Appalachian Community Histories – Richlands, Tazewell County: Coal, Iron, Brick, and the Clinch Valley Town Built by a Boom
Richlands sits in western Tazewell County along the upper fork of the Clinch River, in a valley whose name told visitors what earlier settlers already knew. The land was rich. Before the railroad men, land companies, brick kilns, hotels, storefronts, and coal traffic, the place was remembered for fertile ground, farming, livestock, and a river valley that opened through the mountains.
The town that grew there was not an accident. Richlands was one of those Appalachian places where outside capital, local land, mineral wealth, railroads, and ambition all met at once. In the late nineteenth century, developers looked at the Clinch Valley and saw more than farms. They saw coal, iron, timber, water, transportation, and a town that they believed could become a new industrial center.
For a short time, Richlands was promoted as the “Pittsburgh of the South.” That dream did not come true in the way its promoters imagined. The Panic of 1893 struck hard, the great industrial schemes collapsed, and the men who had promised a manufacturing city left behind more plans than factories. Yet Richlands did not disappear. Local businessmen, coal miners, farmers, merchants, doctors, teachers, and families made something more lasting from the remains.
The result was not the city of smoke and steel that investors had advertised. It was a coalfield trading town, a brickmaking center, a school town, a medical center, and a place where the surrounding valleys came on Saturdays to shop, work, worship, and gather.
The Rich Lands Along the Clinch
Long before Richlands was incorporated, the valley was known for the quality of its land. Historic records trace the name to descriptions of fertile acreage along the upper fork of the Clinch River. A 1785 land grant from Governor Patrick Henry to John Fowler referred to land “in the rich lands” on both sides of the river. The name endured because it described the place plainly.
The area that became Richlands stood west of the older Tazewell settlement at Crab Orchard, where the Witten family had settled in the eighteenth century. In those years, the Clinch Valley was still a frontier edge of Virginia. Farms, stock raising, militia stations, scattered roads, and river crossings mattered more than town lots.
By the late nineteenth century, the land at Richlands was still rural. The site was associated with William M. Gillespie and had been used as farmland and a hog-feeding station. This was practical mountain agriculture. Corn was hard to move to distant markets, so farmers often turned grain into livestock weight. Hogs could be driven overland to market, and feeding stations helped fatten herds before the long drive.
That older agricultural world shaped Richlands before coal speculation transformed it. Even after the town became tied to mines, railroads, and industry, farming never fully vanished from its story. Richlands remained a place with one foot in the field and another in the coalfield.
Railroads, Coal, and the Dream of a New Town
The 1880s changed southwestern Virginia. The Norfolk and Western Railroad opened new possibilities for the coalfields and tied remote mountain valleys to larger markets. When the railroad reached Pocahontas in 1883, coal was already waiting to be shipped. That moment helped set off a wave of land buying, speculation, and town building across Tazewell County.
Richlands belonged to that wave. The Clinch Valley Coal and Iron Company began developing the town in 1888, looking ahead to the arrival of the Norfolk and Western line in 1889. Investors saw the Clinch Valley not as a quiet farming region, but as a place where coal, iron, timber, brick clay, water, and rail transportation might combine into a manufacturing center.
The company bought enormous holdings in the valley. Its reach extended beyond the immediate town site into nearby creek valleys and coal lands. The scale of the purchase showed the ambition behind the project. Richlands was meant to be planned, promoted, and built.
By 1888, the streets were platted. By 1889, the railroad had arrived. By 1890, advertisements and newspaper accounts were describing rapid sales of town lots, new buildings, new companies, and a future that seemed almost guaranteed. Developers were not waiting for a village to slowly grow. They were trying to manufacture a town.
That idea was common in the industrializing Appalachian South. Railroads made isolated mineral lands valuable. Outside investors formed companies, bought acreage, laid out streets, printed brochures, and promised cities where farms had stood. Richlands was one of the clearest examples in Tazewell County.
