Appalachian Community Histories – Mouth of Wilson, Grayson County: Woolen Mills, the 1916 Flood, and the Fight to Save the New River
At the southern edge of Grayson County, only a short distance from North Carolina, Wilson Creek reaches the New River beneath the mountains of southwestern Virginia. Around that meeting of waters grew Mouth of Wilson, a community whose history is much larger than its size might suggest.
Mouth of Wilson was never a great railroad city or county seat. Its importance came from something more characteristic of rural Appalachia. Roads crossed here. Creeks supplied power. Farmers brought grain and wool to local mills. A post office connected scattered families to the outside world, and a school founded by mountain Baptists eventually drew students from far beyond the Blue Ridge. The New River, meanwhile, remained both the geographic center of the community and the force capable of reshaping it.
The surviving documentary record follows those changes unusually well. County court orders place the mouth of Wilson Creek on an important road by the early nineteenth century. Federal records document its postal connections. Business directories describe its mills and professional life. State architectural surveys preserve the story of buildings that still stand and others that have disappeared. Then, during the twentieth century, federal court cases, congressional debates, and a national television documentary recorded a struggle in which residents feared that the entire community might disappear beneath a reservoir.
The story of Mouth of Wilson is therefore not simply the story of a small Virginia settlement. It is the history of an Appalachian community repeatedly shaped by water, first as a source of transportation and industry, then through a destructive flood, and finally through a national battle over whether the New River itself would remain free.
A Place on the Road Before It Was a Village
The exact origin of the name Wilson Creek has become mixed with local tradition. One longstanding account connects it with the surveying of the Virginia and North Carolina boundary in the eighteenth century and tells of a surveyor named Wilson whose name became attached to the stream. The tradition is old enough to deserve notice, but the documentary evidence currently available does not establish all of its details with the certainty of the later history.
What can be established is that the mouth of Wilson Creek was already a recognized geographic landmark by the early nineteenth century.
In 1811, the Grayson County Court considered a petition for a public road that would run from Nathan Ward’s property past Joshua Cox’s, the mouth of Fox Creek, the mouth of Wilson Creek, Robert Parsons’s property, and onward to the North Carolina line. The following year, county officials again examined the route. After reporting that a wagon road could be constructed there and would benefit local inhabitants, the court ordered the road established and appointed local men to oversee its opening.
Those entries are important because they show Mouth of Wilson before there was much of a village to describe. The location mattered because people passed through it. The North Carolina line was close, and families on both sides of that boundary were connected through trade, marriage, churches, mills, and roads long before modern highways made interstate travel routine.
Robert Parsons was already prominent enough for his property to function as a landmark in those court orders. The Virginia Department of Historic Resources identifies a surviving brick house in the Mouth of Wilson area traditionally associated with Robert Parsons, who lived from 1765 to 1846, and his wife Anna Welborn Parsons. The house has been described as one of the oldest brick dwellings in Grayson County.
The Parsons family would remain closely connected with the development of the community. Before the Civil War, John Parsons established a flour mill on Wilson Creek. After the war, it was enlarged and operated for many years by Thomas Marion Cox. Long before large-scale industry appeared, water falling through the mountain creeks was already determining where people worked and where commerce gathered.
The Post Office and a Cross-Border Community
By the nineteenth century, Mouth of Wilson had become more than a location described in road orders. It had become a recognizable postal community.
Records associated with the Post Office Department place a post office at Mouth of Wilson by the 1830s. Later federal postal account books explicitly list “Mouth of Wilson” in Grayson County and identify its postmasters along with the small sums of compensation and postal revenue handled through the office.
The postal system also illustrates how closely Mouth of Wilson was tied to North Carolina. In 1854, Congress formally listed a post road beginning at Grayson Court House and passing through Peach Bottom, Independence, Bridle Creek, and Mouth of Wilson before continuing into North Carolina through Nathan’s Creek to Jefferson.
