Appalachian Community Histories – Independence, Grayson County: The Courthouse Town at the Heart of Southwest Virginia
Many Appalachian communities grew because coal was found beneath them, a railroad reached their valley, or a mill drew workers to a riverbank. Independence, Virginia, began differently. Its reason for existing was government.
The town was created in the middle of the nineteenth century to become the new seat of Grayson County. That decision placed a courthouse, lawyers, merchants, churches, schools, newspapers, and eventually a library at a crossroads near Peach Bottom Creek. Independence never became an industrial center on the scale of nearby Galax or the mill town of Fries. Instead, it developed as the civic center of a mountainous county whose population was scattered among farms, creeks, ridges, and small communities.
The surviving documentary trail is unusually rich for a town of its size. Grayson County order books, deeds, tax records, wills, chancery cases, historic maps, newspapers, census schedules, photographs, and architectural surveys make it possible to follow Independence from its deliberate creation in 1850 to the courthouse town that remains today. The county records identified for the town include order books covering the exact period of its establishment, along with deed, land, tax, and estate records capable of tracing its earliest property owners and institutions.
Before Independence There Was Greenville
Grayson County existed for more than half a century before Independence did.
When the county government was organized in 1793, the first court met at the house of William Bourne. Surviving Grayson County Order Book entries are especially valuable here because they complicate some later traditions. The architectural survey prepared for the Virginia Department of Historic Resources notes that the record specifically calls Bourne’s house, rather than his barn, the meeting place of the first court. In June 1793 the court ordered the county seat placed at a location called “Rose’s Cabbins,” apparently at the settlement that developed into Greenville, later known as Old Town.
Greenville became the first lasting courthouse community. A substantial brick courthouse was built there in the 1830s by James Toncray, a regional builder responsible for several Southwest Virginia courthouses. Stores, a tavern, houses, the clerk’s office, and other businesses clustered around the seat of government. By 1835, however, Greenville remained very small. The Virginia Department of Historic Resources survey, drawing from Joseph Martin’s contemporary gazetteer, places its population at roughly sixty-eight and records about nine houses, three stores, a tavern, and several mechanics.
Then the geography of Grayson County changed.
Carroll County was created from the eastern portion of Grayson in 1842. Greenville, which had made more geographical sense when Grayson stretched farther east, was suddenly poorly positioned for the reduced county. A dispute over the courthouse location followed and continued for several years. By 1849 a commission had been appointed to settle the matter. Greenville had supporters, Elk Creek had supporters, and another group favored a different, more central location near Peach Bottom Creek.
That third group won.
How Independence Got Its Name
The traditional explanation for the name Independence is unusually fitting because it grew directly from the courthouse controversy.
The Virginia Department of Historic Resources describes the successful faction as the “independent” group that supported the eventual central location. The Town of Independence preserves a more detailed version of the story, stating that commissioners from neighboring counties considered the competing claims and selected the location supported by the independents. According to the town’s traditional account, the commissioners climbed Point Lookout Mountain and viewed the proposed area below before making their decision.
Whatever embellishments may have entered the story over generations, the basic history is well supported. Independence emerged from the fight over where Grayson County’s government should sit, and the town was established as the new county seat in 1850.
An early twentieth-century county history by B. F. Nuckolls likewise remembered that Carroll had been cut away from Grayson and that Independence was selected as the county seat around 1850 or 1851. Nuckolls even recorded that county clerk Orville Anderson moved to the new seat shortly afterward.
The town therefore did not slowly acquire county-seat status after becoming an important settlement. County-seat status created the town.
Building a Courthouse Town
Independence was laid out where important roads crossed. The courthouse square occupied one corner of the crossroads, while a hotel and store operated by Shelton and Poindexter occupied other corners. Almost immediately, the institutions expected of a county seat began appearing around them.
The General Assembly authorized a bank at Independence in 1852 and 1853. A Methodist congregation was founded in 1854. An ambitious educational institution known as Grayson College was planned for young women in the new town around 1850. It functioned more like a secondary academy than a modern college, but its building burned not long after opening.
The courthouse drew another profession that would remain closely associated with Independence: law. A statewide directory of Virginia lawyers published in 1859 listed Alexander M. Davis and Granville H. Mathews at Independence, while Samuel McCamant was still listed at Grayson Old Court House. It is a small entry, but it captures the transfer that had taken place. The county’s legal world was moving away from Greenville and establishing itself in the new town.