The “Pittsburgh of the South”
The phrase “Pittsburgh of the South” tells us as much about the dream as it does about the place. Investors wanted Richlands to be a manufacturing town built around coal, iron, steel, brick, glass, and transportation. The comparison to Pittsburgh suggested furnaces, factories, rail yards, smoke, payrolls, and money.
The early buildings reflected that confidence. The Clinch Valley Coal and Iron Company built an office on Suffolk Avenue in 1890, a handsome Georgian Revival building later known as the Williams House. Across the street stood the Bank of Richlands. The company also built the Hotel Richlands, a large sixty-room hotel advertised in its day as one of the finest in southwest Virginia.
A promotional brochure from about 1890 advertised Richlands with the language of industrial promise. It emphasized cheap coal, cheap iron, low manufacturing costs, pure water, and a healthy climate. The list of companies connected to the new town sounded like the foundation of a city. There was the Clinch Valley Coal and Iron Company, Richlands Land Company, Richlands Iron Company, Richlands Coal Company, Richlands Tube Works, Richlands Brick and Manufacturing, Richlands Water, Gas, and Electric Company, and others.
Evans R. Dick, a banker connected to New York and Philadelphia capital, was a leading figure in the project. Men like Dick represented the outside money that transformed many Appalachian valleys during the late nineteenth century. Their plans were bold, but they were also vulnerable. Richlands depended on credit, railroads, mineral markets, steel demand, and confidence.
For a moment, the confidence seemed justified. The town had a depot, stores, hotels, a bank, a company office, a steam brick plant, and machinery for a steel rolling mill. A branch railroad to nearby coal mines had been completed. Richlands was advertised as having extraordinary promise.
Then the national economy turned.
Boomtown Shadows and the Panic of 1893
The Richlands boom was brief. Like many boomtowns, it carried both promise and disorder. Contemporary accounts and later local histories describe saloons, rough conditions, and the social strains that often came with fast-growing industrial towns. Places built quickly around money, labor, and speculation could become unstable before they became settled communities.
No honest history of Richlands can leave out the violence of 1893. In February of that year, the Clinch Valley News reported on the lynching of five African American men accused in connection with the deaths of two white merchants. The newspaper account is a primary source, but it must be read carefully, because it came from a white newspaper in the era of Jim Crow and racial terror. Later scholarship and public history projects have treated the event as part of Virginia’s broader history of lynching. It remains one of the darkest episodes in the history of Richlands and Tazewell County.
That same year, the economic world that had lifted Richlands began to break. The Panic of 1893 damaged railroads, credit markets, steel, iron, and investment schemes across the country. For Richlands, the timing was devastating. The town’s industrial plans depended heavily on exactly the kinds of investment and demand that collapsed.
The Clinch Valley Coal and Iron Company and its related companies could not carry the dream forward. The grand vision of an iron, steel, coal, and glass manufacturing center failed. The company that had planned Richlands was overextended, and the Panic turned ambition into debt.
The “Pittsburgh of the South” did not become Pittsburgh. The factories promised in brochures did not remake the valley. Yet the town itself remained. Streets had been laid out. Buildings had been built. The railroad was there. Coal was still in the surrounding hills. Farmers still needed markets. Merchants still had a reason to open their doors.
The collapse of the dream became the beginning of a different Richlands.
The Local Builders Who Kept Richlands Alive
After the failure of the big outside companies, Richlands survived because local people took hold of it. Later accounts remembered a group of local men sometimes called the “five Bills.” They included Dr. William R. Williams, William B. F. White, William B. Spratt, William P. Farmer, and William P. Boggess.
Their roles show the kind of town Richlands became after the boom. Williams was a doctor. White was a hardware merchant. Spratt was an attorney and the town’s first mayor after incorporation in 1892. Farmer was an undertaker. Boggess was a merchant. These were not distant investors selling a dream from a city office. They were local professional and business leaders whose fortunes were tied to the town itself.
R. L. Crawford, who came to Richlands around the time of the boom and later wrote a local history, credited local citizens with building the town after the speculative period faded. That judgment matters. Richlands was planned by outsiders, but it endured because residents adapted the plan to local needs.