That road was more than a line on a federal schedule. It represented the ordinary geography of life in this corner of Appalachia. State boundaries existed on maps, but residents bought goods, attended churches, visited relatives, and conducted business across them. Contemporary North Carolina business directories consequently included people living at Mouth of Wilson, further demonstrating that the community belonged to an economic region that crossed the Virginia line.
By the late nineteenth century, Mouth of Wilson had accumulated the occupations expected of a small but active rural center. Chataigne’s Virginia Gazetteer for 1888 and 1889 listed physicians, millwrights, residents, and the F. J. McMillan & Sons woolen mill there.
The settlement that had first appeared in county records as a point along a road had become a place of its own.
Oak Hill Academy and Education in the Mountains
One of the most enduring institutions associated with Mouth of Wilson began during this period.
Baptist congregations in southwestern Virginia and neighboring North Carolina wanted to establish a school for children living in the mountain region. In 1873, the New River Baptist Association voted to establish what became Oak Hill Academy. The school held its first session in the fall of 1878.
Its history reflected the complicated development of education in rural Appalachia. The Virginia Department of Historic Resources records that Oak Hill was incorporated around 1879 and 1880 and at first included all grade levels. Between 1889 and 1911, it was operated by the county before returning to the New River Baptist Association.
Schools such as Oak Hill served communities where distance made educational access difficult. They were institutions of learning, but they were also products of local churches and networks of families scattered through the mountains.
Oak Hill survived changes that eliminated many other nineteenth-century academies. Over time it developed into a boarding school whose name became known far outside Grayson County. Its nationally recognized basketball program eventually produced generations of prominent players, but the institution’s roots remain in the same rural Baptist effort begun in the 1870s. The school still stands at Mouth of Wilson, connecting the modern community with one of its most important nineteenth-century institutions.
The Woolen Mill Changes Mouth of Wilson
The event that most clearly transformed Mouth of Wilson into an industrial village came in 1884.
That year, Colonel Fields J. McMillan established a woolen mill on Wilson Creek. According to the Virginia Department of Historic Resources, the water-powered operation manufactured yarn and cloth, with woolen goods distributed throughout the surrounding region in exchange for raw wool. McMillan’s mill was a two-story frame building with a cupola, and worker housing appeared nearby.
This was industry on an Appalachian scale. There were no enormous urban factory blocks, but the mill brought manufacturing, wage labor, commerce, and a concentration of buildings to a community still surrounded by farms.
By the late 1880s, F. J. McMillan & Sons appeared in a statewide business directory as woolen manufacturers at Mouth of Wilson. Millwrights were also listed there, evidence of the specialized labor required by an economy dependent upon machinery and water power.
An 1897 description of Grayson County reported machinery at Mouth of Wilson producing jeans, linseys, blankets, yarns, and other goods, alongside grist and sawmilling.
Ownership eventually passed into the Fields interests, and the mill became associated with Fields and Hash Manufacturing Company. Houses for workers appeared along the road in an area remembered as Factory Town. The surviving architecture provides a glimpse of how substantial the industrial center became. The state survey recorded the Fields Manufacturing Company Store, the McMillan and Fields residence, Factory Town housing, and other buildings related to the community’s commercial growth.
The company store itself was more than a place to purchase necessities. Its first floor contained a soda fountain, while dental offices and a millinery shop occupied space upstairs. For residents scattered across farms and hollows, the industrial village offered services that could not be found at every rural crossroads.
Mouth of Wilson had become a small company-centered community, but water, which had provided the power making that growth possible, soon altered the settlement again.
The Flood of 1916
In 1916, flooding devastated the old village.
The Virginia Department of Historic Resources states plainly that the village of Mouth of Wilson was destroyed during the flood and afterward relocated around the Fields woolen mill area.
The significance of that sentence is easy to overlook. Mouth of Wilson did not simply lose a few buildings and rebuild them in the same locations. The geography of the community changed.
