Appalachian Community Histories – Fairview, Grayson County: The Glades, Fisher’s Gap, Schools, Stores, and Community Life
Fairview does not have the sort of downtown that makes its history immediately obvious. The community spreads through the countryside south of Galax, where Fairview Road meets the larger highway network carrying travelers toward the North Carolina line. Houses, farms, churches, a school, cemeteries, and the Fairview Ruritan Club mark the landscape more clearly than any commercial center.
That scattered appearance is misleading. Fairview has been a recognizable community for generations, and the records left behind are unusually rich for a rural place of its size. County road orders reach back into the 1790s. A voter registration book identifies Fairview as its own precinct by the beginning of the twentieth century. Government maps locate a Fairview school before the present school building was constructed. Newspapers identify stores that doubled as public gathering places, while cemetery surveys preserve another side of Fairview’s past that written histories could easily overlook.
The name also appears to sit over an older landscape. Grayson County’s historical planning documents identify Fairview with a place once known as “The Glades,” pushing the story of the community back toward the Revolutionary generation and raising questions about how today’s Fairview developed from the roads, farms, gaps, and settlements that were already taking shape before Grayson County itself existed.
Before Fairview: The Glades
The earliest chapter of Fairview history is also the most difficult to pin precisely to a modern map.
Grayson County’s historical account identifies modern Fairview with “The Glades” and places the area within the Revolutionary-era struggle between Patriot settlers and Loyalists, commonly called Tories in the surviving accounts. The backcountry of southwestern Virginia and northwestern North Carolina was far from the major armies fighting along the Atlantic coast, but it was not untouched by the Revolution. Allegiance divided neighbors, irregular forces moved through isolated settlements, and both Patriot and Loyalist bands used the mountain roads and gaps that crossed the region.
One of the more important surviving accounts comes from Revolutionary pension testimony associated with James Cox. Cox remembered being captured by Tories before Patriot forces under Major William Love and Colonel Benjamin Cleveland overtook them at a place he called the “big glades,” in what later became Grayson County. According to the testimony, the Tories scattered, some were wounded or captured, and Cox escaped back to the Patriot force. His account went on to describe additional fighting against Tory bands operating through the mountains.
There is reason for caution when attaching every reference to the Big Glades directly to today’s Fairview. Historical accounts sometimes use names such as Big Glades and Round Meadows in ways that can blur neighboring locations, and the landscape was described differently by eighteenth-century residents than it would be by later mapmakers. What can be said more securely is that Grayson County’s own historical interpretation specifically associates Fairview with The Glades, while primary Revolutionary testimony establishes a Glades landscape within the county as a place of conflict.
That makes Fairview’s oldest history less the story of a town being founded on a certain day than the history of a landscape already known to settlers moving through the southern edge of what became Grayson County.
Fisher’s Gap and the Roads of 1793
Road records give the early Fairview area a firmer documentary footing.
Grayson County was created from part of Wythe County at the beginning of the 1790s, and the first county court met in 1793. Almost immediately, the justices faced the practical problem of connecting scattered farms, river crossings, furnaces, mills, gaps, and the new courthouse. In mountain country, a road could determine which settlement grew, where people traded, and how quickly they could reach court, church, or market.
An August 20, 1793 road order is particularly important for Fairview. A published transcription records an order to view a road from Elk Creek toward “Fisher’s Gap,” passing by Jones’ Ford and connecting toward the new courthouse. The transcription adds the parenthetical identification “(Fairview)” after Fisher’s Gap. That parenthetical should be understood as a later geographic identification rather than assumed to be language written by the court clerk in 1793, but it provides an important clue connecting the Fairview area to one of the county’s earliest transportation corridors.
The same body of road orders shows just how heavily early Grayson County depended on such routes. Roads ran toward Elk Creek, the New River, Meadow Creek, Flower Gap, furnaces, fords, the North Carolina line, and the courthouse. The Virginia Department of Historic Resources later described this pattern as fundamental to the county’s development, noting that early settlements formed along roads near important river crossings and that the county’s geography forced travel through particular valleys and gaps.