The town’s economy shifted from heavy industrial dreams to practical regional service. Richlands became a place where coal camps, farms, nearby hollows, and surrounding communities could find supplies, medical care, schools, churches, banks, entertainment, and transportation.
This is a common Appalachian story. Outside capital often arrived with large promises, but the communities that lasted were held together by local labor, local institutions, and local memory.
Brick, Coal, and Commerce
One of the great survivors of the early industrial period was the Richlands Brick Company. While other planned industries failed, the brick plant endured and became one of the town’s leading employers. By the 1920s, it was described as the town’s most important industry. It became the only brick plant in Tazewell County and the largest in southwestern Virginia.
The plant’s output connected Richlands to a wider region. Bricks were shipped by rail, sold locally, and used in construction beyond the town. The factory drew raw material from near the plant, moved clay by small industrial rail equipment, and supported employee housing in the West End of Richlands. By the mid-twentieth century, production had grown even larger, with wartime and federal housing demand helping sustain the industry.
Coal remained central to the broader economy. By 1910, mines were operating near Richlands, including operations connected with Empire Coal Land Corporation, Raven Red Ash Coal Company, and Jewell Ridge Coal Company. By 1928, ten coal companies operated sixteen mines in the Richlands area. Those mines employed large numbers of miners and above-ground workers, and the wages from that labor flowed through Richlands stores, banks, theaters, restaurants, and service businesses.
Richlands itself was not simply a mining camp. It was a commercial center for mining families and farm families. This distinction is important. The town depended on coal, but its downtown economy was built around serving the people of the coalfield.
Hardware stores, grocery stores, dry goods businesses, banks, hotels, garages, theaters, doctors’ offices, funeral homes, and printing offices all made Richlands a practical center of everyday life. On Saturdays, farmers and mine families came into town to shop, conduct business, and enjoy the social life of the streets.
In that sense, Richlands became what the early boosters had not fully imagined. It was not a great steel city, but it was a working Appalachian town with a wide hinterland.
Schools, Doctors, Churches, and Town Life
The history of Richlands cannot be told only through coal companies and buildings. Its institutions helped turn a boomtown into a community.
Education began early in the town’s formal history. The first school was taught in 1892 by J. A. Leslie and Miss Lucy Stuart, and a brick four-room school followed in 1894. Like other towns in Virginia under segregation, education was divided by race. Classes for Black students were held in the Baptist church. That detail is important because it reminds us that Richlands’ growth took place within the unequal systems of the Jim Crow South.
The school system expanded as the town grew. By the 1920s and 1930s, Richlands had hundreds of students and a growing number of teachers. School functions, ball games, dances, and community events became part of the town’s social rhythm.
Medical care also shaped Richlands. Dr. W. R. Williams arrived in 1897 and established a practice. In 1901, he purchased the former Clinch Valley Coal and Iron Company office and used it as his home and office. Later, he built the Mattie Williams Sanitarium, which became one of only two hospitals in Tazewell County by 1930. In a region where distance and mountain roads made medical access difficult, that mattered.
Churches, too, anchored the town. The historic district includes churches and religious buildings that show the role of faith in Richlands’ civic life. Like schools and doctors’ offices, churches helped move the town beyond its speculative origins.
The older buildings of Richlands preserve this layered story. A company office became a doctor’s home and later a library. Commercial buildings housed businesses that served generations of residents. Residential streets filled in as the town matured. The meaning of these places changed as the town changed.
Tazewell Avenue and the Growth Across the River
The Tazewell Avenue Historic District tells the story of Richlands expanding west of the Clinch River. This part of town developed mainly during the first half of the twentieth century as Richlands became a trading center.
The district includes modest brick and frame houses, commercial buildings, and streets that reflect the town’s growth after the early boom. It was not a neighborhood of one class or one style. Families of different income levels lived there, and the houses show a range of popular architectural forms from the early and mid-twentieth century.