Evidence of the earlier settlement nevertheless survived. One of its most distinctive structures is the Round House, an unusual octagonal residence dating to the 1870s that overlooks the New River in the area associated with the former village. The landscape therefore contains traces of two Mouths of Wilson, the older settlement formed around river crossings and early commerce, and the newer center that gathered near the manufacturing complex following the flood.
The disaster also demonstrates the complicated relationship between Appalachian communities and the streams beside which they developed. Wilson Creek and the New River created fertile bottomland, powered mills, offered transportation routes, and attracted settlement. Their waters could also erase what generations had built.
Mouth of Wilson survived by moving.
Electricity, Automobiles, and Factory Town
The relocated community entered the twentieth century with industry still at its center.
W. C. Fields developed a hydroelectric system connected with the manufacturing operation. Construction of the Fields Dam and power facilities began in the late 1920s and was completed around 1930. A later account of the enterprise reported that the generating plant supplied not only the mill and businesses but more than one hundred homes and farms in the surrounding community.
Electricity changed life in rural Appalachia gradually, and Mouth of Wilson offers an example of electrification emerging from local industrial development before or alongside the great expansion of rural electric service.
The automobile was also changing the mountains. Fields Motor Company became a local Ford dealership. Because no railroad ran directly through Mouth of Wilson, automobiles arrived by rail at Troutdale, where they were transferred for assembly and sale in Mouth of Wilson. The surviving Fields Motor Company building was significant enough to be documented in Virginia’s historic architectural survey.
For a community whose earliest documentary appearance involved men opening a wagon road toward North Carolina, the change was remarkable. Within little more than a century, wagon traffic had given way to automobiles, water mills had developed into manufacturing operations, and locally generated electricity was flowing into homes.
Yet the New River had not finished shaping Mouth of Wilson.
When the New River Became a Federal Question
Mouth of Wilson’s relationship with the federal government reached much farther back than the dam controversy of the twentieth century.
Congress had already used the community as a geographic reference point during nineteenth-century investigations into improving the New River. In 1876, federal legislation called for a survey of the river from the lead mines in Wythe County to the mouth of Wilson in Grayson County.
Decades later, questions about the river’s navigability and potential for hydroelectric power reached the United States Supreme Court. In the 1940 decision in United States v. Appalachian Electric Power Company, the Court discussed the river as assuming its New River character at the mouth of Wilson Creek near the Virginia and North Carolina line. The case examined a long history of navigation, federal river improvements, and hydroelectric development.
By then, the river was no longer simply a local resource. Engineers, power companies, regulators, courts, and politicians increasingly viewed the New as part of a much larger system of energy production, navigation, flood control, and water management.
That perspective eventually threatened the existence of Mouth of Wilson itself.
“Farewell, Mouth of Wilson”
During the 1960s and 1970s, Appalachian Power’s proposed Blue Ridge Project became one of the most consequential environmental controversies in the history of the upper New River.
The plan involved two dams and large reservoirs near the Virginia and North Carolina border. Supporters argued that the project would generate electricity, provide flood-control benefits, and contribute to management of water quality farther downstream. Opponents saw something very different. They saw thousands of acres of farms, homes, creeks, archaeological sites, and communities that would disappear beneath the reservoirs.
Mouth of Wilson became one of the symbols of what was at stake.
In December 1971, journalist Bill Moyers brought a television audience into the community in a documentary titled Farewell, Mouth of Wilson. His opening was deliberately stark. If the project proceeded, he explained, the community could cease to exist beneath reservoir water. Residents appeared on camera discussing homes, farms, family history, and their relationship with the river while the political battle was still underway.
The program preserved something government studies could not easily capture. The controversy was not only about megawatts, reservoir capacity, or engineering. It was about what happened when a national project encountered people whose attachment to a place stretched across generations.
Congressional records from the period preserve those voices as well. One 1976 account described G. Cam Fields, whose family interests included the woolen mill, power company, and Ford dealership that had helped define twentieth-century Mouth of Wilson. Fields believed the proposed reservoir would leave the community’s post office deep underwater. His explanation for resisting the loss was simpler than any engineering report. It was home.