Fairview’s location makes more sense when viewed through that eighteenth-century transportation system. Long before paved highways and named state routes, this part of southern Grayson County belonged to a web of passages tying the interior of Virginia to communities across the North Carolina line.
Farms, Families, and the Fairview Precinct
By the beginning of the twentieth century, there is no ambiguity about the Fairview name.
Grayson County’s 1902 and 1903 voter registration records contain a precinct explicitly identified as Fairview in Old Town District. More than one hundred men appear in the Fairview portion of the surviving transcription, creating one of the clearest snapshots available of the community at the turn of the century.
The occupation column tells its own story. Almost everyone was identified as a farmer or as engaged in farming. Among the exceptions were a few millers, a shoemaker, and laborers. George W. Gentry and J. F. Kirby were listed as millers, while G. E. Brannock was identified as a shoemaker. The overwhelming dominance of agriculture fits the larger history of Grayson County, where farming remained the economic foundation even as mills, timber operations, and new towns expanded around the county.
The surnames read like a directory of the countryside: Brannock, Bourne, Cox, Combs, Davis, Gentry, Goodson, Higgins, Hodges, Jennings, Kirby, Lowe, Murphy, McRoberts, Osborne, Pool, Rector, South, Williams, Wilson, Winesett, Wood, and others. Several names appear repeatedly, suggesting clusters of related households whose farms and kin networks helped define the community.
The register also illustrates how little the Virginia and North Carolina boundary divided everyday life. Some Fairview voters reported previous residences at Edmonds or other places in North Carolina, while others were associated with Higgins, Meadow Creek, Cole Creek, Wainwright, Baywood, and nearby communities. These were not isolated settlements functioning independently of one another. Fairview belonged to a wider rural neighborhood in which families, labor, marriages, roads, mills, and trade continually crossed the lines drawn on county and state maps.
Fairview School and the Center of the Community
If the voter precinct reveals Fairview on paper, the school helps locate it physically.
A United States Geological Survey Galax quadrangle from the early 1930s labels “Fairview Sch” among the many rural schools spread across southern Grayson County. The map also shows the larger geography surrounding the community, including State Highway 89, Oldtown, Meadow Creek, Snow Hill School, churches, mills, and the road network connecting the countryside with Galax and North Carolina.
That map is important because it proves that a Fairview school existed before the building associated with the modern elementary school.
Grayson County’s comprehensive plan records Fairview Elementary as having been built in 1942, with an addition or renovation in 1957. The 1930s map therefore captures an earlier Fairview School that served the community before the later building was constructed.
The role of the school has lasted far beyond the era when rural schools were scattered every few miles across the mountains. Fairview Elementary remains part of Grayson County Public Schools at 2323 Fairview Road, and Virginia’s current school records continue to identify it as a kindergarten through fifth-grade elementary school.
There is an especially fitting continuity in the fact that the school remains tied to Fairview’s civic identity. Grayson County’s official polling-place list identifies Fairview Elementary as the voting location for Fairview Precinct 302 in Oldtown District. More than a century after men registered under the Fairview precinct name in 1902, residents still come to Fairview to vote.
Edwards’ Store and Winesett’s Store
A rural community did not need a courthouse square to have a center.
For Fairview during the 1930s and 1940s, stores appear to have filled some of that role. Newspaper records repeatedly identify Edwards’ Store and Winesett’s Store with Fairview. A March 1933 issue of the Grayson-Carroll Gazette placed both stores in the community, and later issues of the Galax Gazette continued using the stores as recognizable Fairview landmarks.
Their importance becomes particularly clear in county tax notices. In April 1940, the Galax Gazette published a tax-collection schedule that included stops at “Fairview (Edward’s Store)” and “Fairview (Winesett’s Store).” Another notice later that year again directed taxpayers to Winesett’s Store.