The formal municipal history of Independence is more complicated than some later summaries suggest. The 2002 architectural survey cites a local history stating that the town was incorporated in 1859 or 1860. The Virginia Acts of Assembly contain an act to incorporate Independence during the 1870 to 1871 session. The Commonwealth’s present charter history, however, identifies a 1906 Act of Assembly, Chapter 278, as the town’s incorporation and lists later charters from 1934 and 1993. Rather than forcing these records into a single date, they show that the legal organization of Independence changed more than once as the community developed.
Independence During the Civil War
Independence was barely a decade old when the Civil War began.
Grayson County did not become the site of a major battlefield, but the war disrupted the economy, created shortages, drew local men into military service, and brought the machinery of wartime government into the courthouse town. County court records continued to handle estates, debts, criminal matters, claims, and public business while the country around them was at war.
A surviving January 1862 court minute provides an especially interesting glimpse of Independence during the conflict. The court appointed a commissioner to determine Robert P. Baker’s accounts connected with the Mountain News, which the record expressly described as “a newspaper published in the town of Independence.” That short entry establishes that even during the Civil War the young county seat already supported a local press.
The Alexander M. Davis papers provide another window into the period. Davis was a prominent Grayson County lawyer, and surviving correspondence includes letters addressed to him or other residents at Independence during the years surrounding the war. Such material is important because the political history of a courthouse town was not confined to troop movements. It was also written in legal correspondence, court sessions, private disputes, newspaper accounts, and decisions made by the people who continued operating county government while armies fought elsewhere.
Independence came through the war without the physical devastation suffered by many larger Southern towns, but the county around it experienced the economic dislocation that affected much of the Appalachian South.
Lawyers, Merchants, Newspapers, and a Town of About Two Hundred
Growth after the Civil War was steady but slow.
Chataigne’s Virginia Gazetteer and Classified Business Directory recorded roughly 200 people at Independence in 1884. Among them were three lawyers and three general merchants. The architectural survey concluded that the town’s population consisted heavily of professional and merchant families, an unsurprising pattern for a small place whose most important institution was the courthouse. A flour mill on Peach Bottom Creek represented one of the few nearby industrial enterprises.
Education also remained important. By 1884, Independence High School was one of four secondary schools identified in Grayson County. Grayson Normal School and Grayson Academy also operated at Independence during the 1880s and 1890s, although their principal buildings have not survived.
The town’s newspapers offer perhaps the most intimate surviving record of the period. The Library of Virginia has digitized issues of the Grayson Clipper from 1882 through 1884 and the Grayson Journal from 1886 through 1913, although both runs are incomplete. Later surviving Independence papers include the Grayson Sun and Grayson Star. These papers preserve advertisements, elections, court notices, deaths, marriages, businesses, social news, church activity, and the countless smaller events that rarely entered formal county histories.
The existence of so many local newspaper titles makes Independence particularly valuable for studying everyday life in rural Southwest Virginia. County government may have created the town, but newspapers helped create its public voice.
The Fire of 1897
By the closing years of the nineteenth century, Independence possessed a more developed professional and commercial community. A local history used by the Virginia Department of Historic Resources recorded six lawyers, a physician, a dentist, two builders, and a watch repair and jewelry business in town in 1897.
That same year brought one of the most destructive episodes in the town’s early history.
A severe fire destroyed several major buildings, including the three-story Central Hotel operated by E. T. Kirby and the large neighboring store of E. L. Lundy and J. A. Dickey. Because much of Independence was still composed of frame buildings, fire represented a persistent threat to the business district. Commercial activity nevertheless remained concentrated along Main Street on either side of the courthouse.
One important survivor helps reveal what the earlier streetscape looked like. The Acorn Building, constructed for Dr. William M. Dickinson in 1877, survived as a small professional office with Italianate ornamentation and carved acorn details. Against a landscape where so many nineteenth-century structures vanished through fire, demolition, or redevelopment, its survival became unusually significant.
The year 1897 also produced one of the finest visual sources for the county. S. M. Dickey and geologist Charles Rufus Boyd prepared a detailed Map of Grayson County, Virginia. The map showed roads, topography, resources, and other features of the county and was prepared in connection with a larger description of Grayson’s resources. Copies survive in institutional collections including Virginia Tech and the Library of Congress.