The Blue Ridge Project had supporters, including people who emphasized jobs, power generation, investment, flood control, and the economic opportunities associated with a large reservoir. Congressional debate demonstrates that the dispute was not uniformly divided between outsiders and residents. Supporters of the project submitted petitions from people in both Virginia and North Carolina, while opponents organized locally and nationally to preserve the river.
What made the conflict extraordinary was its scale. A small Appalachian community whose name first appeared in road records and postal accounts was now being discussed in Congress as part of a national argument about energy, environmental protection, private property, and the limits of development.
The River Remains
The campaign to protect the New River eventually prevailed.
In 1976, Congress acted to protect the North Carolina section of the New River system threatened by the project. The House approved the legislation by a wide margin, followed by the Senate, and President Gerald Ford signed it in September. The National Park Service’s later administrative history summarized the result simply: the Blue Ridge Project was dead.
The victory did not freeze Mouth of Wilson in time. The woolen mill that had once anchored the industrial settlement disappeared. Rural commerce changed. Families moved away, farming changed, roads improved, and the economic connections binding small communities together evolved.
Still, much of the landscape that generations had known survived.
Fields Dam remains on the New River, and Virginia wildlife officials still describe the backwater created by the dam near the Mouth of Wilson river access. Historic houses, former commercial structures, pieces of Factory Town, Oak Hill Academy, and the routes following Wilson Creek preserve parts of the community’s older geography.
The post office continued serving a broad rural territory as well. In a Library of Congress oral history, celebrated Grayson County guitar maker Wayne Henderson remembered carrying mail from the Mouth of Wilson Post Office for thirty-two years beginning in 1969. His recollections describe the rural carrier as something more than a person delivering letters. In isolated communities, the carrier could help residents navigate forms, correspondence, and connections with institutions beyond the mountains.
That continuing role seems fitting for a place whose history has always depended upon connections.
Why Mouth of Wilson Matters
Mouth of Wilson is easy to pass through without realizing how many versions of the community occupy the same landscape.
There is the Mouth of Wilson of the early county records, where officials ordered a wagon road past Robert Parsons and Wilson Creek toward North Carolina. There is the nineteenth-century postal community tied economically to both Virginia and North Carolina. There is the village of gristmills, merchants, physicians, and Oak Hill Academy. There is the industrial Mouth of Wilson created by McMillan’s woolen mill and expanded by the Fields family. There is the community displaced by the flood of 1916 and rebuilt around a different center. There is Factory Town, the company store, the Ford dealership, and the locally generated electricity of the early twentieth century.
Then there is the Mouth of Wilson that almost vanished.
The proposed Blue Ridge Project transformed the community into part of a national debate over the future of the New River. Residents who had already watched floodwaters move their village faced the possibility that water would again erase their homes, this time not through natural disaster but by design.
It did not happen.
Today the New River still passes the mouth of Wilson Creek and bends north through Grayson County. The river flows past a landscape where the physical remains of mills, houses, roads, schools, and businesses preserve portions of more than two centuries of documented history.
Mouth of Wilson survived because it repeatedly adapted. Roads changed, mills disappeared, floodwaters forced relocation, industry rose and declined, and a massive reservoir project threatened to put much of the community underwater. Through each transformation, the name remained attached to the meeting of creek and river that county officials were already using as a landmark more than two hundred years ago.
For a place that has never been large, Mouth of Wilson has spent much of its history standing at a crossroads. Sometimes those crossroads were literal roads leading into North Carolina. Sometimes they were choices between agriculture and industry, old settlement and new, local needs and national projects, development and preservation.
Through all of them, the river remained.