That small detail says a great deal about the social geography of the community. When officials needed a place where residents could predictably gather, they did not direct people toward a municipal building because Fairview had none. They named the stores.
Country stores throughout Appalachia were commercial establishments, but they often became something more. They were places to hear news, exchange messages, encounter neighbors, arrange business, and deal with traveling officials. Fairview’s newspaper record shows Edwards’ and Winesett’s stores functioning in precisely that sort of public role.
The newspapers also preserve Fairview as a social community rather than simply a place on a map. On October 3, 1940, the Galax Gazette carried a community column headed “Fairview, Galax P.O.” Such local columns commonly reported visitors, family gatherings, illnesses, church activities, and people traveling between neighboring communities. The heading also shows that Fairview residents could be identified as belonging to Fairview even when Galax served as their postal address.
The Galax Gazette itself began publication in 1937 and circulated in Galax, Carroll County, and Grayson County, making it one of the most important surviving newspapers for reconstructing Fairview’s twentieth-century life. Its earlier predecessor, the Grayson-Carroll Gazette, was published from 1924 to 1936. Both are preserved through the Library of Virginia’s newspaper collections.
Glades Memorial Cemetery and Black Fairview
One of Fairview’s most significant historical sites is easy to miss.
Glades Memorial Cemetery lies on the east side of Fairview Road, about a quarter mile north of Fairview Elementary School. A cemetery survey conducted in 2004 and updated in 2008 describes it as a very old African American cemetery and records numerous graves marked only by fieldstones, depressions, damaged markers, or no surviving inscription at all. Local tradition places Glades Union Methodist Church beside the cemetery.
The cemetery index records 135 burials and dates the site at least as early as the nineteenth century. Among the surviving stones is that of Sarah Dickerson, born in 1855 and died in 1922. Other names include Williams, Bryson, Toliver, Revels, Sword, and Cox. The number of unmarked graves makes clear that the surviving stone inscriptions represent only part of the community once buried there.
Glades Memorial is especially important because the documentary record of rural African American Appalachia is often thinner than the record left for white landowners, voters, and public officials. The 1902 Fairview voter register, for example, documents a political system in which the names that appear are overwhelmingly tied to the male electorate of the period. A cemetery preserves people differently.
For Fairview, Glades Memorial places African American families directly within the historical landscape of the community and connects the older Glades name to a site where Black religious and family life continued long after slavery.
Grayson County records offer additional avenues for following those families backward. The Library of Virginia preserves registrations of free Black residents, lists of free Black and multiracial residents, apprenticeship records, and slavery-era court documents from the county. When those records are compared with cemetery names, deeds, census schedules, and later marriage records, they offer the possibility of recovering a much fuller history of Black Fairview than any single county history can provide. The Fairview research material identifies those records as an especially important direction for further study.
Cemeteries, Churches, and the Geography of Memory
Glades Memorial is not the only burial ground that helps define Fairview.
A second place identified as the Glades Burial Site lies near the intersection of Fishers Gap Road and Country Charm Lane. Its location is intriguing because it brings together three names that appear repeatedly in Fairview’s historical record: Glades, Fisher’s Gap, and Fairview. The surviving evidence does not prove that all three names once described exactly the same boundaries, but their proximity shows how older place names remained layered across the landscape.
Fairview Memorial Gardens represents a more recent chapter. Located behind Fairview Baptist Church near Skyline Highway and Snow Hill Road, the cemetery contains twentieth and twenty-first century graves and remains closely connected with the modern Fairview community.
Together the burial grounds illustrate the difficulty of writing rural community history strictly from maps. Communities such as Fairview rarely had corporate boundaries. Their edges shifted depending on whether someone meant a school district, voting precinct, church neighborhood, postal address, road, or family network. Cemeteries often provide a more enduring geography because generations of families continued returning to the same ground long after stores closed or road names changed.
From Country Stores to the Ruritan Hall
The gathering places changed, but the habit of gathering did not.
