Appalachian Community Histories – Ben Hur, Lee County: Pridemore’s Station, Route 58, and Virginia Oil Country
Ben Hur sits in the part of Lee County where a place can be small on the map and still carry several layers of history. It is not best understood as a town with a courthouse square or incorporated limits. It is better understood as a named community, a postal place, a railroad memory, a school and highway landmark, and one of the names tied to Virginia’s small oil-producing history.
The official trail begins with the map. The U.S. Geological Survey records Ben Hur as a recognized geographic name in Lee County, and the USGS Store still lists the historic Ben Hur, Virginia quadrangle as a 1:24,000 scale map with a 1935 version date. That map record matters because it places Ben Hur inside the federal mapping record before the later highway changes that reshaped travel through this part of the county.
Auburn Pridemore and the Name Ben Hur
The story most often attached to Ben Hur’s name begins with Auburn Lorenzo Pridemore. Pridemore was born in Scott County, Virginia, in 1837, served in the Confederate army, practiced law in Jonesville, served in the Virginia Senate, and represented Virginia in the Forty-fifth Congress from 1877 to 1879. The U.S. House biography says he continued practicing law in Jonesville until his death there in 1900.
Local and place-name accounts connect Pridemore to the naming of Ben Hur. Cooperative Living’s place-name account says the Lee County community was named after Lew Wallace’s novel by Auburn Lorenzo Pridemore, and a local Pridemore sketch preserves the tradition that the station received its name from Wallace’s book. Those accounts should be treated as local-history and place-name sources rather than courthouse proof, but they are consistent with the larger memory of Ben Hur as a named stop or community rather than a formally incorporated town.
That makes Ben Hur one of those Appalachian places where a literary name settled into a railroad and roadside landscape. The name came from a national book, but the community belonged to Lee County’s local world of stations, churches, schools, creeks, ridges, and family roads.
A Station in the Valley
One of the clearest early clues to Ben Hur’s community life comes from newspapers. A 1927 item in the Powell Valley News described Ben Hur as the “next station” after Pennington in a railroad story. The OCR is rough, and the page image should be checked before quoting it in final publication, but the reference is still a valuable lead because it shows Ben Hur functioning in public memory as a railroad station point between Pennington and Jonesville.
By the late 1920s, Ben Hur was not just a name on a railroad line. It was a community that appeared in everyday notices. The 1929 Powell Valley News includes references to Ben Hur church activity, residents visiting nearby communities, and land advertisements that used Ben Hur as a recognizable landmark. One sale notice described property as close to a good church and school and “1 1-2 miles south Ben Hur,” showing that readers were expected to know the place well enough for directions and land value.
The postal record gives another marker of local identity. Jim Forte’s postal-history listing for Lee County records “Ben Hur” as a post office from 1921 to the present, while also listing an earlier “Benhur” from 1895 to 1919. Postal listings are not the whole story of a community, but they are strong evidence that Ben Hur became an official mail name in the early twentieth century.
The Landscape Beneath the Community
Ben Hur’s deeper history is also geological. The community lies in a county where roads, ridges, and settlement patterns were shaped by the folded and faulted country of far southwestern Virginia. In 1950, Ralph L. Miller and William Peters Brosgé mapped the geology of the Jonesville district for the U.S. Geological Survey, and in 1954 they published USGS Bulletin 990, Geology and Oil Resources of the Jonesville District, Lee County, Virginia.
That USGS work is important because Ben Hur belongs to the same Lee County landscape where geology later became an oil story. Virginia Energy explains that most past oil production in Virginia occurred in the Ben Hur-Fleenortown and Rose Hill fields in Lee County. The state agency also identifies the producing rock as fractured Middle Ordovician-age Trenton Limestone of the Appalachian Basin.
The geology did not make Ben Hur a boomtown in the Texas sense. It made Ben Hur part of a small, difficult, and very Appalachian oil field, where production came from fractures in old limestone rather than from large, easy reservoirs. That is why the Ben Hur oil story is local, technical, and unusually important to Virginia history at the same time.
The Ben Hur-Fleenortown Oil Field
The strongest state source for this subject is J. E. Nolde’s Oil and Gas Well Data and Geology for Lee County, Virginia, published by the Virginia Division of Mineral Resources in 1992. Virginia Energy’s listing describes it as a report on Lee County’s geologic structure and stratigraphy, with an overview of the Rose Hill and Ben Hur-Fleenortown oil fields. It also notes that the maps include oil and gas well locations, operators, landowners, elevations, total depths, well results, and producing formations.
C. S. Bartlett Jr.’s 1984 paper on Trenton Limestone fracture reservoirs gives the Ben Hur field a clearer timeline. Bartlett wrote that the Ben Hur oil field, about 16 miles northeast of the Rose Hill pool, opened in 1963. He also described renewed exploration after 1981 and noted that production came mainly from a nonporous rock with secondary fracturing.
