Appalachian Community Histories – Big Stone Gap East, Wise County: Coal, Railroads, and a Community Hidden Behind Changing Names
Big Stone Gap East sits in one of the most historically important industrial landscapes in Southwest Virginia. Its name immediately connects it to Big Stone Gap, the Wise County town that became a center of coal, timber, railroads, land speculation, and corporate development during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Yet the history of Big Stone Gap East requires an unusual amount of care because an older community with an almost identical name already existed nearby.
The 2020 United States Census recorded Big Stone Gap East as a separate census-designated place with 687 residents and 350 housing units. In the same census, East Stone Gap was counted separately with 537 residents. That distinction matters because the nineteenth-century settlement called East Big-Stone Gap was not simply an earlier name for the modern Big Stone Gap East census area. Historic East Big-Stone Gap was incorporated in 1890 and later renamed East Stone Gap. Modern federal geography recognizes Big Stone Gap East and East Stone Gap as distinct communities.
For that reason, the history of Big Stone Gap East cannot be written by simply taking every nineteenth-century reference to “East Big Stone Gap” and applying it to the modern community. The safer approach is to begin with today’s census boundary and trace the land backward through maps, deeds, plats, roads, company records, and newspapers, exactly the problem identified in the research assembled for this article.
Before the Coal Boom
Long before census officials drew a boundary around Big Stone Gap East, the surrounding Powell River country was shaped by mountains, streams, farmland, and transportation routes. Big Stone Gap itself takes its name from the broad opening in the mountain landscape around the Powell River Valley. The Virginia Department of Historic Resources describes the larger setting as a valley framed by Stone Mountain, Little Stone Mountain, and Wallens Ridge.
The settlement that eventually became Big Stone Gap was known during its early history as Three Forks, a reference to streams converging around the Powell River. Through much of the nineteenth century the country remained agricultural, and the Gilley, Horton, and Flanary families became particularly important landholders in the area. Wise County itself was created by the Virginia legislature in 1856.
Coal and iron were present beneath the mountains, but minerals alone could not create an industrial town. Investors needed transportation, capital, workers, and control of large blocks of land. Those ingredients began coming together after the Civil War, particularly during the late 1870s and 1880s, when promoters increasingly presented Southwest Virginia as an undeveloped industrial frontier.
In 1882 the growing settlement was incorporated as Mineral City. Virginia’s official charter history records that the name was changed to Big Stone Gap in 1888, just as outside capital began transforming the valley.
Building a City on Paper
Few documents reveal the scale of those ambitions better than the Virginia General Assembly’s 1888 act incorporating the Big Stone Gap Improvement Company.
The company received authority to acquire property within ten miles of the settlement and could hold as much as 10,000 acres in fee simple at one time. Its charter permitted it to mine and quarry land, construct houses and stores, build bridges and dams, improve streets, provide water, gas, and electric lighting, operate street railways, establish parks, and divide its property into lots for sale. The same corporation could develop coal, iron ore, furnaces, mills, manufacturing works, and coke ovens.
This was far more than a charter for a small real estate company. It was permission to build much of the physical framework of a new industrial community.
The planned nature of Big Stone Gap distinguished it from many older mountain settlements that had grown gradually around roads, creeks, farms, mills, and crossroads. The Big Stone Gap Improvement Company laid out streets in a grid, while Rufus Ayers and other promoters imagined waterworks, electric lights, parkland, transportation improvements, industrial sites, and substantial new residential districts. The company’s plans intentionally connected the town to the landscape while making room for expansion beyond the original commercial core.
Writer Charles Dudley Warner arrived during this extraordinary period and left one of the most valuable eyewitness descriptions of the transformation. In 1889 he found two versions of Big Stone Gap. One existed physically, a settlement of only several dozen houses with new construction underway. The other existed as a much larger “city on the map,” complete with streets, lots, parks, hotels, warehouses, and ambitious expectations for the future.
Warner also observed that promoters were already considering suburbs and the eventual outward growth of the community into surrounding valleys and terraces. The gap was not being envisioned merely as a compact mining town. Investors imagined an expanding city whose residential and industrial landscape would spread into the countryside around it.
East Big Stone Gap Enters the Record
That enthusiasm soon produced development plans east and southeast of Big Stone Gap itself.
On February 25, 1890, the Virginia General Assembly incorporated the East Big Stone Gap Land and Improvement Company. The corporation was authorized to hold as much as 5,000 acres in Wise County and could construct houses and stores, build bridges, dams, and ferries, mine or quarry its property, and establish lighting and water systems. It could also invest in railroads and other corporations.
