieth century life. Long after the pictographs had become a subject for archaeologists and historians, Paintlick was also a living rural neighborhood where children went to school and families appeared in the local columns of Southwest Virginia newspapers.
That is why Paintlick should not be reduced to only the pictographs, important as they are. A full history must hold both layers together. There is the ancient painted record on the mountain. There is also the later Appalachian community of roads, farms, schools, post offices, churches, cemeteries, and families who lived under that name.
Why Paint Lick Mountain Matters
Paint Lick Mountain matters because it preserves something rare: Indigenous visual expression in the Appalachian landscape of Southwest Virginia. The pictographs are not a written document in the usual archival sense, but they are a primary source. They are marks left by Native people on the land itself.
They also remind us how much is unknown. Historians often want names, dates, authors, and explanations. Paint Lick Mountain does not give them easily. We know the images exist. We know they were made with mineral pigment. We know they predate European settlement, according to official preservation descriptions. We know later observers tried to explain them through the language and assumptions of their own time. We do not know exactly who painted them, when they were painted, or what every figure meant.
That uncertainty should not weaken the story. It should deepen it. Paint Lick Mountain asks for humility. It belongs to Tazewell County history, Appalachian history, Virginia Indian history, archaeology, geology, and preservation all at once.
For local residents, it is also a reminder that even the smallest named places on a county map may sit beside history older than the courthouse, older than the first settler cabins, and older than the roads that later carried mail, schoolchildren, wagons, and cars through the valley.
Paintlick may appear today as a quiet place name in Tazewell County, but the mountain above it holds one of Southwest Virginia’s most important surviving links to the Native past. The red figures on the stone remain fragile, mysterious, and powerful. They are part of the story of the land itself, written in the color of the mountain.
Sources & Further Reading
Virginia Department of Historic Resources. “Indian Paintings on Paint Lick Mountain.” DHR ID 092-0007. Last updated April 29, 2024. Accessed June 29, 2026. https://www.dhr.virginia.gov/historic-registers/092-0007/
National Park Service. “Indian Paintings.” National Register of Historic Places Inventory Nomination Form. Prepared by Colonel Howard MacCord. 1969. Virginia Department of Historic Resources. Accessed June 29, 2026. https://www.dhr.virginia.gov/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/092-0007_Indian_Paintings_1969_Final_Nomination_REDACTED.pdf
Klatka, Thomas. “Paint Lick Mountain Pictograph Archaeological Site.” Encyclopedia Virginia. Virginia Humanities. Last updated February 13, 2025. Accessed June 29, 2026. https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/paint-lick-mountain-pictograph-archaeological-site/
Encyclopedia Virginia. “Paint Lick Mountain Pictograph.” Media entry. Virginia Humanities. Accessed June 29, 2026. https://encyclopediavirginia.org/8338-4f89f3223956cae/
Mallery, Garrick. “Pictographs of the North American Indians: A Preliminary Paper.” Fourth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1882 to 1883. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1886. Accessed June 29, 2026. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/54643/54643-h/54643-h.htm
Mallery, Garrick. “Pictographs of the North American Indians: A Preliminary Paper.” Smithsonian Institution Repository. Accessed June 29, 2026. https://repository.si.edu/handle/10088/91628
Coale, Charles B. The Life and Adventures of Wilburn Waters, the Famous Hunter and Trapper of White Top Mountain. Richmond: G. W. Gary, 1878. HathiTrust. Accessed June 29, 2026. https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/008651763
Coale, Charles B. The Life and Adventures of Wilburn Waters, the Famous Hunter and Trapper of White Top Mountain. West Jefferson, NC: M. D. Hart, 1960. Reprint of portions of the 1878 edition. Internet Archive. Accessed June 29, 2026. https://archive.org/details/lifeadventuresof00coal_0
Lesley, J. P. “The Geological Structure of Tazewell, Russell, and Wise Counties, in Virginia.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 12, no. 86 (1871): 489 to 513. JSTOR. Accessed June 29, 2026. https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/981750.pdf
