Appalachian Community Histories – St. Paul, Wise and Russell Counties: Railroads, Coal, and the Lost Twin City of Minneapolis
St. Paul sits in a place where several different versions of Appalachian history meet. The Clinch River curves along the foot of the town, railroad tracks cut across its southern edge, coal country rises to the north and west, and the community itself reaches across the boundary between Wise and Russell counties. Its downtown historic district lies entirely in Wise County, but the incorporated town extends southward into Russell County as well. That unusual geography is not a modern accident. The two sides of the river have been connected to the same development story for more than a century.
What makes St. Paul especially interesting is that the town people know today was once supposed to have a companion city across the Clinch. In the feverish railroad speculation of the late nineteenth century, investors imagined St. Paul on the Wise County side and Minneapolis on the Russell County side as twin cities modeled in name and ambition after St. Paul and Minneapolis, Minnesota. Minneapolis, Virginia, never became the city its promoters promised. Yet the plan was real enough to leave behind deeds, court cases, and a surviving plat showing both proposed communities. The Russell County chancery case involving George Banner and Thomas L. Rosser preserves one of the clearest records of this forgotten scheme.
That failed city is only one chapter in a much longer story. The research assembled for this article includes Russell and Wise County court records, railroad collections, census schedules, business directories, maps, geological surveys, newspapers, and preservation studies, with particularly strong material surviving for the St. Paul and Minneapolis development.
Before There Was a St. Paul
Long before a town grid appeared beside the Clinch River, the valley formed part of a much larger Appalachian landscape used and contested by Native peoples. Cherokee hunters traveled through the Clinch and Powell River country, while Shawnee and Iroquois interests also reached into the region. European settlement came relatively late compared with parts of eastern Virginia, partly because of distance, mountain geography, and earlier restrictions on settlement west of the colonial boundary.
By the 1780s, enormous speculative landholdings were beginning to reshape the paper ownership of the Clinch Valley. In 1787, London investor Richard Smith obtained a grant for approximately 335,000 acres north of the Clinch River. At the time, the future St. Paul area was still within Russell County. Wise County would not be created until 1856, when territory was taken from Russell, Scott, and Lee counties.
An even stranger episode followed in 1790 when French nobleman François Pierre de Tubeuf purchased roughly 55,000 acres from Smith’s holdings. De Tubeuf had grand plans of his own. Escaping the upheaval associated with the French Revolution, he hoped to establish a settlement of French refugees in the mountains of Southwest Virginia. According to the National Register research, he envisioned attracting thousands of settlers and secured assistance connected with the Virginia government for a road toward the Clinch River settlement.
De Tubeuf established himself near what is now St. Paul, on land associated with the ridge later known as Sugar Hill. His proposed settlement became known as Sainte Marie. Like the Minneapolis scheme that followed almost a century later, it represented an ambitious outside vision imposed on a difficult mountain landscape.
The dream ended violently in April 1795. De Tubeuf was killed after Richard Barrow and John Brown reportedly entered his home while pretending to seek assistance for an injured horse. His son was badly wounded, and another member of the household died as a consequence of the attack. De Tubeuf’s heirs failed to make the estate profitable, and the Commonwealth eventually foreclosed. When the holdings were surveyed for sale in the 1850s, the property had grown on paper to more than 150,000 acres.
For decades afterward, the country around the future St. Paul remained rural. Families scratched out livings from small farms, livestock, timber, hunting, and limited local trade. Coal was present beneath the hills, but coal without transportation was little more than a local resource. Farmers could dig shallow deposits and sell wagon loads, but the mountains made large-scale shipment nearly impossible. The fortunes of St. Paul would change only when industrial America began searching aggressively for Appalachian coal and railroads found ways to reach it.
Coal and the Railroad Rush
During the 1880s the coalfields of Wise County began attracting outside capital on a new scale. Railroads were the key. Coal could become commercially valuable only if companies could move thousands of tons from isolated mountain seams to furnaces, factories, and cities beyond Appalachia.
Railroad companies began pushing into Wise County from several directions. The Norfolk and Western approached from the east, while other systems entered from the southwest. Once main lines penetrated the mountains, branch lines and spurs could be driven toward individual coal operations. The result was a transformation repeated throughout the Central Appalachian coalfields. Places that had been isolated farming districts suddenly found themselves connected to distant markets.
Investors quickly recognized the value of the relatively buildable land beside the Clinch River. Compared with the surrounding ridges, the cove at St. Paul provided an unusually convenient place for a town, and its position near a practical railroad passage through the mountains made it even more attractive.
In 1884, Frank Stratton purchased approximately 324.5 acres from William Fields for $25,000. The property became the nucleus of St. Paul. Streets and narrow lots were laid out across the site, giving the future community the ordered grid that still distinguishes downtown from the irregular mountain roads beyond it.
Then the speculation became much more ambitious.
The Twin Cities on the Clinch
Railroad promoters were discussing a vast transportation network intended to link Charleston, Cincinnati, and Chicago. Known as the 3-C Railway, the project promised to make the Clinch Valley part of a major north-south transportation corridor.