Sources & Further Reading
Grayson County, Virginia. “Grayson County Court Orders, 1811.” New River Notes. Transcription of Grayson County Court Order Book. https://www.newrivernotes.com/grayson-court-orders-1811/
Grayson County, Virginia. “Grayson County Court Orders, 1812.” New River Notes. Transcription of Grayson County Court Order Book. https://www.newrivernotes.com/grayson-court-orders-1812/
Grayson County, Virginia. “Grayson County Land Tax List, 1863.” New River Notes. Transcription of county land tax records. https://www.newrivernotes.com/grayson-land-tax-list-1863/
Grayson County, Virginia. “Grayson County Land Tax List, 1890.” New River Notes. Transcription of county land tax records. https://www.newrivernotes.com/grayson-land-tax-list-1890/
Grayson County, Virginia. “Grayson County Voter Registration List, 1902–03.” New River Notes. https://www.newrivernotes.com/grayson-voter-registration-list-1902-03/
United States Post Office Department. “Grayson County Postmasters, 1823–.” Compiled from federal postal appointment records. New River Notes. https://www.newrivernotes.com/grayson-postmasters-1823/
United States. Statutes at Large. Vol. 10. Post-road legislation establishing a route through Mouth of Wilson, 1854. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/STATUTE-10/pdf/STATUTE-10-Pg349.pdf
United States. Revised Statutes of the United States Relating to the Post Roads. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. Library of Congress. https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/ll/llsl/llsl-c43-post-roads/llsl-c43-post-roads.pdf
Chataigne, J. H. Chataigne’s Virginia Gazetteer and Classified Business Directory, 1888–1889. Richmond, VA, 1888. Transcription at New River Notes. https://www.newrivernotes.com/chataignes-virginia-gazetteer-1888-1889/
Hill Directory Company. Hill’s Virginia Gazetteer and Classified Business Directory. 1911. Transcription at New River Notes. https://www.newrivernotes.com/grayson-hills-gazetteer-1911/
Branson, Levi. Branson’s North Carolina Business Directory. Raleigh, NC, 1869. DigitalNC. https://lib.digitalnc.org/record/25524/files/dirnc_001887_000001.pdf
“Grayson County, Virginia, 1897.” New River Notes. Contemporary description of Grayson County industries, mills, and waterpower. https://www.newrivernotes.com/grayson-county-va-1897/
United States Congress. Congressional Record. 44th Cong., 1st sess., 1876. Debate and authorization concerning a survey of the New River from the Wythe County lead mines to Mouth of Wilson. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GPO-CRECB-1876-pt5-v4/pdf/GPO-CRECB-1876-pt5-v4-26.pdf
United States Congress. Congressional Record. 47th Cong., 1st sess., July 6, 1882. Discussion of New River improvement appropriations involving Mouth of Wilson. https://www.congress.gov/47/crecb/1882/07/06/GPO-CRECB-1882-pt6-v13-11-1.pdf
United States v. Appalachian Electric Power Co., 23 F. Supp. 83 (W.D. Va. 1938). https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/FSupp/23/83/2002006/
United States v. Appalachian Electric Power Co., 311 U.S. 377 (1940). United States Supreme Court. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/USREPORTS-311/pdf/USREPORTS-311-377.pdf
United States Geological Survey. Mouth of Wilson, VA-NC Historical Map. 1:48,000. 1935. https://store.usgs.gov/product/921960
United States Geological Survey. Mouth of Wilson Quadrangle, Virginia-North Carolina. 1:62,500. 1940. https://prd-tnm.s3.amazonaws.com/StagedProducts/Maps/HistoricalTopo/PDF/VA/62500/VA_Mouth%20of%20Wilson_188383_1940_62500_geo.pdf
United States Geological Survey. Mouth of Wilson Quadrangle. 1:24,000. 1966. https://store.usgs.gov/product/278153
New River Baptist Association. Minutes of the Annual Sessions of the New River Baptist Association. Historic association records. https://divinityarchive.com/bitstream/handle/11258/12294/minutesofannuals1884newr.pdf?isAllowed=y&sequence=1