Campbell, M. R. Description of the Tazewell Quadrangle. Geologic Atlas of the United States, Folio 44. Washington, DC: U.S. Geological Survey, 1897. Accessed June 29, 2026. https://pubs.usgs.gov/gf/044/text.pdf
U.S. Geological Survey. “Tazewell Folio, Virginia-West Virginia.” National Geologic Map Database. Accessed June 29, 2026. https://ngmdb.usgs.gov/Prodesc/proddesc_2450.htm
Gannett, Henry. The Gazetteer of Virginia. U.S. Geological Survey Bulletin 232. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1904. Accessed June 29, 2026. https://pubs.usgs.gov/publication/b232
Gannett, Henry. The Gazetteer of Virginia. U.S. Geological Survey Bulletin 232. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1904. Internet Archive PDF. Accessed June 29, 2026. https://archive.org/download/cu31924102204066/cu31924102204066.pdf
Worsham, Gibson. “Maiden Spring.” National Register of Historic Places Registration Form. Virginia Department of Historic Resources, 1994. Accessed June 29, 2026. https://www.dhr.virginia.gov/VLR_to_transfer/PDFNoms/092-0002_Maiden_Spring_1994_Final_Nomination.pdf
Virginia Department of Historic Resources. “Maiden Spring.” DHR ID 092-0002. Accessed June 29, 2026. https://www.dhr.virginia.gov/historic-registers/092-0002/
Pendleton, William C. History of Tazewell County and Southwest Virginia, 1748 to 1920. Richmond, VA: W. C. Hill Printing Company, 1920. Internet Archive. Accessed June 29, 2026. https://archive.org/details/historyoftazewel00pendrich
Harman, John Newton. Annals of Tazewell County, Virginia from 1800 to 1922. Richmond, VA: W. C. Hill Printing Company, 1922. Internet Archive. Accessed June 29, 2026. https://archive.org/details/annalsoftazewell01harm
Bickley, George W. L. History of the Settlement and Indian Wars of Tazewell County, Virginia. Cincinnati: Morgan and Company, 1852. Google Books. Accessed June 29, 2026. https://books.google.com/books/about/History_of_the_Settlement_and_Indian_War.html?id=gWFAAAAAYAAJ
Bickley, George W. L. History of the Settlement and Indian Wars of Tazewell County, Virginia. Cincinnati: Morgan and Company, 1852. HathiTrust. Accessed June 29, 2026. https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/011534163
Virginia Department of Transportation. Tazewell County, Virginia County Road Map. Richmond: Commonwealth of Virginia, 2023. Accessed June 29, 2026. https://www.vdot.virginia.gov/media/vdotvirginiagov/travel-and-traffic/maps/counties/92_Tazewell_acc052323_PM.pdf
Virginia Department of Transportation. Tazewell County, Virginia County Road Map, Supplement Sheet A. Richmond: Commonwealth of Virginia, 2023. Accessed June 29, 2026. https://www.vdot.virginia.gov/media/vdotvirginiagov/travel-and-traffic/maps/counties/92A_Tazewell_acc052323_PM.pdf
U.S. Geological Survey. “Paint Lick Mountain.” Geographic Names Information System, The National Map. Accessed June 29, 2026. https://edits.nationalmap.gov/apps/gaz-domestic/public/gaz-record/1499834
U.S. Geological Survey. “The National Map Viewer.” Accessed June 29, 2026. https://www.usgs.gov/tools/national-map-viewer
Library of Virginia. “National Native American Heritage Month.” The UncommonWealth. November 1, 2021. Accessed June 29, 2026. https://uncommonwealth.lva.virginia.gov/blog/2021/11/01/national-native-american-heritage-month/
Tazewell County Business Development Authority. “History & Heritage.” Accessed June 29, 2026. https://tazewellcountybusiness.com/history-heritage/
Virginia Chronicle. “Boys Have Power Of Majority At Paint Lick School.” News Progress, October 25, 1951. Accessed June 29, 2026. https://www.virginiachronicle.com/?a=d&d=NPR19511025.1.1
Virginia Chronicle. “Clinch Valley News, 6 March 1931.” Accessed June 29, 2026. https://www.virginiachronicle.com/?a=d&d=CVN19310306.1.1
Virginia Chronicle. “Clinch Valley News.” Newspaper title record. Library of Virginia. Accessed June 29, 2026. https://www.virginiachronicle.com/?a=cl&cl=CL1&sp=CVN
FamilySearch. “Tazewell County, Virginia Genealogy.” Accessed June 29, 2026. https://www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/Tazewell_County,_Virginia_Genealogy
Author Note: This article treats Paintlick as both a small Tazewell County community and a gateway into the much older story of Paint Lick Mountain’s pictographs. Because the site is privately owned and culturally sensitive, readers should respect the land, the owners, and the Native history preserved there.