If those plans succeeded, the little cove beside the Clinch might become far more than another coalfield settlement. Investors led by Colonel J. B. Moon of Charlottesville became involved with the St. Paul property. Streets were graded and another town plat prepared.
Across the Clinch River in Russell County, another group began buying and promoting land. Colonel Thomas Lafayette Rosser became one of the central figures in that project. Rosser was a former Confederate cavalry general who became involved in railroad and business ventures after the Civil War. His group intended to create a companion city on the southern side of the river.
The names chosen for the two developments revealed just how large their ambitions had become. The Wise County town was called St. Paul. The proposed Russell County city became Minneapolis. Together they were promoted as the “Twin Cities” of the Clinch, consciously echoing the growing Minnesota cities carrying the same names.
Land speculation accelerated between roughly 1885 and 1889. According to the National Register research, lots on the proposed Minneapolis side could sell for $200, while blocks containing forty lots were offered for $8,000. On the St. Paul side, some narrow lots reportedly reached prices as high as $1,200. Those figures make little sense if measured only against the rural settlement that existed at the time. Buyers were paying for what they thought the place would become.
The surviving chancery record makes clear that Minneapolis was more than a colorful story remembered by later residents. In the Russell County case George Banner v. Thomas L. Rosser, Banner had sold Rosser 868 acres intended for the proposed city. When Rosser’s companies failed and financial disputes followed, the matter entered chancery court. Among the exhibits was a plat showing St. Paul and Minneapolis on opposite sides of the Clinch.
The courthouse file captures an important moment in Appalachian development. Maps could transform farms into city blocks before streets existed. Investors could assign names to communities before houses appeared. Railroad lines drawn across survey sheets could drive land values upward before the first regular train passed through.
In this case, the future imagined on paper never fully arrived.
Why Minneapolis Disappeared
The proposed 3-C network ran into serious trouble around 1890. Key investors died, financing weakened, and the larger railroad plan stalled. The real estate boom collapsed with it.
Rosser’s development group began selling much of the more usable Russell County land in larger agricultural tracts rather than continuing to divide it into urban lots. That decision made the dense street-and-block development imagined for Minneapolis increasingly unlikely. The proposed city faded away before it could become a functioning town.
St. Paul survived because its railroad geography was better.
The Norfolk and Western tracks reached the St. Paul side of the river around 1890. Houses and businesses began gathering near the right-of-way. An iron bridge with a wooden deck connected the two sides of the Clinch, one of the surviving signs that promoters had once expected development on both banks.
Early businesses appeared around the foot of the bridge and railroad. The M. V. Bates Store served customers there, while the Riverside Hotel combined lodging with mercantile and postal functions. Norfolk and Western constructed a residence around 1890 for section foreman C. R. Brown, whose crew maintained the nearby railroad. The building became one of the oldest surviving pieces of St. Paul’s early railroad era.
Minneapolis became a vanished possibility. St. Paul became a railroad town.
The Clinchfield Arrives
St. Paul’s next major period of expansion began after 1904, when work resumed along former 3-C rights-of-way as part of the railroad system that developed into the Carolina, Clinchfield and Ohio.
The importance of this second railroad can hardly be overstated. Norfolk and Western had already given St. Paul access to regional markets, but the arrival of the Clinchfield turned the town into a true junction. Two major railroad systems now met beside the town, placing St. Paul at a transportation crossroads between the coalfields and markets to the north and south.
By 1910, the Carolina, Clinchfield and Ohio had reached St. Paul. Dickenson, Duff & Handy, a wholesale company established at nearby Castlewood in 1906, had already recognized the advantage and moved its operations to St. Paul in 1907. Commerce was following the rails.
The growth became substantial enough that on April 12, 1911, the Circuit Court of Wise County formally incorporated the Town of St. Paul. Virginia’s present charter history still identifies that 1911 court order as the legal beginning of the incorporated town. Later boundary changes extended municipal territory into Russell County, with the current charter specifically referring to a December 19, 1972, Russell County Circuit Court order.
This creates an interesting historical irony. Minneapolis failed as a separate Russell County city, yet the modern Town of St. Paul eventually crossed the river and incorporated territory within Russell County itself.
A Commercial Town Takes Shape
St. Paul’s physical appearance began changing alongside its legal and economic status. Wooden buildings remained common, but merchants and investors increasingly built in brick and masonry, creating the streetscape that eventually became the St. Paul Historic District.
One of the most prominent early buildings was the Blue Sulphur Hotel, constructed in 1909 and later known as the St. Paul Hotel. Its Classical Revival influences and elaborate brick and stone details projected prosperity to travelers stepping off trains in what was still a relatively small mountain town. Inside, conveniences such as steam heat, hot showers, and telephone service advertised St. Paul as modern and connected.
The St. Paul National Bank followed in 1910 after the consolidation of banking interests in town. A large commercial and residential building arose along Fourth Avenue around 1914. These were not the buildings of a temporary mining camp. They reflected the expectation that St. Paul would remain a permanent commercial center.