Today the Fairview Ruritan Club stands on Fairview Road near the elementary school. The club describes its mission in the language of community service, fellowship, and goodwill, while its building hosts reunions, benefits, meetings, banquets, and other local events. Bluegrass concerts have become one of its best-known activities, bringing musicians and audiences to the same rural community where stores and schools once served as the most obvious public meeting places.
Grayson County itself recognizes the Fairview Ruritan Club’s musical role. The county comprehensive plan lists its bluegrass concerts among the traditional music venues of Grayson County, alongside the 1908 Courthouse Jam, Fries Jam Session, the Rex Theater, fiddlers’ conventions, and other institutions associated with the region’s musical heritage.
That continuation fits Fairview particularly well. The community has never depended on a dense downtown or a single industry for its identity. Its centers have been places where people met: roads and gaps, schoolhouses, country stores, churches, cemeteries, voting places, and eventually the Ruritan hall.
Fairview in the Appalachian Landscape
Fairview’s history is not a story of spectacular population growth, a railroad boom, or a company town rising almost overnight. Its importance comes from the opposite direction.
The community developed through continuity.
The oldest sources point toward The Glades and the contested backcountry of the Revolutionary generation. County road orders then reveal Fisher’s Gap as part of the transportation network being organized almost as soon as Grayson County government began. By 1902, Fairview was established enough to give its name to a voting precinct filled primarily with farming families from Higgins, Meadow Creek, Cole Creek, Wainwright, and communities extending toward North Carolina.
By the 1930s, federal mapmakers marked Fairview School. Edwards’ Store and Winesett’s Store gave residents places to trade and meet, while county officials used those stores as tax-collection stops. The Galax Gazette treated Fairview as a community worthy of its own local correspondence.
At the same time, Glades Memorial Cemetery preserved the history of an African American community whose story might otherwise be reduced to scattered names in court and census records.
The school built in 1942 remained. Fairview continued as a voting precinct. The Ruritan Club became another gathering place, and bluegrass music joined the older patterns of school, church, family, and neighborly association that had held the community together.
Fairview therefore offers something valuable to Appalachian history. It demonstrates how a place can survive without incorporation, a courthouse, a railroad depot, or a commercial downtown. The community existed because people repeatedly treated it as one. They voted there, attended school there, shopped there, worshiped and buried their families there, gathered for music there, and continued calling the countryside Fairview.
Beneath that familiar twentieth-century name lies an older landscape of Glades, gaps, farms, and roads whose history reaches back nearly to the beginning of Grayson County itself.
Sources & Further Reading
Grayson County Historical Society. “Community Research Notebooks.” Includes the society’s Fairview research collection containing books, maps, photographs, personal recollections, and other community materials. https://graysonvahistsoc.com/community-research-notebooks/
Grayson County, Virginia. Grayson County Comprehensive Plan. 2024. Historical section discussing Fairview, “The Glades,” Revolutionary-era activity, early settlement, transportation, education, and county development. https://www.graysoncountyva.gov/DocumentCenter/View/258/Comprehensive-Plan-2024-PDF
Grayson County, Virginia. Grayson County Comprehensive Plan. Adopted December 12, 2013. Includes historical material concerning Grayson County and Fairview Elementary. https://www.graysoncountyva.gov/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/GraysonCompPlan_12_18_13.pdf
