Appalachian Community Histories – Dunlow, Wayne County: The Railroad Town Built Along Twelvepole Creek
In southern Wayne County, West Virginia, the community of Dunlow sits along Twelvepole Creek in a landscape where the railroad has been gone for generations. A paved road now follows much of the old route through the valley, and anyone passing through without knowing the story might see little to suggest that this quiet place once stood along one of the Norfolk & Western Railway’s important routes toward the Ohio River. One building, however, refuses to let that history disappear. The old Dunlow depot still stands near the center of the community, remarkably intact after more than a century and long after the tracks beside it were pulled from the ground.
The depot is more than a surviving railroad building. It is the physical reminder of why Dunlow developed where it did and why, for a brief period during the late nineteenth century, boosters could imagine that the community might become one of the important towns of southern West Virginia. Railroad promoters, coal investors, merchants, miners, and families gathered around a station built in 1891, creating a town that grew with remarkable speed. In 1897, the Ceredo Advance described Dunlow as one of the busiest and most attractive communities along the Norfolk & Western in southern West Virginia. Less than four decades later, the railroad that had created much of that prosperity was gone.
The rise and decline of Dunlow is therefore not simply the story of a small Wayne County community. It is a concentrated example of a pattern repeated across Appalachia, where outside investment, transportation improvements, resource speculation, and industrial development could create a town almost overnight, only for changing railroad routes and disappointed mineral expectations to alter its future just as quickly.
Before Dunlow Was Dunlow
Long before railroad surveyors arrived, people were already living along the branches of Twelvepole Creek. The country was rugged, but it was not empty. Farms, timber operations, scattered settlements, wagon roads, churches, mills, and family networks had developed along the creek during the nineteenth century. State historic preservation research indicates that a settlement and post office known simply as Twelve Pole existed near the later site of Dunlow by the 1850s. The Twelve Pole post office continued for years before the arrival of the railroad town that would eventually replace its name on the map.
The possibility of using Twelvepole Creek as a transportation corridor had been considered decades before the Norfolk & Western appeared. In 1866, the West Virginia Legislature authorized the Wayne County Coal and Iron Railway Company to construct a railroad from near Ceredo on the Ohio River toward the forks of Twelve Pole Creek and then toward the Guyandotte River. The project did not produce the railroad that eventually reached Dunlow, but the charter is important because it shows that investors recognized very early that the Twelvepole valley offered both natural resources and a potential route connecting the interior of Wayne County with outside markets.
For most people living there, however, the nineteenth-century economy remained local and regional. Timber could be floated or hauled from the mountains, farmers occupied the creek bottoms and hollows, and residents depended upon difficult roads and waterways for transportation. What would transform the valley was not simply the discovery of coal. It was the arrival of a railroad capable of carrying coal, timber, merchandise, passengers, and investment money through the mountains on a scale that wagon roads could never match.
Jedediah Hotchkiss and the Making of Dunlow
One of the central figures in Dunlow’s transformation was Jedediah Hotchkiss. Best remembered as the Confederate cartographer who produced detailed maps for Stonewall Jackson during the Civil War, Hotchkiss became deeply involved after the war in geological work, land speculation, mining, and the promotion of West Virginia’s mineral resources. His surviving papers at the Library of Congress contain thousands of documents related to those ventures, including extensive correspondence and records from the Guyandot Coal Land Association between 1889 and 1895. The association became one of the organizations most closely connected with the development of Dunlow and the mineral lands surrounding it.
As the Norfolk & Western planned its Ohio Extension through southern West Virginia, Hotchkiss participated in selecting sites where stations and communities could be developed. In 1889 he selected the site that became Dunlow and gave the new railroad settlement its name. His involvement extended beyond drawing lines on a map. Correspondence later used in historic preservation research shows him taking an interest in the town’s school, Presbyterian church, postal service, and even the behavior of local coal operators. In 1890, Dunlow became the headquarters of the Guyandot Coal Land Association, making the new community a center from which land transactions and mineral development throughout the Twelvepole region could be coordinated.
The town was therefore planned from the beginning around expectations of industrial growth. Land, coal, timber, and transportation were all connected. If the Norfolk & Western could open the region to national markets, the value of nearby mineral property would rise, mining companies could be organized, businesses would follow railroad employees and miners, and town lots could be sold to the people arriving to participate in the boom.