Later USGS work kept Ben Hur in the technical record. A 2014 chapter in USGS Professional Paper 1708 studied oils and gases from wells in the Ben Hur and Rose Hill fields in Lee County, along with the Swan Creek field in Tennessee. That study shows how Ben Hur remained useful to geologists long after the first local drilling excitement had passed.
For local history, the oil field matters because it ties a rural Lee County community to one of Virginia’s rare oil-producing landscapes. Virginia Energy says oil was first produced in Virginia in 1942 in Lee County, and its current oil overview still identifies Lee and Wise as oil-producing counties. It also states that Virginia oil production reached its peak in 1983, with most past production coming from the Ben Hur-Fleenortown and Rose Hill fields.
Ben Hur on Route 58
Ben Hur’s modern history is also tied to roads. Route 58 and Alternate 58 connected this part of Lee County to the larger transportation corridor running across southern Virginia. A 1993 Roanoke Times report on the U.S. 58 project described a planned 10.6-mile section that generally followed existing Alternate U.S. 58 in Lee County from Ben Hur to Dryden. It specifically identified a 1.7-mile stretch from Virginia 644 at Ben Hur to Virginia 643 west of Pennington Gap.
VDOT’s Route 58 Corridor Development Fund reports show the same pattern in state planning records. One report listed $9.8 million for “Ben Hur to Pennington Gap in Lee County,” placing Ben Hur directly inside the state’s highway-development language. Another VDOT report tracked Route 58 Alternate projects in Lee County, including the Pennington Gap bypass and nearby parallel-lane work.
Road projects often erase older travel patterns while creating new ones. In Ben Hur’s case, the highway records show that the community remained a practical point of reference even after the railroad-station era faded from everyday life.
Schools, Precincts, and the Present Community
Modern official records still use Ben Hur as a place name. The National Center for Education Statistics lists the Lee County Career and Technical Center with a physical address at 181 Vo-Tech Drive, Ben Hur, Virginia, and identifies it as a vocational school in Lee County Public Schools.
Lee County’s code also preserves Ben Hur in civic geography. The county precinct boundaries refer to Ben Hur in relation to St. Charles, Pennington, Woodway, Stone Mountain, Powell River, U.S. 58 Alternate, and other local roads and lines. That kind of legal description is not colorful history, but it is strong proof that Ben Hur remains part of the county’s official map of local identity.
That is the pattern running through Ben Hur’s history. It appears in maps, newspapers, post offices, oil reports, road projects, and school directories. Each source sees a different Ben Hur. Together, they show a Lee County community that survived mostly as a place name, but a powerful one.
Why Ben Hur Matters
Ben Hur is easy to pass through without realizing how many stories meet there. Its name points back to Auburn Lorenzo Pridemore and a nineteenth-century literary memory. Its newspaper record points to a railroad and church community. Its post office record shows early twentieth-century local identity. Its geology connects it to the Ben Hur-Fleenortown oil field, one of the central names in Virginia petroleum history. Its modern school and highway records show that the name still works in everyday Lee County life.
That is what makes Ben Hur worth remembering. It was never just a dot on the map. It was a station, a postal name, a road marker, a school place, and an oil-field name in the mountains of far southwestern Virginia.
Sources & Further Reading
Miller, Ralph L., and William Peters Brosgé. Geology and Oil Resources of the Jonesville District, Lee County, Virginia. U.S. Geological Survey Bulletin 990. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1954. https://pubs.usgs.gov/publication/b990
Miller, Ralph L., and William Peters Brosgé. Geology of the Jonesville District, Lee County, Virginia. U.S. Geological Survey Oil and Gas Investigation Map 104. Washington, DC: U.S. Geological Survey, 1950. https://pubs.usgs.gov/publication/om104
U.S. Geological Survey. “Geographic Names Information System: Ben Hur, Virginia.” The National Map. https://edits.nationalmap.gov/apps/gaz-domestic/public/search/names/1486137
U.S. Geological Survey. “Ben Hur, VA Historical Map GeoPDF 7.5 x 7.5 Grid, 24000-Scale, 1949.” USGS Store. https://store.usgs.gov/product/922252
U.S. Geological Survey. “Historical Topographic Maps: Preserving the Past.” National Geospatial Program. https://www.usgs.gov/programs/national-geospatial-program/historical-topographic-maps-preserving-past
U.S. Geological Survey. US Topo 7.5-Minute Map for Ben Hur, VA. 2016. https://prd-tnm.s3.amazonaws.com/StagedProducts/Maps/USTopo/PDF/VA/VA_Ben_Hur_20160719_TM_geo.pdf
