Forgotten Appalachia Series – Lilly on the Bluestone and the Flood That Never Came
On a quiet day in the Bluestone Gorge, if you follow the old river road that hikers now call the Bluestone Turnpike Trail, you can walk for miles with the river on one side and deep forest on the other. Somewhere near the confluence of the Bluestone and Little Bluestone Rivers, the trail passes a set of low stone walls, a scatter of broken foundation lines, and a faint rise where a lane once ran between houses. In spring, a few stubborn daffodils bloom in the leaf litter. There are no stores or church steeples here now, only trees, river rock, and the sound of water.
This was Lilly. For more than a century and a half, it was one of the oldest and most closely knit settlements on this stretch of the Appalachian frontier, a farming community that traced its roots to the Revolutionary era. It was razed in the 1940s in anticipation of a flood that never came, sacrificed so that a federal dam could protect other towns downstream. Today Lilly survives in family reunions, church records, and the memories of people who still know where the town used to stand.
From Frontier Trail To River Settlement
Long before anyone named Lilly came into the gorge, the Bluestone River already carried people through the mountains. Archaeologists and park historians have documented native camps and village sites along the river that date back thousands of years, from Paleoindian hunters who shared the landscape with mammoth and mastodon to Woodland era communities and the later Delaware, Shawnee, and Cherokee peoples.
Indigenous travelers knew this waterway as Momongosenka, often translated as the Big Stone River, a name that fit the rocky gorge and boulder strewn bottomland. The path that hugged the river eventually became a narrow wagon road, and later the Bluestone Turnpike, but its earliest ruts belonged to people walking, carrying game, trade goods, and news through the steep country between what are now Virginia and West Virginia.
By the late 1700s, frontier land seekers had begun to follow the same corridor. Among them were Robert and Mary Frances “Fanny” Moody Lilly and the Reverend Josiah Meadows, a Revolutionary War veteran and Battle of Yorktown soldier. Leaving the Dublin area of Pulaski County, Virginia, they crossed the Alleghenies together and settled near the junction of the Bluestone and Little Bluestone Rivers in what would become Summers County, West Virginia.
Both families built homesteads on bottomland that was rich but hard won. Later accounts and local tradition say they arrived with three essential tools: a Bible, an axe, and a gun, and carved out small farms from the tangle of forest and stone.
Building Lilly At The Rivers’ Meeting
The little cluster of farms that grew around the confluence became the village of Lilly, named for Robert and Fanny Lilly and their descendants. By the early nineteenth century there was a community here large enough to support one of the earliest Baptist congregations west of the Allegheny Mountains. Josiah Meador, Robert Lilly’s son in law, helped found Bluestone Baptist Church, tying the town’s identity closely to both kinship and faith.
For generations, Lilly remained a place of subsistence farmers and timber cutters. Families scratched a living from cornfields and pastures on the narrow flats along the river, kept hogs and cattle, cut timber from the surrounding slopes, and sent logs downstream. A simple road followed the valley floor, sometimes no more than two wagon ruts in the mud, linking the scattered farms to neighboring settlements and to Hinton, which would later become the county seat.
By the late 1800s, Lilly had grown into a recognizable village. The West Virginia Encyclopedia notes that it existed as a named place from the late eighteenth century until 1946, standing at the meeting of the Bluestone and Little Bluestone south of Hinton. There were homes, barns, a school, and a church. Orchards climbed the hillsides. Several extended families owned most of the land, and the cemetery on the ridge above town held the remains of early settlers and their descendants.
Life at Lilly was isolated but not cut off from the wider world. Young men left to fight in wars or to work in coal mines and railroad jobs in other counties, then came home to farm or retire. The river road carried mail, peddlers, preachers, and the occasional traveler. In flood season the Bluestone rose fast and dangerous, but the people of Lilly knew how to read the water and how to rebuild the bottomland fields when spring came.
Federal Flood Control And The Bluestone Dam
The story that finally swept Lilly off the map began far from the Bluestone Gorge, in Washington debates over flood control during the New Deal. After devastating Ohio Valley floods in the 1930s, Congress and the Roosevelt administration pushed for a network of dams to reduce downstream damage, protect navigation, and, in some cases, generate power. The Bluestone project on the New River, just upstream from the confluence with the Greenbrier and a short distance below the mouth of the Bluestone, became part of that plan.
Bluestone Dam was authorized by presidential executive order in 1935 and funded in the Flood Control Acts of 1936 and 1938. Construction began in 1942, paused during the Second World War, and resumed in 1946. The massive concrete gravity structure would eventually span the New River to create Bluestone Lake, a reservoir more than ten miles long at normal pool and capable of stretching several times that length during high water.
For the families in Lilly, the technical language of federal planning translated into something simple and devastating. Engineers calculated that the future lake would back up the Bluestone River far enough to put the town underwater. To clear the way, the government condemned the land in the gorge, including farms and homesteads that had been in the same hands for generations.
Uprooting A River Community
In the mid 1940s, residents of Lilly began receiving word that they would have to leave. Oral histories collected by West Virginia Public Broadcasting and the National Park Service describe families who were primarily subsistence farmers, living close to the land and to one another. The bottomland soils that had drawn Robert and Fanny Lilly to the valley in the eighteenth century still produced good corn, fruit, and hay.