For a historian trying to reconstruct Independence at the end of the nineteenth century, that map and the surviving Grayson Journal issues provide something close to a snapshot of the town immediately before the twentieth century transformed it.
Churches, Black Community Life, and Mt. Zion
The history of Independence was not limited to the courthouse and Main Street businesses.
Methodists had organized in the town soon after its founding. After the early Grayson Institute building burned, the congregation met for years in the Masonic lodge before constructing a frame church in 1880. That building was eventually replaced in 1929 and 1930 by the brick First Methodist Episcopal Church South, whose Gothic Revival details became another distinctive element of the Independence landscape.
Baptists established a church in town during the 1890s, while African American residents developed institutions of their own west of Independence. The Virginia Department of Historic Resources survey identifies a Black community known as Klondike west of town and records the establishment of Mt. Zion Baptist Church in 1902. George and Hattie Allen donated the land.
Mt. Zion was more than a place of Sunday worship. An upper room served an Odd Fellows lodge associated with the area’s Black residents. Mutual-aid organizations such as the Grand United Order of Odd Fellows provided social support, burial assistance, fellowship, and a measure of economic security in an era of segregation and limited public services. The architectural survey considers Mt. Zion one of the county’s significant surviving resources directly associated with African American history.
That history broadens the story of Independence considerably. The town was a courthouse community, but the society surrounding that courthouse included churches, schools, fraternal organizations, professionals, laborers, merchants, Black neighborhoods, and families whose lives extended far beyond official records.
The 1908 Courthouse
No building came to symbolize Independence more completely than the courthouse completed in 1908.
Designed by Washington architect Frank P. Milburn, the building rises dramatically above the center of town with corner towers, curving gables, brickwork, and a design far more elaborate than might be expected in a small mountain county seat. Milburn designed numerous public buildings throughout the South, including several courthouses in Southwest Virginia. The Virginia Department of Historic Resources describes the building as part of a brief period when mountain counties invested in imposing courthouses that functioned not only as government buildings but as statements of civic confidence.
There is a small discrepancy in published accounts concerning the courthouse it replaced. The 2002 DHR architectural survey refers to an old brick courthouse dating to 1850 and says it was demolished in 1905. The Historic 1908 Courthouse Foundation dates the previous building to 1863 and says it was removed in 1906. What is certain is that an earlier courthouse occupied the square before the Milburn building rose there, and the new structure was completed in 1908.
The courthouse became the physical center of Independence just as county government had been the reason for the town’s creation nearly sixty years earlier.
The Becker Library and the Depression Years
Independence entered the twentieth century without experiencing the explosive industrial expansion seen elsewhere in Grayson County. In 1930 its population stood at only 429. Service occupations, professional work, government, and commerce remained central to the town’s economy.
One of the most remarkable local projects of the Great Depression was not a factory or highway. It was a library.
Independence lawyer Pauline Bourne became one of the driving forces behind expanding access to books in Grayson County. A lending project supported through the National Youth Administration developed into an effort to serve people living far from town. The history preserved by the Wythe-Grayson Regional Library describes young people carrying reading material into isolated communities and records thousands of readers being served as the project grew.
The success of the program helped justify construction of the Becker Library in Independence. National Youth Administration boys provided labor, while Lola “Kidd” Dickenson prepared plans for a rustic log structure meant to evoke the region’s mountain architecture. The building was completed in 1937.
The original Becker Library was eventually demolished to make way for the county jail, but portions of its legacy survived. The Grayson County Public Library retained furniture, books, and other materials associated with it, preserving evidence of a period when a small courthouse town became the center of an effort to carry books into some of the most isolated sections of the county.
A Courthouse Saved
By the middle and later twentieth century, automobiles, new commercial development, and changing patterns of shopping altered Independence much as they altered small towns across Appalachia. Older storefronts were modernized, businesses moved outward, and the traditional pedestrian business district lost some of its earlier commercial importance.
County government itself eventually moved.
A modern courthouse was constructed in 1981, leaving the 1908 building without the purpose for which it had been designed. Demolition became a possibility. Instead, local preservationists organized to save it. The property was acquired by the courthouse foundation in the early 1980s and rehabilitated rather than destroyed. The building had already been placed on the Virginia Landmarks Register in 1977 and the National Register of Historic Places in 1978.