Grayson County, Virginia. Grayson County Comprehensive Plan. 2018. Includes material concerning Fairview Elementary, education, community development, cultural resources, and traditional music. https://www.graysoncountyva.gov/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/2018_GrayCoCompPlanFinal.pdf
Grayson County, Virginia. “Official Polling Locations for Grayson County, Virginia.” Identifies Fairview Precinct 302 in Oldtown District at Fairview Elementary School. https://www.graysoncountyva.gov/DocumentCenter/View/313/Grayson-County-Polling-Locations-PDF
Virginia Department of Elections. “Polling Places.” Includes Fairview Precinct 302, Grayson County. https://www.elections.virginia.gov/resultsreports/registration-statistics/polling-places/
Grayson County, Virginia. Voter Registration List, 1902–1903. Fairview Precinct, Old Town District. Transcribed by New River Notes. https://www.newrivernotes.com/grayson-voter-registration-list-1902-03/
Grayson County, Virginia. Federal Census, 1870. Old Town District. Transcribed and published by New River Notes. https://www.newrivernotes.com/grayson-federal-census-1870/
Grayson County Court. “Grayson County Transportation and Road Orders.” Includes a transcription of the August 20, 1793 road order involving Fisher’s Gap. New River Notes. https://www.newrivernotes.com/grayson-transportation-and-roads/
Grayson County Circuit Court. Order Book, 1793–1794. Grayson County Court Records, reel 13. Local Government Records Collection, Library of Virginia, Richmond. https://www.lva.virginia.gov/collections/ccmf/VA/VA105
Grayson County Circuit Court. Deed Book 1, 1793–1803. Grayson County Court Records, reel 1. Local Government Records Collection, Library of Virginia, Richmond. https://www.lva.virginia.gov/collections/ccmf/VA/VA105
Grayson County Circuit Court. Road Bond Book, 1900–1906. Grayson County Court Records. Local Government Records Collection, Library of Virginia, Richmond. https://www.lva.virginia.gov/collections/ccmf/VA/VA105
Grayson County Circuit Court. Road Order Book 2, 1946–1972. Grayson County Court Records. Local Government Records Collection, Library of Virginia, Richmond. https://www.lva.virginia.gov/collections/ccmf/VA/VA105
Grayson County Circuit Court. Minutes of the Local Board of Tax Review, 1915–1927. Grayson County Court Records. Local Government Records Collection, Library of Virginia, Richmond. https://www.lva.virginia.gov/collections/ccmf/VA/VA105
Library of Virginia. “Grayson County Microfilm.” County and City Microfilm Collection. Includes court, land, road, marriage, probate, fiduciary, and administrative records. https://www.lva.virginia.gov/collections/ccmf/VA/VA105
Library of Virginia. “Grayson County Chancery Causes.” Chancery Records Index. Includes digitized nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Grayson County chancery records. https://www.lva.virginia.gov/chancery/available.asp
Library of Virginia. “Virginia Untold: The African American Narrative.” Collection of records concerning enslaved, free Black, and multiracial Virginians, including records from Grayson County. https://www.virginiamemory.com/collections/aan/
Library of Virginia. “Circuit Court Records Preservation Program.” Information concerning preserved local court records and archival holdings. https://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/local/circuit-court-records-preservation-program/
Dickey, S. M., and C. R. Boyd. Map of Grayson County, Virginia. 1897. Geography and Map Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. https://www.loc.gov/item/2012589206/
United States Geological Survey. Galax, VA-NC. Historical topographic quadrangle. U.S. Geological Survey. https://store.usgs.gov/product/345777
United States Geological Survey. Independence, VA-NC. Historical topographic quadrangle. U.S. Geological Survey. https://store.usgs.gov/product/921899
Devereux, R. E., and G. W. Patteson. Soil Survey of Grayson County, Virginia. Washington, DC: United States Department of Agriculture, Bureau of Chemistry and Soils, 1934. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GOVPUB-GP3-78ef87d9d13c8b88d335e402c3e3b55a/pdf/GOVPUB-GP3-78ef87d9d13c8b88d335e402c3e3b55a.pdf