At the center of that plan stood the railroad station.
Building the Dunlow Depot
In August 1891, the J. H. Millender Lumber Company of Ceredo entered into contracts with the Norfolk & Western to construct combination stations at Beech Fork, Wayne, and Dunlow. Each station was to cost $1,250. The railroad specified the materials and quality of construction, including the use of good poplar and oak, because these buildings had to serve several purposes at once. They were passenger stations, freight houses, ticket offices, communications points, and recognizable symbols of the railroad’s presence in communities that were only beginning to grow.
Construction at Dunlow began in September 1891 and was completed before the end of the year. On December 13, the first train arrived. That date marks one of the clearest dividing lines in the community’s history. Twelve Pole had been a rural settlement along the creek. Dunlow would be a railroad town.
The settlement was formally surveyed and platted in 1892. The surviving town plan placed the depot in a central position, which reflected the reality of life in the new community. The station was not located on the edge of Dunlow. Dunlow grew around the station. Every arriving passenger, shipment of merchandise, piece of mail, load of freight, and passing railroad crew reinforced the depot’s place at the heart of the town.
A Town Growing Around the Tracks
Dunlow grew with astonishing speed. By 1892, less than a year after regular railroad service reached the community, its population reportedly exceeded 200. Thirteen trains passed through the area each day. Some residents worked directly for the Norfolk & Western while others found employment with coal companies, timber operations, stores, hotels, and businesses created to serve a population that had suddenly become much more connected to the outside world.
The Guyandot Coal Land Association maintained its headquarters in town, while the Irvine Coal Company and Dunlow Coal Company established operations there. Merchants opened stores, professionals established offices, and community institutions followed. Dunlow acquired a school and church as well as fraternal organizations and other features expected of a growing Appalachian railroad town.
The scale of the optimism surrounding Dunlow can be seen in proposals to make it the seat of an entirely new county. During the 1890s, there were efforts to divide southern Wayne County and establish a new county, sometimes proposed under the names Clark or Wilson, with Dunlow as its county seat. Railroad investor Edward W. Clark reportedly offered to finance the construction of a courthouse. The movement ultimately failed, but the fact that Dunlow was seriously considered for such a role demonstrates how differently the community was viewed during its boom years.
By July 1897, Dunlow appeared to have justified some of those expectations. An article published in the Ceredo Advance under the title “Dunlow: An Up-to-Date Town: The Best Business Point in Southern West Virginia” presented an enthusiastic picture of the settlement. The writer described a furniture store, general merchandise businesses, a physician, a law office, logging activity, fraternal organizations, and the seventy-room Hotel Dunlow. Station agent R. K. Currie was praised as one of the Norfolk & Western’s most respected employees. Most strikingly, the writer called Dunlow one of the busiest and most beautiful towns along the railroad in southern West Virginia.
For a visitor standing beside the depot in 1897, it would have been easy to imagine that Dunlow’s best years were still ahead.
The Coal Boom That Never Fully Arrived
Dunlow’s problem was that much of its anticipated prosperity had been built on what investors believed would happen rather than what ultimately did. Coal certainly existed in southern Wayne County, and contemporary geological and commercial publications promoted the mineral potential of the Twelvepole region. Mines opened around Dunlow and nearby communities during the early 1890s, but the local coal industry never developed on the scale envisioned by promoters.
The Dunlow Coal Company itself ceased operating in 1894. Other mines in the area were similarly short-lived. The issue was not necessarily the absence of coal, but the difficulty and expense of extracting it profitably. The distinction mattered. A railroad town developed to service a major producing coal district had a very different future from one situated along a transportation route carrying coal mined somewhere else. Historic preservation research concluded that much of the coal moving through the Twelvepole valley eventually came from fields farther south rather than from a thriving concentration of mines around Dunlow.
The railroad also had problems of its own. Following Twelvepole Creek through the mountains required curves, grades, bridges, and other compromises that increasingly made the route inefficient for the long and heavy coal trains the Norfolk & Western wanted to operate. As coal traffic increased elsewhere in southern West Virginia, the shortcomings of the Twelvepole route became more important.