Government agents surveyed the properties, appraised homes and fields, and offered compensation. One Beckley newspaper article in 1947, cited by WVPB, recorded a payment of 1,750 dollars to a single farmer, roughly equivalent to thirty thousand dollars in modern currency, for a lifetime’s work on land he would never farm again.
Money could not replace the cemetery on the ridge. Corps crews and contracted workers disinterred graves from the old burial ground and moved them to a new Lilly Crews Cemetery outside the flood zone. When the coffins were transferred, many were marked only with small metal tags and numbers, leaving descendants with the painful sense that their ancestors had been reduced to anonymous remains. Visitors today still note rows of numbered markers among later headstones.
Back in the gorge, crews cut the fruit trees that still held apples and began demolishing or relocating structures. A few houses were moved to higher ground. Others were burned or dismantled. Orchards and gardens were left to grow up in brush. The school, church, and outbuildings disappeared. Within a few years, the village that had existed for more than one hundred and fifty years was gone.
The Bluestone River itself kept flowing as it always had, but now it did so through federal land. The entire lower river corridor, including the old townsite, had been purchased as part of the Bluestone Lake project.
A Miscalculation And A Ghost Town Above The Waterline
When Bluestone Dam began operations in 1949, it quickly became clear that the planners had made an error. The maximum pool elevation used to justify the clearance of Lilly and neighboring farms had been too high. In practice, the permanent lake never reached the old townsite, and even at extreme flood levels the water did not cover the village footprint.
The village had been razed for a flood that never arrived. The Bluestone and Little Bluestone still meet in the bottom of the gorge, but where houses and gardens once stood, the forest simply thickened. The land, now owned by the federal government, eventually came under National Park Service management as part of Bluestone National Scenic River, established in 1988.
For families who had left, the knowledge that their home ground was still dry land added a bitter note to the story. Yet over time, as the river corridor became a protected unit with limited development, some descendants came to see a different kind of preservation at work. The site would never again hold a town, but it would not be turned into a subdivision or strip mine either. Instead it became a place where foundations and daffodils slowly disappeared into second growth forest, watched over by park rangers and visited by hikers who often had no idea a town had ever existed there.
Memory, Reunion, And The Lilly Bridge
If the physical town vanished, the Lilly name did not. The family that gave the village its identity had already spread far beyond the gorge by the time the dam was built. Today the Lilly family is widely described as one of the largest kin networks in southern West Virginia, and since the early twentieth century they have gathered each summer on family grounds at Flat Top, not far from the old settlement. The reunion grew so large that it was once recognized by Guinness World Records as the largest family reunion in the world.
The bridge that once carried West Virginia Route 20 across Bluestone Lake also kept the name alive. When the reservoir flooded the old highway, engineers built a high cantilever truss bridge over the upper portion of the lake, naming it Lilly Bridge in honor of the community that had been removed for the dam project. Completed in 1950 by the Virginia Bridge and Iron Company, the steel span became a landmark in its own right, later deemed eligible for the National Register of Historic Places for both its design and its association with the Bluestone project and the lost town.
In the early twenty first century, the state replaced Lilly Bridge with a modern structure on a new alignment and eventually demolished the older truss. Historic preservation advocates argued that the bridge should have remained standing for pedestrians as a visible memorial to the drowned and displaced communities of the Bluestone. Instead, the name persists mostly in park literature, family history, and the quiet of the gorge itself.
Walking Through Lilly Today
For visitors who know where to look, Lilly is still there to be traced, if not exactly seen. The National Park Service describes the townsite as the largest former settlement within the Bluestone National Scenic River, though now only a few foundation lines and household artifacts remain scattered through the woods.
The best way to reach the site is along the Bluestone Turnpike Trail, a roughly ten mile path that follows the old river road between Bluestone State Park and Pipestem Resort State Park. Hikers walking this route follow the same corridor used by Native Americans, frontier families, and the later farmers and loggers of Lilly. Somewhere along the middle stretch, a careful eye will pick out those stone remnants and the flat benches of land that once held houses, barns, and gardens.
Rangers sometimes lead interpretive walks along the trail, pointing out not only the townsite but also the deeper layers of history embedded in the gorge. They talk about Momongosenka and the ancient peoples who camped along its banks, about the Lilly and Meador families and the Bluestone Baptist Church, about the dam that spared some communities while erasing others, and about the complicated legacy of federal flood control in an Appalachian landscape where water has always been both lifeblood and threat.
In spring, the daffodils bloom again at Lilly. They grow where cabin doors once opened and where children once ran down to the river. They are not native wildflowers but garden plants, descendants of bulbs planted by someone who wanted color at the edge of a yard. The government relocated the graves and cut the orchards, but the daffodils stayed in the soil.
For a historian on foot, that may be the most powerful marker of all. The gorge holds a federal project, a national scenic river, a wildlife corridor, and a hiking trail, but beneath all of those layers it still holds a small river town that never quite learned how to be fully gone.