Only days later, on March 5, the General Assembly incorporated a town called East Big-Stone Gap in Powell’s Valley. Unlike vague promotional descriptions, the incorporation act gave actual boundaries. They were described with reference to the South Fork of Powell River, the corporate boundary of Big-Stone Gap, William H. Wampler’s land, Powell Mountain, Butcher’s Ridge, and property belonging to the Big-Stone Gap Improvement Company.
The similarity between that name and today’s Big Stone Gap East is the source of much of the modern confusion.
During the 1893 to 1894 General Assembly session, Virginia changed the town’s name from East Big Stone Gap to East Stone Gap. The historical record therefore creates a clear line of succession between East Big-Stone Gap and East Stone Gap. Modern Census records, meanwhile, list East Stone Gap and Big Stone Gap East separately.
Big Stone Gap East should therefore not be presented as simply the renamed nineteenth-century town. Its history overlaps with the same landscape of speculation, transportation, farming, and industrial expansion, but its modern name represents a different geographic designation.
Railroads Change the Valley
The ambitions of the 1880s and 1890s depended heavily on the railroad.
By 1891 both the South Atlantic & Ohio Railroad and Louisville & Nashville Railroad had reached Wise County. Rail transportation connected the coalfields with outside markets and helped turn land that had previously supported farming and timber into some of the most heavily promoted industrial property in Southwest Virginia. Lumber mills supplied construction materials, mines provided coal, coke ovens processed fuel for industrial use, and railroads carried the products outward.
Big Stone Gap also developed a small passenger and freight connection remembered locally as the Dummy Line. Running between railroad depots, the line traveled through the developing town and became part of daily life. Children reportedly used it to travel to school, while businessmen and travelers used the connection between the larger rail systems.
The railroad age transformed far more than downtown Big Stone Gap. Tracks, roads, industrial property, worker housing, farms, subdivisions, and neighboring settlements became parts of one interconnected landscape. The areas outside municipal boundaries mattered because those were the spaces available for homes, transportation corridors, industrial facilities, and further development.
That broader landscape is essential to understanding the land now called Big Stone Gap East.
When the Boom Fell Short
For a brief period, boosters imagined Big Stone Gap becoming one of the great industrial cities of the South.
Promotional plans included major hotels, manufacturing operations, electric power, waterworks, recreational developments, and even an expensive railroad tunnel that would have provided a new connection through the mountains toward Kentucky. Investors purchased property while land values climbed rapidly. Contemporary promoters saw the possibility of combining coal, iron, timber, transportation, and real estate into a city that could rival established industrial centers.
Not everything happened.
The speculative boom weakened in the early 1890s. Investors withdrew, some proposed improvements never left the planning stage, and numerous lots that had been laid out during the height of speculation remained undeveloped. The grand hotel, major tunnel, and several other enormous projects envisioned by promoters never became the foundations of a Pittsburgh-sized mountain city.
Yet the collapse of the most extravagant dreams did not mean Big Stone Gap disappeared.
Coal production recovered. By the end of the nineteenth century Wise County had become one of Virginia’s most important coal-producing regions. The Virginia Department of Historic Resources notes that the county surpassed Tazewell County in annual coal production by the end of the century and produced roughly half or more of Virginia’s coal during much of the following quarter century.
The city imagined on promotional maps never fully appeared, but an enduring industrial town and a network of nearby communities did.
Growth Beyond Downtown
During the first half of the twentieth century, Big Stone Gap continued growing as coal, timber, transportation, business, and government strengthened its role as a regional center.
The incorporated town’s population rose from 1,617 in 1900 to 2,590 in 1910 and approximately 3,000 by 1920. By 1940 the population had reached 4,331, and in 1950 it peaked at 5,175. Stonega Coke and Coal Company, which absorbed operations previously associated with Virginia Coal and Iron, established its headquarters in Big Stone Gap and reinforced the town’s importance to the surrounding coal camps.
Those figures describe Big Stone Gap proper, not the modern Big Stone Gap East CDP. Still, such growth placed pressure on the surrounding landscape. A town attracting miners, railroad workers, merchants, lawyers, company officials, teachers, government employees, and their families required housing and transportation beyond its original business blocks.
Historic maps provide some of the best evidence for following that process. A United States Geological Survey Big Stone Gap quadrangle was published in 1929, while later Big Stone Gap and East Stone Gap quadrangles documented the area during the postwar period. Virginia’s Department of Highways also produced a Wise County road map in 1947 showing the county’s primary and secondary highway systems. Together with deeds and subdivision plats, these sources allow the modern Big Stone Gap East boundary to be traced backward parcel by parcel rather than forcing modern names onto older maps.
A Place Hidden Behind Other Names
This is one reason communities such as Big Stone Gap East can be surprisingly difficult to research.