Between 1902 and 1904, the railroad developed a more favorable route along the Big Sandy and Tug Fork valleys near the Kentucky border. Loaded coal trains could use the newer alignment while the older Twelvepole route increasingly handled empty cars and local traffic. Dunlow remained connected to the railroad, but the line that had created it was already losing its status as the preferred route for the traffic that mattered most to the Norfolk & Western.
The Fire That Changed Dunlow
Before the consequences of that railroad shift fully appeared, Dunlow suffered another devastating blow.
During the night of December 23, 1901, fire swept through the town’s leading business block. News of the disaster traveled far beyond Wayne County. A contemporary report published in Georgia’s True Citizen on December 28 described the destruction in considerable detail. Henry Copley’s dry goods store was lost, with damage estimated at $15,000. W. M. Davies lost a business selling dry goods, groceries, and hardware, with an estimated loss of $10,000. Wayne Strother’s dry goods store suffered another estimated $10,000 loss.
The destruction extended beyond those stores. The post office, several residences, and a number of smaller buildings were also burned. For a community that had grown so quickly around a relatively small commercial center, the loss represented more than a collection of individual businesses. It removed a large portion of the infrastructure that made Dunlow function as a regional trading point.
Dunlow continued after the fire, but the timing could hardly have been worse. The local mining industry had already failed to fulfill its early promise, and the Norfolk & Western was beginning to develop an alternative route that would eventually carry much of the railroad’s important through traffic away from Twelvepole Creek. Modern historical research has therefore treated the 1901 fire as one of the major turning points in the town’s decline. By 1919, Dunlow’s population had reportedly fallen to around seventy-five.
Life in Dunlow After the Boom
Decline did not mean disappearance. One of the dangers in writing about railroad and coal towns is allowing economic statistics to obscure the people who continued living there after the period historians identify as the boom. Dunlow remained a community of families, teachers, merchants, railroad workers, miners, farmers, church members, and children long after the grander expectations of the 1890s faded.
The Wayne County News provides glimpses of that everyday world. In 1926, the Lincoln District Board of Education still listed Dunlow Graded School among the district’s educational institutions. The same list included schools scattered throughout communities such as Crum, Genoa, Radnor, Ferguson, Doane, and Wilsondale, showing how education in southern Wayne County depended on numerous community schools serving a population dispersed through the creeks and hollows.
Healthcare offers another glimpse into Dunlow life. In 1927, the Wayne County News published a county list of licensed midwives following new state regulations. Four women associated with Dunlow appeared on that list: Enster Perry, Allie Brown, Mary Mathis, and Armilda Marcum. The newspaper explained that midwives remained particularly important in rural communities where physicians could be difficult to reach. Their presence in Dunlow reminds us that the history of the community was made not only in coal company offices and railroad stations, but also in homes where children were born, illnesses were treated, and families relied upon neighbors with practical medical experience.
Former residents also carried memories of Dunlow with them. In a 1923 homecoming edition of the Wayne County News, attorney J. H. Meek remembered living in Wayne and Dunlow with his family before moving to Huntington in 1907. His recollection was not of a failed speculative venture. It was of a place tied to family and to the years in which he had built his early life. That difference between economic decline and community memory would continue long after the railroad disappeared.
The Big Sandy Line Takes the Traffic
The shift away from the Twelvepole route became unmistakable during the 1920s. In June 1925 the Wayne County News reported that the Norfolk & Western had completed double tracking along its Big Sandy route. Practically all freight traffic that had previously moved by way of Wayne and Dunlow was being transferred to the newer line.
What remained on the old route was increasingly local. The newspaper reported passenger trains 27 and 28, East Lynn and Williamson local service, and one additional freight train as the principal traffic still using the Twelvepole Line. Railroad employment declined with the reduction in traffic. Section crews were cut, along with positions connected to coal and water facilities, because the Norfolk & Western no longer needed the same number of workers to maintain the route.
The change was not simply a matter of railroad preference. The new route offered significant operating advantages. According to the 1925 report, traveling between Kenova and Naugatuck over the Big Sandy alignment saved about twenty-five miles compared with going by Wayne and Dunlow. Trains on the new route could also haul more cars. For a railroad built increasingly around the enormous movement of Appalachian coal, those savings multiplied across thousands of trains.