West Front Street also developed its own commercial life. Local accounts remember grocery stores, a soda pop bottling plant, dry cleaners, department stores, apartments, lodge space, and businesses that served the neighborhood and the larger town. These were not the grand promotional buildings of the 1890 boom. They were the ordinary places that made a community function.
That ordinary history is often the most important. A town is not only its founding company or its biggest industry. It is also the grocery over which a family lived, the dry cleaner in an old bottling plant, the lodge room upstairs, the school nearby, the bridge over the river, and the houses built as children grew into adults and made lives of their own.
Historic Buildings and What Still Remains
Richlands is fortunate that much of its history can still be read in its built environment. The Richlands Historic District includes commercial, residential, and institutional buildings connected to the town’s development from the late nineteenth century into the mid-twentieth century.
Among the most important surviving buildings is the former Clinch Valley Coal and Iron Company Office, later known as the Williams House. Built in 1890, it began as a symbol of outside industrial ambition. Later, through Dr. Williams, it became tied to local medical history. In time, it became associated with the public library, giving the building a third life as a civic space.
The Bank of Richlands, W. B. F. White and Sons Hardware, railroad-related buildings, churches, cottages, bungalows, and brick commercial blocks together show the town’s changing identity. Some buildings represent the early boom. Others represent the practical prosperity that followed recovery from the Panic of 1893. Still others show the building activity of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s.
The Tazewell Avenue Historic District adds another chapter, showing the growth of residential and commercial life west of the Clinch River. Together, the two districts help explain Richlands not as a failed boomtown, but as a place that transformed.
The planned industrial city did not fully arrive. The community did.
Richlands After Coalfield Expansion
By 1930, Richlands had become one of the primary towns in Tazewell County. It had an estimated population of around 1,800 and a business base surpassed in the county mainly by the Bluefield and West Graham area. Passenger trains, bus service, hotels, stores, factories, and professional services tied the town to the wider region.
By 1940, the population had grown again. The brick plant continued to operate. The coal economy remained important. The town’s stores served mine workers, farmers, families, and travelers. Its schools and medical facilities helped make it a regional center rather than just another stop on the railroad.
In the later twentieth century, the decline of mining and changes in industry slowed the kind of growth Richlands had known in earlier decades. The brick plant closed in the 1970s. Coalfield employment changed. Retail patterns shifted. Highways, hospitals, schools, and regional economic transitions all reshaped the town.
Still, Richlands remained. In the 2020 census, the town had a population of 5,261. That number tells a modern story of a small Appalachian town, but the streets hold a larger history. Behind the present-day town are layers of frontier land, farming, railroads, coal companies, brick kilns, racial violence, local rebuilding, schools, churches, doctors, storefronts, floods, and families.
Why Richlands Matters
Richlands matters because it shows how Appalachian towns were made, unmade, and remade. It began with land that earlier people called rich. It became a railroad-era industrial dream promoted by outside investors. It suffered when the Panic of 1893 destroyed many of those plans. It carried the scars of racial violence and the inequalities of its era. Then it survived through local effort, coalfield commerce, brickmaking, schools, medicine, churches, and everyday work.
The story of Richlands is not simply the story of a failed “Pittsburgh of the South.” That phrase is useful, but it can also mislead. Richlands did not become the city investors promised, but it became something real. It became a town where surrounding communities came to trade, learn, heal, worship, and make a living.
Its historic buildings still tell that story. The old company office, the bank, the hardware store, the churches, the Front Street buildings, the Tazewell Avenue houses, and the traces of the brick and coal economy all point to a deeper truth. Appalachian history is not only found in famous battles, famous people, or vanished towns. It is also found in places like Richlands, where the hopes of investors met the endurance of local people in a valley along the Clinch.