Older newspapers were not writing about a census-designated place called Big Stone Gap East. Deeds might identify an individual landowner, creek, road, subdivision, company, or adjoining tract. Maps could place the same property relative to Big Stone Gap, East Stone Gap, Powell River, a mountain, or a railroad. A resident might use Big Stone Gap as a mailing address even while living beyond the incorporated town.
The name familiar to a modern Census researcher may therefore be almost invisible in nineteenth and early twentieth-century records.
That does not mean the place lacks history. It means the history is buried under earlier systems of describing land.
Wise County deed indexes dating to the county’s creation, surveyor books, title bonds, court cases, and especially the county’s 1888 to 1921 plat records offer a path toward a more detailed reconstruction. Those records can identify who owned the land, when acreage was divided, where roads crossed property, and which development companies transformed farms into lots. Contemporary Big Stone Gap newspapers add another layer, recording real estate sales, railroad improvements, businesses, schools, churches, fires, deaths, and the everyday movement of people through the valley. The extensive source base assembled for Big Stone Gap East makes clear that these property and court records may ultimately provide the strongest evidence specifically tied to the modern census area.
Big Stone Gap East in the Modern Census
By the twenty-first century, the landscape east of Big Stone Gap had long ceased to resemble the speculative frontier Warner encountered in 1889.
The 2020 Census formally counted Big Stone Gap East as a census-designated place with 687 residents. Census geography gave the community its own FIPS code, 51-07484, and GNIS identifier, 2807471. The same federal data separately recognized East Stone Gap, reinforcing the distinction between the two communities. Current Census geography continues to identify Big Stone Gap East as its own CDP.
Unlike incorporated Big Stone Gap, a census-designated place is primarily a statistical geography rather than an incorporated municipal government. That distinction helps explain why Big Stone Gap East appears suddenly and clearly in modern datasets while proving much harder to follow by name through older records.
Its land, however, is much older than its census label.
The ground belongs to the same Powell Valley world that experienced nineteenth-century farming, mineral speculation, railroad construction, land-company promotion, coal development, road building, and the steady spread of settlement beyond the boundaries of Big Stone Gap.
Why Big Stone Gap East Matters
The history of Big Stone Gap East is valuable precisely because it demonstrates one of the problems historians encounter when writing about small Appalachian communities.
Names change. Boundaries move. Towns incorporate and sometimes disappear. Postal communities overlap with unincorporated settlements. Coal companies create camps that outlive the corporations that named them. New highways alter how residents understand distance, while Census officials can eventually draw a statistical boundary around a community that existed for generations without that particular designation.
Big Stone Gap East belongs to that pattern.
It should not be confused with historic East Big-Stone Gap, which became East Stone Gap, but neither should it be separated from the larger history unfolding around Big Stone Gap. The same land boom that filled promotional maps with streets and subdivisions, the same railroads that opened Wise County’s coalfields, and the same twentieth-century growth that pushed homes and roads beyond downtown all shaped the landscape from which the modern community emerged.
Charles Dudley Warner arrived expecting to see the famous “city” people throughout the surrounding country had been talking about. What he found was partly real and partly imagined, a small settlement surrounded by mountains and fields, with investors already drawing its future across paper maps.
More than a century later, Big Stone Gap East reminds us that some of those maps produced places immediately, while others produced patterns of settlement that took generations to become visible. The modern census name may be young, but the land beneath it carries the much older story of Powell Valley, Wise County, and the rise of industrial Appalachia.
Sources & Further Reading
Campbell, Marius R. Geology of the Big Stone Gap Coal Field of Virginia and Kentucky. U.S. Geological Survey Bulletin 111. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1893. https://pubs.usgs.gov/publication/b111
Virginia General Assembly. “An Act to Incorporate the Big Stone Gap Improvement Company.” Approved February 14, 1888. Acts of the General Assembly of Virginia, chap. 121. https://modelingjimcrow.virginia.edu/volume/1887-88/law/121
Virginia General Assembly. “An Act to Incorporate the East Big Stone Gap Land and Improvement Company.” Approved February 25, 1890. Acts of the General Assembly of Virginia, chap. 364. https://modelingjimcrow.virginia.edu/volume/1889-90private/law/364