Nolde, J. E. Oil and Gas Well Data and Geology for Lee County, Virginia. Virginia Division of Mineral Resources Publication 113. Charlottesville: Virginia Division of Mineral Resources, 1992. https://www.energy.virginia.gov/commerce/ProductDetails.aspx?productID=2196
Virginia Department of Energy. “Geology and Mineral Resources: Oil.” https://www.energy.virginia.gov/geology/Oil.shtml
Dennen, Kristen O., Mark Deering, and Robert A. Burruss. The Geochemistry of Oils and Gases from the Cumberland Overthrust Sheet in Virginia and Tennessee. U.S. Geological Survey Professional Paper 1708-G.12. Reston, VA: U.S. Geological Survey, 2014. https://pubs.usgs.gov/publication/pp1708G.12
Ruppert, Leslie F., and Robert T. Ryder, eds. Coal and Petroleum Resources in the Appalachian Basin. U.S. Geological Survey Professional Paper 1708. Reston, VA: U.S. Geological Survey, 2014. https://pubs.usgs.gov/publication/pp1708
Bartlett, C. S., Jr. “Trenton Limestone Fracture Reservoirs in Lee County, Southwestern Virginia.” AAPG Bulletin 68, no. 12 (1984). https://www.osti.gov/biblio/5685772
Virginia Places. “Oil Resources in Virginia.” http://www.virginiaplaces.org/geology/oilresources.html
Tennis, Joe. “Oil in Western Virginia: Pace Has Slowed, but Lee County Fields Still Produce.” The Virginian-Pilot, July 11, 1994. https://scholar.lib.vt.edu/VA-news/VA-Pilot/issues/1994/vp940711/07110033.htm
Tennis, Joe. “They’re Slowing to a Drip in Va.’s Western Oil Fields.” The Roanoke Times, July 11, 1994. https://scholar.lib.vt.edu/VA-news/ROA-Times/issues/1994/rt9407/940711/07110123.htm
Biographical Directory of the United States Congress. “Pridemore, Auburn Lorenzo.” https://bioguide.congress.gov/search/bio/P000535
U.S. House of Representatives: History, Art & Archives. “Pridemore, Auburn Lorenzo.” https://history.house.gov/People/Detail/19940
Cooperative Living. “What’s in a Name?” https://www.co-opliving.com/4726/whats-in-a-name/
RootsWeb. “Auburn Lorenzo Pridemore.” Historical Sketches of Southwest Virginia. https://sites.rootsweb.com/~vahsswv/historicalsketches/pridemoreauburnl.html
Tennis, Joe. Southwest Virginia Crossroads: An Almanac of Place Names and Places to See. Johnson City, TN: Overmountain Press, 2004. https://books.google.com/books/about/Southwest_Virginia_Crossroads.html?id=noiiZPTGk9IC
Gallant, Frank K. A Place Called Peculiar: Stories About Unusual American Place-Names. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2012. https://www.google.com/books/edition/A_Place_Called_Peculiar/
Jim Forte Postal History. “Post Offices: Lee County, Virginia.” https://www.postalhistory.com/postoffices.asp?county=Lee&state=VA&task=display
National Archives. “Post Office Reports of Site Locations, 1837–1950.” https://www.archives.gov/research/post-offices/locations-1837-1950.html
United States Postal Service. “Ben Hur Post Office.” USPS Locations. https://tools.usps.com/locations/home.htm?location=1354620
Powell Valley News. Digitized 1927 issues. Internet Archive. https://archive.org/stream/powell-valley-news-1927/Powell%20Valley%20News%20%281927%29_djvu.txt
Powell Valley News. Digitized 1929 issues. Internet Archive. https://archive.org/stream/powell-valley-news-1929/Powell%20Valley%20News%20%281929%29_djvu.txt
Lee County, Virginia. “Boundaries in Election District Number 3.” American Legal Publishing Code Library. https://codelibrary.amlegal.com/codes/leecountyva/latest/leecounty_va/0-0-0-842
Lee County, Virginia. “Boundaries in Election District Number 5.” American Legal Publishing Code Library. https://codelibrary.amlegal.com/codes/leecountyva/latest/leecounty_va/0-0-0-854
National Center for Education Statistics. “Lee County Career & Tech. Center.” Common Core of Data, 2024–2025 School Year. https://nces.ed.gov/ccd/schoolsearch/school_detail.asp?DistrictID=5102190&ID=510219000898&Search=1
Virginia Department of Transportation. Route 58 Corridor Development Fund Report. Richmond: Virginia Department of Transportation, 2009. https://www.vdot.virginia.gov/media/vdotvirginiagov/about/legislative-studies-and-reports/4_09_Final_Route_58_Report.pdf
Virginia Department of Transportation. Lee County Road Map. Richmond: Virginia Department of Transportation, 2023. https://www.vdot.virginia.gov/media/vdotvirginiagov/travel-and-traffic/maps/counties/52A_Lee_acc052323_PM.pdf
Kozel, Scott. “U.S. 58 Corridor, Ben Hur to Dryden.” The Roanoke Times, June 2, 1993. https://scholar.lib.vt.edu/VA-news/ROA-Times/issues/1993/rt9306/930602/06020117.htm
Construction Equipment Guide. “VDOT Perseveres on Route 58 Corridor Construction.” February 27, 2002. https://www.constructionequipmentguide.com/vdot-perseveres-on-route-58-corridor-construction/2223
Author Note: Ben Hur is one of those Lee County places where a name on the map opens into several stories at once. I wanted this piece to hold the community together through its railroad memory, Pridemore tradition, Route 58 setting, and unusual place in Virginia oil history.