Sources & Further Reading
Wyatt, Sherry Joines. “Richlands Historic District.” National Register of Historic Places Registration Form. Virginia Department of Historic Resources, 2006. https://www.dhr.virginia.gov/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/148-5014_Richlands_HD_2007_NRfinal.pdf
Virginia Department of Historic Resources. “Richlands Historic District.” Virginia Landmarks Register and National Register Historic Registers, last updated June 2, 2023. https://www.dhr.virginia.gov/historic-registers/148-5014/
Wyatt, Sherry Joines. “Tazewell Avenue Historic District.” National Register of Historic Places Registration Form. Virginia Department of Historic Resources, 2009. https://www.dhr.virginia.gov/VLR_to_transfer/PDFNoms/148-5020_Tazewell_Ave_HD_2009_NR_FINAL.pdf
Virginia Department of Historic Resources. “Tazewell Avenue Historic District.” Virginia Landmarks Register and National Register Historic Registers, last updated June 2, 2023. https://www.dhr.virginia.gov/historic-registers/148-5020/
Virginia Historic Landmarks Commission. “Williams House.” National Register of Historic Places Inventory/Nomination Form. Virginia Department of Historic Resources, 1983. https://www.dhr.virginia.gov/VLR_to_transfer/PDFNoms/148-5018_Williams_House_1983_Final_Nomination.pdf
Clinch Valley News. “‘Richlands’ Lynching,’ Clinch Valley News, February 3, 1893.” Encyclopedia Virginia. Accessed June 29, 2026. https://encyclopediavirginia.org/primary-documents/richlands-lynching-clinch-valley-news-february-3-1893/
James Madison University. “Sam Blow in Tazewell.” Racial Terror: Lynching in Virginia. Accessed June 29, 2026. https://sites.lib.jmu.edu/valynchings/va1893020202/
Virginia Chronicle. “Clinch Valley News.” Library of Virginia. Accessed June 29, 2026. https://www.virginiachronicle.com/?a=cl&cl=CL1&sp=CVN
Library of Virginia. “Virginia Newspaper Directory: Richlands.” Accessed June 29, 2026. https://old.lva.virginia.gov/public/vnd/results.php?cities=Richlands
Library of Virginia. “Tazewell County Microfilm.” County and City Records on Microfilm. Accessed June 29, 2026. https://www.lva.virginia.gov/collections/ccmf/VA/VA273
Tazewell County Circuit Court. “Genealogy Research.” Virginia’s Judicial System. Accessed June 29, 2026. https://www.courts.state.va.us/courts/circuit/Tazewell/genealogy
Tazewell County Public Library. “Genealogy.” Accessed June 29, 2026. https://tcplweb.org/genealogy/
Library of Congress. “About This Collection: Sanborn Maps.” Accessed June 29, 2026. https://www.loc.gov/collections/sanborn-maps/about-this-collection/
Sanborn Map Company. “Sanborn Fire Insurance Map from Richlands, Tazewell County, Virginia, 1936.” Wikimedia Commons. Accessed June 29, 2026. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Sanborn_Fire_Insurance_Map_from_Richlands,_Tazewell_County,_Virginia,_1936
Town of Richlands, Virginia. “History About Our Town.” Accessed June 29, 2026. https://www.town.richlands.va.us/history/history.html
U.S. Census Bureau. “QuickFacts: Richlands Town, Virginia.” Accessed June 29, 2026. https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/richlandstownvirginia/PST045224
Worsham, Gibson. “Historic Architectural Survey of Tazewell County, Virginia.” 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
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 Cecil. History of Tazewell County and Southwest Virginia, 1748–1920. Richmond, VA: W. C. Hill Printing Company, 1920. https://archive.org/details/historyoftazewel00pendrich
Eller, Ronald D. Miners, Millhands, and Mountaineers: Industrialization of the Appalachian South, 1880–1930. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1982. https://utpress.org/9780870493416/miners-millhands-and-mountaineers/
Brundage, W. Fitzhugh. Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880–1930. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993. https://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/?id=p063459
Appalachian Regional Commission. “Appalachian Counties Served by ARC.” Accessed June 29, 2026. https://www.arc.gov/appalachian-counties-served-by-arc/
Author Note: Richlands is one of those Appalachian towns where the dream sold by outside investors became something more lasting in the hands of local people. This article follows the town through farmland, railroad speculation, coal, brick, tragedy, commerce, and the community that remained after the boom faded.