Virginia General Assembly. “An Act to Incorporate the Town of East Big-Stone Gap, in Wise County, Virginia.” Approved March 5, 1890. Acts of the General Assembly of Virginia, chap. 595. https://modelingjimcrow.virginia.edu/volume/1889-90private/law/594
Virginia General Assembly. “Charter of the Town of Big Stone Gap.” Code of Virginia, Charters. https://law.lis.virginia.gov/charters/big-stone-gap/
Hoeing, Joseph Bernard, and Big Stone Gap Improvement Company. Map Showing Location of Big Stone Gap, Va., and Its Relation to the South Appalachian System. Ca. 1890. Geography and Map Division, Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/resource/g3884b.ct009306/
Warner, Charles Dudley. Studies in the South and West, with Comments on Canada. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1889. https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/52290/pg52290-images.html
The Big Stone Post. Big Stone Gap, VA, 1890–1892. Chronicling America, Library of Congress. https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn87060150/
The Big Stone Gap Post. Big Stone Gap, Wise County, VA, 1892–1928. Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/item/sn88061179/
The Big Stone Gap Post. Big Stone Gap, VA, January 18, 1900. Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/item/sn88061179/1900-01-18/ed-1/
The Big Stone Gap Post. Big Stone Gap, VA, December 15, 1920. Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/item/sn88061179/1920-12-15/ed-1/
Library of Congress. “Titles in County: Wise, Virginia.” Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/titles/places/virginia/wise/
Eby, J. B. The Geology and Mineral Resources of Wise County and the Coal-Bearing Portion of Scott County, Virginia. Virginia Geological Survey Bulletin 24. Charlottesville: University of Virginia, 1923. https://ngmdb.usgs.gov/Prodesc/proddesc_93590.htm
Stose, George W. “Pre-Pennsylvanian Rocks.” In J. B. Eby, The Geology and Mineral Resources of Wise County and the Coal-Bearing Portion of Scott County, Virginia, 22–30. Virginia Geological Survey Bulletin 24. 1923. https://ngmdb.usgs.gov/Prodesc/proddesc_93591.htm
United States Geological Survey. “Big Stone Gap.” Geologic Names Lexicon. National Geologic Map Database. https://ngmdb.usgs.gov/Geolex/UnitRefs/BigStoneGapRefs_16744.html
Commonwealth of Virginia, Department of Highways. Wise County, Virginia, Showing Primary and Secondary Highway Systems. 1947. Virginia Tech Special Collections and University Archives. https://aspace.lib.vt.edu/repositories/2/resources/540
Library of Virginia. “Wise County Microfilm.” County and City Records on Microfilm. https://www.lva.virginia.gov/collections/ccmf/VA/VA297
Library of Virginia. “Wise County, Virginia, Chancery Cause: John B. Payne Jr. v. Big Stone Gap Improvement Co. et al., 1892-072.” Chancery Records Index. https://old.lva.virginia.gov/chancery/case_detail.asp?CFN=195-1892-072
Library of Virginia. “Wise County, Virginia, Chancery Cause: Nettie Cohen v. Big Stone Gap Iron Co. et al., 1910-104.” Chancery Records Index. https://old.lva.virginia.gov/chancery/case_detail.asp?CFN=195-1910-104
Virginia Department of Historic Resources. “Big Stone Gap Downtown Historic District.” Virginia Landmarks Register and National Register of Historic Places. https://www.dhr.virginia.gov/historic-registers/101-5002/
Virginia Department of Historic Resources. Big Stone Gap Downtown Historic District: National Register of Historic Places Registration Form. 2018. https://www.dhr.virginia.gov/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/101-5002_BigStoneGapDowntownHD_2018_NRHP_FINAL.pdf
Tolson, Edward. Wise County, Virginia; City of Norton; Historic Architectural Survey. Virginia Department of Historic Resources, 1995. https://dhr.fr.virginia.gov/pdf_files/SpecialCollections/WS-057_Wise_County_Norton_Historic_AH_Survey_1995_Cost_share_report.pdf
University of Tennessee Libraries, Betsey B. Creekmore Special Collections and University Archives. “Virginia Coal and Iron Company Records, 1883–1915.” https://scout.lib.utk.edu/repositories/2/resources/1121
Johnson, Charles A. A Narrative History of Wise County, Virginia. Norton, VA: Norton Press, 1938. https://books.google.com/books?id=6RyGQfOhl18C
Wise County Historical Society. The Heritage of Wise County and the City of Norton, 1856–1993. Vol. 1. Wise, VA: Wise County Historical Society, 1993.
Wise County Historical Society. The Heritage of Wise County and the City of Norton, 1856–2001. Vol. 2. Wise, VA: Wise County Historical Society, 2001.
Robertson, Rhonda, Wanda Rose, and Joyce Turner. Views from the Gap: Photographs of Big Stone Gap and East Stone Gap, Virginia. Wise, VA: Wise County Historical Society, 2008.
Hendrick, Bill. Big Stone Gap: “The Early Years.” 1988.
U.S. Census Bureau. “Virginia Census Designated Places, 2020 Census.” TIGERweb. https://tigerweb.geo.census.gov/tigerwebmain/Files/acs25/tigerweb_acs25_cdp_2020_tab20_va.html
Author Note: Growing up in the coalfields of Harlan County made me familiar with how Appalachian communities can carry names and boundaries that shift across generations. Big Stone Gap East reminds us that sometimes understanding a place means following the land, roads, and records as carefully as the name.