Sources & Further Reading
National Park Service. “History & Culture.” Bluestone National Scenic River. Last updated February 14, 2020. Accessed January 15, 2026. https://www.nps.gov/blue/learn/historyculture/index.htm.
National Park Service. “The Lost Town of Lilly.” Bluestone National Scenic River. Accessed January 15, 2026. https://www.nps.gov/blue/learn/historyculture/the-lost-town-of-lilly.htm.
National Park Service. “Things to Do.” Bluestone National Scenic River. Last updated May 13, 2025. Accessed January 15, 2026. https://www.nps.gov/blue/planyourvisit/things2do.htm.
National Park Service. “Bluestone Turnpike Trail.” Places, Bluestone National Scenic River. Accessed January 15, 2026. https://www.nps.gov/places/bluestone-turnpike-trail.htm.
National Park Service. “Bluestone National Scenic River.” Park brochure, n.d. Accessed January 15, 2026. https://npshistory.com/publications/blue/brochures/undated.pdf.
National Park Service. “Bluestone National Scenic River.” Park Archives, NPSHistory.com. Last updated August 12, 2025. Accessed January 15, 2026. https://npshistory.com/publications/blue/index.htm.
Interagency Wild & Scenic Rivers Council. “Bluestone River, Virginia, West Virginia.” Rivers.gov. Accessed January 15, 2026. https://www.rivers.gov/rivers/bluestone.php.
Wills, Jack. “Little Bluestone River.” e-WV: The West Virginia Encyclopedia. Last revised February 8, 2024. Accessed January 15, 2026. https://www.wvencyclopedia.org/entries/1372.
Meador, Michael M. “Bluestone Dam and Lake.” e-WV: The West Virginia Encyclopedia. Last revised February 16, 2024. Accessed January 15, 2026. https://www.wvencyclopedia.org/entries/544.
Lilly, Jessica. “Lilly, W.Va.: The Town Swept Away by ‘Progress’.” West Virginia Public Broadcasting, October 17, 2017. Accessed January 15, 2026. https://wvpublic.org/story/wvpb-news/lilly-w-va-the-town-swept-away-by-progress/.
U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Great Lakes and Ohio River Division. “Bluestone Dam.” Huntington District project fact sheet, January 10, 2024. Accessed January 15, 2026. https://www.lrd.usace.army.mil/Missions/Projects/Article/3641192/bluestone-dam/.
U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Bluestone Dam Independent External Peer Review (IEPR) Report. Dam Safety Modification Study, October 31, 2016. Accessed January 15, 2026. https://usace.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/api/collection/p16021coll7/id/4246/download.
U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. “Supplemental Final Environmental Impact Statement for the Dam Safety Modification Report, Bluestone Dam, Hinton, West Virginia.” Federal Register 82, no. 86 (May 5, 2017). Accessed January 15, 2026. https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2017/05/05/2017-09146/supplemental-final-environmental-impact-statement-for-the-dam-safety-modification-report-bluestone.
Mathes, M. V., J. R. Kirby, D. D. Payne, and R. A. Shultz. Drainage Areas of the Kanawha River Basin, West Virginia. U.S. Geological Survey Open-File Report 82-351. Reston, VA: U.S. Geological Survey, 1982. Accessed January 15, 2026. https://pubs.usgs.gov/publication/ofr82351.
Miller, James H., and Maude Vest Clark. History of Summers County from the Earliest Settlement to the Present Time. Hinton, WV: J. H. Miller, 1908. Pdf edition, Library of Congress. Accessed January 15, 2026. https://www.loc.gov/item/08016522/.
Sanders, William. A New River Heritage. Parsons, WV: McClain Printing Company, 1992. Finding aid, West Virginia and Regional History Center. Accessed January 15, 2026. https://archives.lib.wvu.edu/repositories/2/archival_objects/35716.
West Virginia and Regional History Center. “Summers County Photos (Lilly Community Views, Cemeteries, and Industrial Scenes).” Long/Trail Southeastern West Virginia Historical Records, A&M 3762. Accessed January 15, 2026. https://archives.lib.wvu.edu/repositories/2/archival_objects/34707.
“Lilly-Crews Cemetery.” Find a Grave. Accessed January 15, 2026. https://www.findagrave.com/cemetery/1960819/lilly-crews-cemetery.
West Virginia Tourism Office. “Bluestone National Scenic River.” Almost Heaven: West Virginia. Accessed January 15, 2026. https://wvtourism.com/bluestone-national-scenic-river/.
West Virginia State Parks. “Trails at Pipestem State Park.” Pipestem Resort State Park. Accessed January 15, 2026. https://wvstateparks.com/parks/pipestem-state-park/trails/.
The Clio Foundation. “Bluestone Dam and State Park.” Clio: Your Guide to History. Last updated February 10, 2018. Accessed January 15, 2026. https://theclio.com/entry/22147.
Author Note: I wrote this piece to follow the story of Lilly from frontier river trail to a vanished town in a federal project. If you ever walk the Bluestone Turnpike Trail, I hope these words help you recognize the old community beneath the trees and daffodils.