Automobiles were changing the equation as well. The same newspaper article observed that passenger traffic had declined partly because residents who once depended upon trains were traveling by automobile over improving roads. The railroad had brought Dunlow into a new transportation age in 1891. A generation later, another transportation revolution was weakening the community’s dependence upon the depot.
The Attempt to Save the Twelvepole Line
By the beginning of the Great Depression, the Norfolk & Western no longer believed that maintaining the central portion of the Twelvepole Line could be justified. In February 1932 the railroad petitioned the Interstate Commerce Commission for permission to abandon approximately fifty-four miles between Wayne and Lenore. Dunlow lay near the middle of the proposed abandonment.
The figures presented by the railroad show how dramatically the line’s fortunes had changed. Traffic fell from 2,249 cars in 1927 to only 360 in 1931. Average daily passenger numbers declined from 147 to 43 during the same period. In 1931 the line produced approximately $50,000 in revenue while operating expenses exceeded $100,000. The railroad also argued that there was little prospect of sufficient long-term coal or timber development along the route to reverse those losses.
Residents and public officials opposed abandonment. The West Virginia government and the state Public Service Commission were among those resisting the railroad’s proposal. The dispute reflected the difficult position of communities that had been built around rail service. From the company’s perspective, the line had become an expensive and redundant route. From the perspective of the people living along it, the railroad was part of the economic infrastructure around which communities had been organized for four decades.
The Interstate Commerce Commission ultimately sided with the Norfolk & Western. Its published decision concluded that the branch had repeatedly cost more to operate than it generated in traffic revenue and had become a burden on the railroad and interstate commerce. The official decision appeared in volume 193 of the Interstate Commerce Commission Reports, pages 363 through 369. The case later remained sufficiently significant to be cited in federal court decisions concerning railroad abandonment and the disposition of railroad rights-of-way.
The Last Train Through Dunlow
On September 1, 1933, the last train passed through Dunlow on the section of the Twelvepole Line scheduled for abandonment.
Only two days later, work crews began removing rails and ties. By December the dismantling was finished. A railroad that had transformed the valley, created Dunlow’s commercial center, attracted investors and miners, carried generations of passengers, and once brought thirteen trains a day through the community had vanished from the landscape in a matter of months.
The old railroad grade did not remain empty for long. The Norfolk & Western transferred the abandoned right-of-way to the State Road Commission. During the following years portions were converted into highway. Much of the corridor became part of the automobile transportation system that had already helped undermine passenger rail service. Sections of the old Twelvepole route eventually became part of what is now West Virginia Route 152, while the abandoned grade beside the Dunlow depot became a local road.
There was a strange symmetry in the transformation. The valley had been reorganized around the railroad in the 1890s. After 1933, the railroad itself became the foundation for a road.
The Depot That Refused to Disappear
The Norfolk & Western did not demolish every station along the abandoned route. Buildings were sold, moved, converted to other uses, or gradually lost. Dunlow’s depot somehow survived.
Its history during the decades immediately following abandonment is not completely documented. Local recollections suggest that it was used as a residence, including by a schoolteacher at one point. By the time the West Virginia Division of Highways surveyed the building in 1995, it was vacant. Another preservation survey in 2017 again found the old station standing, still preserving an unusual amount of its original material.
Its survival became even more remarkable as other physical traces of the railroad vanished. The tracks were gone. Businesses that had depended upon them disappeared. The Hotel Dunlow and most of the commercial town described in 1897 no longer defined the landscape. Yet the modest wood-frame combination station built for $1,250 remained where the Norfolk & Western had placed it in 1891.
In 2018 new owners acquired the property and began preservation work. Inside the building they reportedly discovered railroad paperwork, including schedules, tickets, telegrams, and other documents left from its operational years. The exterior was repaired and repainted while plans developed to preserve the structure for future generations.
On April 5, 2023, the Dunlow Norfolk & Western Railway Depot was officially added to the National Register of Historic Places as property number 100008825. The National Register recognized the building for both transportation history and architecture, particularly its status as a rare surviving example of the simple combination stations once used by railroads in smaller communities.
What Dunlow Tells Us About Appalachian History
Dunlow’s history is easy to read as a story of decline, but that interpretation captures only part of what happened there. The community represents several different Appalachian histories layered onto the same landscape.