Today the former courthouse serves as an arts and cultural center. It houses museum exhibits and provides space for cultural programs, historical organizations, performances, tourism activities, and community events. A building constructed as a monument to county government therefore survived by acquiring a second civic life.
That preservation seems especially appropriate in Independence. The town itself exists because Grayson County once needed a courthouse in a more central place.
Independence Today
The 2020 census counted 1,011 residents in Independence. That is still a small town by almost any measure, yet it represents considerable growth from the roughly 200 residents recorded in the 1880s and the 429 counted in 1930.
Its importance has never been measured simply by population.
For more than 175 years, people from communities across Grayson County have traveled to Independence to record deeds, settle estates, appear in court, obtain licenses, conduct county business, attend school, worship, shop, publish newspapers, consult lawyers, use the library, and gather for public events. Roads that once carried wagons and horseback travelers toward the courthouse now carry traffic through the same general crossroads.
The old courthouse still dominates the center of town even though the courts themselves have moved to Davis Street. The survival of the 1908 building, nineteenth-century structures, church properties, county records, maps, newspapers, and local archives gives Independence something many similarly sized Appalachian communities have lost: an unusually continuous record of how the place came to be.
Why the History of Independence Matters
Independence tells a different kind of Appalachian town story.
There was no great mineral discovery that created it and no single corporation that built it. The town grew from an argument over geography. When Carroll County separated from Grayson, residents had to decide where their reduced county should conduct its public business. The compromise created a new community near Peach Bottom Creek and gave it a name that remembered the faction responsible for choosing the site.
From that beginning came the courthouse square, hotels, stores, lawyers’ offices, newspapers, churches, schools, mills, Black community institutions, the Becker Library, and eventually the ornate courthouse that still watches over Main Street.
Independence never needed to become a large city to shape Grayson County. Its importance came from being the place where a scattered mountain population repeatedly met the institutions that connected individual communities to the county as a whole.
The town began because Grayson County needed a center.
More than a century and three quarters later, Independence remains it.
Sources & Further Reading
Library of Virginia. “Grayson County Microfilm.” County and City Microfilm. Includes Grayson County order books, minute books, deed books, plat books, marriage registers, wills, incorporation records, and road records. Accessed September 3, 2026. https://www.lva.virginia.gov/collections/ccmf/VA/VA105
Library of Virginia. “Grayson County Court Records.” Local Government Records Collection. Includes Circuit Court order books, chancery order books, minute books, common-law order books, and other surviving Grayson County records. Accessed September 3, 2026. https://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/local/results_all.asp?CountyID=VA105
Grayson County Court. Order Book, 1844–1854. Reel 15. Grayson County Circuit Court Clerk’s Office; microfilm, Library of Virginia. https://www.lva.virginia.gov/collections/ccmf/VA/VA105
Grayson County Court. Deed Book 10, 1849–1855. Reel 5. Grayson County Circuit Court Clerk’s Office; microfilm, Library of Virginia. https://www.lva.virginia.gov/collections/ccmf/VA/VA105
Grayson County Court. Will Book 3, 1849–1864. Reel 10. Grayson County Circuit Court Clerk’s Office; microfilm, Library of Virginia. https://www.lva.virginia.gov/collections/ccmf/VA/VA105
Library of Virginia. “Chancery Records Index: Grayson County.” Virginia Memory. Includes digitized Grayson County chancery causes containing deeds, depositions, plats, estate disputes, accounts, and other court records. https://old.lva.virginia.gov/chancery/default.asp
Virginia General Assembly. “An Act to Incorporate the Town of Independence, in the County of Grayson.” Acts of the General Assembly of the State of Virginia, 1870–1871. Indexed by Modeling the Records of the Commonwealth. https://modelingjimcrow.virginia.edu/browse/subjects/municipal-charters
Commonwealth of Virginia. “Independence, Town of.” Virginia Legislative Information System, Virginia Municipal Charters. Includes the 1906 charter and subsequent charter revisions. https://law.lis.virginia.gov/charters/independence/