Nuckolls, Benjamin Floyd. Pioneer Settlers of Grayson County, Virginia. Bristol, TN: King Printing Company, 1914. Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/item/15019440/
Worsham, Gibson. A Survey of Historic Architecture in Grayson County, Virginia. Richmond: Virginia Department of Historic Resources, 2002. https://www.dhr.virginia.gov/pdf_files/SpecialCollections/GY-029_AH_Survey_Grayson_County_2002_WORSHAM_report_TEXT.pdf
Fields, Bettye-Lou, and Jene Hughes. Grayson County: A History in Words and Pictures. Independence, VA: Grayson County Historical Society, 1976. Catalog and bibliographic references available through WorldCat. https://search.worldcat.org/
Gordon, Shirley, ed. Bicentennial Heritage: Grayson County, Virginia, 1793–1995. Independence, VA: 1908 Courthouse Foundation, 1995. Catalog and bibliographic references available through WorldCat. https://search.worldcat.org/
Wilson, Buford C. “Snow Hill Baptist Church Cemetery.” Survey completed July 2, 2003, updated May 24, 2008. New River Notes. https://www.newrivernotes.com/snow-hill-baptist-church-cemetery/
Douglas, Fran, and Buford C. Wilson. “Glades Memorial Cemetery.” Survey completed 2004, updated 2008. New River Notes. https://www.newrivernotes.com/glades-memorial-cemetery/
Wilson, Buford C. “Fairview Memorial Gardens.” Cemetery survey, 2003, updated 2008. New River Notes. https://www.newrivernotes.com/fairview-memorial-gardens/
Grayson County Virginia Heritage Foundation. “Cemeteries of Grayson County, Virginia.” Includes Glades Memorial Cemetery, the Glades Burial Site, and numerous other cemeteries in the Fairview and Grayson County area. https://www.newrivernotes.com/cemeteries-of-grayson-county-virginia/
Fairview Elementary School. Grayson County Public Schools. https://fairview.grayson.k12.va.us/
Fairview Ruritan Club. “Community People Meeting Community Needs.” Fairview Ruritan Club, Galax, Virginia. https://fairviewruritan.com/
Library of Virginia. “Virginia Newspaper Directory: Galax.” Includes bibliographic information for the Galax Gazette, Grayson-Carroll Gazette, and other Galax-area newspapers. https://old.lva.virginia.gov/public_test/vnd_G/results.php?cities=Galax&page=1
Library of Virginia. “Virginia Chronicle: Digital Newspaper Archive.” Digitized historic Virginia newspapers, including newspapers serving Galax and Grayson County. https://virginiachronicle.com/
Grayson-Carroll Gazette. March 27, 1933. References to Edwards’ Store and Winesett’s Store at Fairview. Virginia Chronicle, Library of Virginia. https://virginiachronicle.com/
Galax Gazette. October 30, 1939. Fairview and Winesett’s Store reference. Virginia Chronicle, Library of Virginia. https://virginiachronicle.com/
Galax Gazette. April 15, 1940. Grayson County tax-collection schedule listing Fairview at Edward’s Store and Winesett’s Store. Virginia Chronicle, Library of Virginia. https://virginiachronicle.com/
Galax Gazette. October 3, 1940. “Fairview.” Community correspondence headed “Fairview, Galax P.O.” Virginia Chronicle, Library of Virginia. https://virginiachronicle.com/
Galax Gazette. October 21, 1940. Tax-collection notice identifying Fairview and Winesett’s Store. Virginia Chronicle, Library of Virginia. https://virginiachronicle.com/
Virginia Department of Historic Resources. “Grayson County.” Virginia Cultural Resource Information and historic-property resources. https://www.dhr.virginia.gov/
Virginia Tech Special Collections and University Archives. “Grayson County Collections.” Includes historic maps and regional archival material relating to Grayson County. https://aspace.lib.vt.edu/
New River Notes. “Grayson County, Virginia.” Collection of transcribed tax lists, censuses, road orders, voter registrations, cemetery surveys, and other historical records. https://www.newrivernotes.com/virginia/grayson-county/
Author Note: Fairview’s history survives not through one defining event, but through generations of roads, farms, schools, stores, churches, cemeteries, and neighbors. I hope this article helps preserve the story of a Grayson County community whose roots reach much farther back than its modern name suggests.