There was the older Twelve Pole settlement that existed before industrial development. There was the speculative Dunlow of Jedediah Hotchkiss and the Guyandot Coal Land Association, where maps, mineral reports, railroad surveys, and investors transformed mountain land into an imagined industrial future. There was the railroad town of the 1890s, filled with stores, a large hotel, coal offices, railroad workers, professionals, schoolchildren, and passengers. Then came the Dunlow shaped by failed coal expectations, the 1901 fire, changing railroad technology, automobiles, and the transfer of through traffic to the Big Sandy route.
Through all of those changes, people continued to live along Twelvepole Creek. Teachers still went to Dunlow’s school. Midwives delivered children. Families attended churches, operated stores, worked on the railroad, mined coal, farmed hillsides, traveled new highways, and remembered the years when trains still stopped in the center of town.
The old depot connects those worlds. It survives from a time when Dunlow was young enough for investors to imagine it becoming the seat of a new county and prosperous enough for a newspaper writer to call it one of southern West Virginia’s busiest railroad towns. It also witnessed the moment when practically all of that through traffic was diverted elsewhere and the final train disappeared around the bend in 1933.
Today there is no need to imagine where the railroad stood. The depot is still there.
For Dunlow, that small building beside an abandoned grade is not simply a relic of transportation history. It is the surviving center of a town that the railroad helped create, a reminder of how quickly industrial Appalachia could rise around a set of tracks and how deeply those tracks could shape a community even after the trains stopped running.
Sources & Further Reading
Beckett, Anne Stuart. “West Virginia Historic Property Inventory Form: N&W Dunlow Depot.” Aurora Research Associates, 2017. West Virginia State Historic Preservation Office. https://mapwv.gov/shpo/docs/PDFs/ArchitecturalSites/WA-0035-0005_Rev01.pdf.
Dickinson, Jack, and Kay Dickinson. Last Train to Dunlow: History from the Hollows of Wayne County, West Virginia and the Coming of the N&W Railroad, 1870–1940. Self-published, 2005. https://wvculture.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Dunlow-Depot-with-Pictures-Reduced.pdf.
Dickinson, Jack, and Kay Dickinson. Trail of the Powhatan Arrow: The N&W’s Big Sandy Line. Self-published, 2007. https://wvculture.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Dunlow-Depot-with-Pictures-Reduced.pdf.
“Dunlow.” Ceredo Advance, July 14, 1897, 4. Library of Congress, Chronicling America. https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn86092392/1897-07-14/ed-1/seq-4/.
“Dunlow Woman, Age 104, Is Victim of Paralytic Stroke.” Wayne County News, September 23, 1920. West Virginia Archives and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/History/wcn/wcn200923.html.
Edwards, William Seymour. Coals and Cokes in West Virginia: A Hand-Book on the Coals and Cokes of the Great Kanawha, New River, Flat Top, and Adjacent Coal Districts in West Virginia. Cincinnati: Robert Clarke & Co., 1892. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fa/Coals_and_cokes_in_West_Virginia%3B_a_hand-book_on_the_coals_and_cokes_of_the_Great_Kanawha%2C_New_River%2C_Flat_Top%2C_and_adjacent_coal_districts_in_West_Virginia_%28IA_coalscokesinwest00edwarich%29.pdf.
Frey, Robert L. “Norfolk & Western Railway.” e-WV: The West Virginia Encyclopedia. Revised February 8, 2024. https://www.wvencyclopedia.org/entries/1629.
Gannett, Samuel Stinson, and David Henry Baldwin. Results of Spirit Leveling in West Virginia, 1896 to 1908, Inclusive. U.S. Geological Survey Bulletin 399. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1909. https://pubs.usgs.gov/publication/b399.
Harris, C. Nelson. Norfolk and Western Railway Stations and Depots. Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2009. https://wvculture.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Dunlow-Depot-with-Pictures-Reduced.pdf.
Harter, Michelle. “West Virginia Historic Property Inventory Form: Dunlow Depot.” West Virginia Division of Highways, 1995. West Virginia State Historic Preservation Office. https://mapwv.gov/shpo/docs/PDFs/ArchitecturalSites/WA-0035-0005.pdf.