Boyd, Charles Rufus, and S. M. Dickey. Map of Grayson County, Virginia. 1897. Virginia Tech Special Collections and University Archives. https://aspace.lib.vt.edu/subjects/337
Library of Virginia. “New News!: Virginia Chronicle Updates.” UncommonWealth, March 11, 2026. Documents digitized runs of the Grayson Clipper, Grayson Journal, Grayson Sun, and Grayson Star of Independence. https://uncommonwealth.lva.virginia.gov/blog/2026/03/11/new-news/
Grayson Clipper. Independence, VA, 1882–1884. Surviving issues digitized by the Library of Virginia through Virginia Chronicle. https://uncommonwealth.lva.virginia.gov/blog/2026/03/11/new-news/
Grayson Journal. Independence, VA, 1886–1913. Surviving issues digitized by the Library of Virginia through Virginia Chronicle. https://uncommonwealth.lva.virginia.gov/blog/2026/03/11/new-news/
Grayson Sun. Independence, VA, May 25, 1922. Surviving issue documented by the Library of Virginia. https://uncommonwealth.lva.virginia.gov/blog/2026/03/11/new-news/
Grayson Star. Independence, VA, June–August 1959. Surviving issues digitized by the Library of Virginia. https://uncommonwealth.lva.virginia.gov/blog/2026/03/11/new-news/
Becker, Florence Deakins. Florence Deakins Becker Papers, 1891–1963. Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. Includes material concerning the founding of the George Ferdinand Becker Memorial Library in Independence. https://findingaids.loc.gov/repositories/19/resources/4449
Becker, George Ferdinand. George F. Becker Papers. Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. https://findingaids.loc.gov/repositories/19/resources/3855
Worsham, Gibson. A Survey of Historic Architecture in Grayson County, Virginia, Including the Towns of Independence and Fries. 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
Virginia Department of Historic Resources. “Grayson County Courthouse.” Virginia Landmarks Register No. 240-0001; National Register of Historic Places No. 78003019. Accessed September 3, 2026. https://www.dhr.virginia.gov/historic-registers/240-0001/
Virginia Department of Historic Resources. “Old Grayson County Courthouse and Clerk’s Office.” Virginia Landmarks Register No. 038-0004; National Register of Historic Places No. 97000151. Accessed September 3, 2026. https://www.dhr.virginia.gov/historic-registers/038-0004/
Lee, Anne Carter. “Historic 1908 Grayson County Courthouse.” SAH Archipedia. Edited by Gabrielle Esperdy and Karen Kingsley. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012–. https://sah-archipedia.org/buildings/VA-02-GY2
SAH Archipedia. “Grayson County Courthouse.” SAH Archipedia. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. https://sah-archipedia.org/buildings/VA-02-GY1
Town of Independence, Virginia. “History & Geography.” Accessed September 3, 2026. https://www.independenceva.com/about-independence/about/
Grayson County Historical Society. Grayson County: A History in Words and Pictures. Edited by Bettye-Lou Fields and Jene Hughes. Independence, VA: Grayson County Historical Society, 1976. https://graysonvahistsoc.com/product/grayson-county-a-history-in-words-and-pictures/
Grayson County Historical Society. “Community Research Notebooks.” Includes books, maps, photographs, personal recollections, and other materials concerning Independence and other Grayson County communities. https://graysonvahistsoc.com/community-research-notebooks/
Grayson County Historical Society. “Grayson County Historical Society.” Archival holdings include photographs, maps, newspapers, genealogical material, Civil War records, census information, deeds, original letters, and journals. https://graysonvahistsoc.com/
Grayson County Historical Society. “Library.” Research collections on Grayson County businesses, churches, schools, cemeteries, families, military history, and communities. https://graysonvahistsoc.com/library/
Grayson County Historical Society. Our Grayson Heritage. Vol. 9. Independence, VA: Grayson County Historical Society, 2015. Includes “The Town of Independence, Virginia.” https://graysonvahistsoc.com/product/our-grayson-heritage-2015/
Nuckolls, B. F. Pioneer Settlers of Grayson County, Virginia. Bristol, TN: King Printing Company, 1914. Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/item/15019440/
Author Note: Independence is unusual among Appalachian towns because it was deliberately created around the need for a new county seat rather than an industry or railroad. I hope this history helps preserve the story of the courthouse, newspapers, churches, schools, businesses, and residents who made the town the civic heart of Grayson County.