Henderson, Wayne. Oral history interview. 2022. Library of Congress, Occupational Folklife Project. https://www.loc.gov/resource/afc2021010.afc2021010_013_ms01/?st=pdf
Moyers, Bill. “Farewell, Mouth of Wilson.” This Week with Bill Moyers, December 13, 1971. American Archive of Public Broadcasting, GBH and Library of Congress. https://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-3981261a413
United States Congress. House. Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs. Subcommittee on National Parks and Recreation. Designation of New River Segment as a Component of the Wild and Scenic Rivers System: Hearing on H.R. 12958 and H.R. 13372. 94th Cong., 2nd sess., May 6, 1976. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1976. https://books.google.com/books?id=JXQTWb9_wF4C
United States Department of the Interior, Bureau of Outdoor Recreation. Final Environmental Statement: Proposed South Fork New River National Wild and Scenic River, North Carolina. Washington, DC, March 1976. https://www.fws.gov/rivers/sites/rivers/files/2023-01/new-sf-study-eis.pdf
Worsham, Gibson. A Survey of Historic Architecture: Grayson County, Virginia. Richmond: Virginia Department of Historic Resources, 2002. https://dhr.es.virginia.gov/pdf_files/SpecialCollections/GY-029_AH_Survey_Grayson_County_2002_WORSHAM_report_TEXT.pdf
Lee, Anne Carter. “Fields House.” SAH Archipedia. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012–. https://sah-archipedia.org/buildings/VA-02-GY8
Lee, Anne Carter. “Pierce-Parsons-Phipps House.” SAH Archipedia. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012–. https://sah-archipedia.org/buildings/VA-02-GY9
Lee, Anne Carter. “The Round House (Octagon House).” SAH Archipedia. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012–. https://sah-archipedia.org/buildings/VA-02-GY10
Lee, Anne Carter. “Mouth of Wilson and Vicinity.” SAH Archipedia. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012–. https://sah-archipedia.org/essays/VA-02-0005-0003-0004
Rumbaugh, Pete. “Pioneer Industry in Grayson County Was Woolen Mill at Mouth of Wilson.” Galax Gazette, April 1960. Reprinted in Glimpses of Grayson, Spring 2012. https://graysonvahistsoc.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/Spring2012WebVersion.pdf
Nuckolls, Benjamin Floyd. Pioneer Settlers of Grayson County, Virginia. Galax, VA, 1914. Library of Congress. https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/public/gdcmassbookdig/pioneersettlerso00nuck/pioneersettlerso00nuck_bw.pdf
Fields, Bettye-Lou. Grayson County: A History in Words and Pictures. 1976. Grayson County Historical Society. https://graysonvahistsoc.com/product-category/books/
Gordon, Shirley, ed. Bicentennial Heritage: Grayson County, Virginia, 1793–1995. Independence, VA: 1908 Courthouse Foundation, 1995. https://search.worldcat.org/title/Bicentennial-heritage-Grayson-County-Virginia-1793-1995/oclc/35286023
Oak Hill Academy. “Mission Statement & History.” Mouth of Wilson, VA. https://oak-hill.net/about/mission-statement-history/
Grayson County Historical Society. “Community Research Notebooks.” https://graysonvahistsoc.com/community-research-notebooks/
Grayson County Historical Society. “Physical Archives.” https://graysonvahistsoc.com/physical-archives/
United States Forest Service. Mountaineers and Rangers: A History of Federal Forest Management in the Southern Appalachians, 1900–81. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Agriculture. https://npshistory.com/publications/usfs/region/8/history/chap8.htm
National Wild and Scenic Rivers System. “New River, North Carolina.” U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. https://www.fws.gov/rivers/river/new
Author Note: Mouth of Wilson is one of those Appalachian communities whose story becomes much larger when its surviving court, postal, industrial, and federal records are placed together. If you have photographs, family papers, or memories connected to the old mill, Factory Town, Oak Hill, or the New River dam fight, I would be glad to hear from you.