Hotchkiss, Jedediah. Jedediah Hotchkiss Papers: General Correspondence, 1846–1899; Letterbooks; 1892–1894, Guyandot Coal Land Association. MSS26526, Reel 29. Manuscript Division, Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/item/mss265260218/.
Hotchkiss, Jedediah. Jedediah Hotchkiss Papers: Subject File, circa 1835–1899; Guyandot Coal Land Association, 1889–1895. Box 37, Reel 37. Manuscript Division, Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/item/mss265260270/.
Interstate Commerce Commission. Interstate Commerce Commission Reports. Vol. 193. Decisions of the Interstate Commerce Commission of the United States, Finance Reports, April–December 1933, 363–69. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1934. https://wvculture.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Dunlow-Depot-with-Pictures-Reduced.pdf.
Library of Congress. Jedediah Hotchkiss Papers, 1835–1908. Manuscript Division, MSS26526. https://findingaids.loc.gov/repositories/19/resources/2697.
Meek, J. H. Letter published in the Wayne County News Home-Coming Edition, December 23, 1923. West Virginia Archives and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/History/wcn/wcn231223.html.
Miller, J. C. Map of the Twelve-Pole and Part of the Guyandot Basins, Showing the Location of Coal, Oil, Gas, Iron and Timber Lands, in Wayne, Cabell, Lincoln, and Logan Counties, West Virginia. March 1, 1891. Map-0362. Special Collections and University Archives, Virginia Tech. https://aspace.lib.vt.edu/repositories/2/resources/721.
“Monument to Be Built in Memory of Dead Heroes.” Wayne County News, May 11, 1922. West Virginia Archives and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/History/wcn/wcn220511.html.
National Park Service. “National Register of Historic Places Weekly List, April 7, 2023.” Dunlow Norfolk & Western Railway Depot, Wayne County, West Virginia, Reference No. 100008825. https://www.nps.gov/subjects/nationalregister/weekly-list-2023-04-07.htm.
Norfolk & Western Railway. “Dunlow Depot Blueprints.” 1896. HS-D10649. Norfolk & Western Historical Society Archives. https://wvculture.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Dunlow-Depot-with-Pictures-Reduced.pdf.
Roper, Peter W. “Jedediah Hotchkiss.” e-WV: The West Virginia Encyclopedia. Revised February 8, 2024. https://www.wvencyclopedia.org/entries/470.
Straley, Cody. “Dunlow Depot Added to National Register of Historic Places.” West Virginia Explorer, April 23, 2023. https://wvexplorer.com/dunlow-wv-depot-added-to-national-register/.
Straley, Steven Cody. National Register of Historic Places Registration Form: Dunlow Norfolk & Western Railway Depot. 2022. West Virginia State Historic Preservation Office and National Park Service. https://wvculture.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Dunlow-Depot-with-Pictures-Reduced.pdf.
“Teachers Are Employed for Lincoln District.” Wayne County News, May 20, 1926. West Virginia Archives and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/History/wcn/wcn260520.html.
“The Last of the ‘Twelve Pole’ Line.” Norfolk and Western Magazine 11, no. 11 (November 1933): 408–10. https://wvculture.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Dunlow-Depot-with-Pictures-Reduced.pdf.
“Trains Taken From Old Line to Big Sandy.” Wayne County News, June 18, 1925. Wayne County Genealogical and Historical Society. https://waynewv.com/wcghs/oldsite/Old%20Newspapers/Newspapers%201925.htm.
“28 Practicing Wayne Midwives to Renew License This Month.” Wayne County News, October 27, 1927. West Virginia Archives and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/History/wcn/wcn271208.html.
West Virginia Encyclopedia. “Wayne County.” e-WV: The West Virginia Encyclopedia. https://www.wvencyclopedia.org/entries/897.
“What Do You Know About Twelve Pole?” Wayne County News, August 27, 1925. West Virginia Archives and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/History/wcn/wcn250827.html.
Author Note: This article grew from research into Dunlow’s surviving railroad depot and the records that explain how the community developed around the Norfolk & Western Railway. I relied heavily on contemporary newspapers, Jedediah Hotchkiss’s papers, government records, railroad documentation, and historic preservation research to reconstruct the community’s rise and decline.