A 1917 Virginia business directory provides a contemporary snapshot. It listed St. Paul with a population of 535 and described it as a railroad and banking community. The directory named the St. Paul National Bank, St. Paul Hardware Company, general merchants, grocers, wholesalers, attorneys, and other businesses. Instead of simply describing later memories of a prosperous town, the directory shows commerce operating in real time.
By the 1920 census, St. Paul’s population had reached 574. It remained smaller than several other Wise County commercial centers, but its significance extended beyond the number of people living inside the corporate boundary. Surrounding coal camps depended on towns like St. Paul for banking, wholesale goods, professional services, entertainment, transportation, and supplies.
The railroad made that possible.
Chestnut Timber, Leather, and Wartime Industry
Coal was central to the regional economy, but St. Paul’s industrial history was never limited to coal alone. The railroad connections made other forms of manufacturing possible.
In 1914, Swift and Company of Chicago established a tannic acid extract plant in St. Paul. The operation reportedly employed about 300 workers. The surrounding mountains contained abundant chestnut timber, while the railroads provided the means to bring raw materials to the plant and ship processed products away.
Tannic acid extracted from chestnut wood was valuable in the leather industry. When World War I created enormous demand for boots and other leather goods, St. Paul’s plant found itself connected to a much larger wartime economy. A mountain town in Wise County was participating indirectly in industrial supply chains stretching far beyond Virginia.
Nearby coal development added another layer. John M. Hillman established the Hillman Coal Company at Virginia City during the World War I era. By the 1920s, the St. Paul Baking Company and Clinchfield Lumber Company were among the businesses contributing to the local economy.
The result was a community shaped by transportation rather than by a single mine. Miners from surrounding camps came into town, but so did railroad workers, salesmen, merchants, travelers, lawyers, doctors, wholesalers, and families seeking goods unavailable in smaller settlements.
The Western Front
Not every part of prosperous St. Paul carried the respectability of a bank or hotel.
Along the south side of the railroad tracks grew a collection of saloons, poolrooms, gambling establishments, and other businesses catering to railroad employees, miners, and visitors. Regular train service made the strip accessible even to workers from communities beyond St. Paul.
Its reputation for drinking, gambling, fights, and general disorder produced one of the most memorable place names in town history. Residents called the strip the “Western Front,” borrowing the name of the brutal European battlefront of World War I. A 1927 Sanborn fire insurance map indicates that Western Front was not merely a casual nickname. The name was attached to the frontage road running beside the tracks.
The name survived long after many of the original establishments disappeared. In modern St. Paul, “Western Front” has been reclaimed as part of the community’s historic identity, a reminder of the days when trains delivered both commerce and crowds to the edge of downtown.
Downtown in the 1920s
By 1927, St. Paul’s street grid was filling rapidly. Commercial buildings lined Fourth Avenue, Broad Street, and Russell Street. Wholesale businesses distributed goods throughout the surrounding coal country. Hardware stores, grocers, drugstores, banks, hotels, automobile businesses, professional offices, and restaurants served the town and its hinterland.
The railroad station stood close to the commercial district, accompanied by a landscaped railroad park. Passengers stepping from a train entered a town whose built environment had been designed around their arrival.
Entertainment became part of the economy as well. The Gaiety Theater was operating by the 1920s and later hosted both motion pictures and live performers. Local historical accounts recorded appearances by members of the Carter family, connecting St. Paul’s entertainment district to the broader musical culture of Southwest Virginia.
The town could also be violent. Sheriff David Addington was killed in a gunfight near the intersection of Russell Street and Fourth Avenue in 1921, a reminder that the growing commercial center still belonged to a turbulent coalfield world where disputes, alcohol, firearms, and political tensions occasionally collided.
Yet the lasting architectural record is one of confidence. Brick storefronts, banks, hotels, commercial blocks, churches, and railroad structures replaced much of the earlier wood-frame landscape. The Virginia Department of Historic Resources identifies the 1920s and 1930s as the period of St. Paul’s most intense physical development.
Depression and Public Works
The Great Depression damaged St. Paul’s economy just as it did communities throughout the coalfields. Mines reduced production, workers lost jobs, and businesses faced customers with less money to spend.
Federal relief programs nevertheless left permanent marks on the town. Works Progress Administration labor helped improve streets and public infrastructure during the 1930s. Before that period, many St. Paul streets remained dirt roads bordered by board sidewalks. Relief workers broke stone and prepared gravel, turning unemployment relief into physical improvements that reshaped the community.
Those projects mattered when prosperity began to return. St. Paul entered the World War II era with better infrastructure and an economy still tied to industries the war would need.
Coal production rose again. Railroads became heavily used arteries for wartime freight. Businesses that had struggled through the Depression found new customers among workers whose labor had once again become essential to the national economy.
Mid-Century St. Paul
The years surrounding World War II and the early 1950s represented one of the last periods when St. Paul’s traditional railroad and coalfield commercial economy operated near full strength.
A bus station opened along Russell Street in the early 1950s, showing how transportation patterns were beginning to change even while the railroad remained important. Piggly Wiggly developed a larger grocery store on land that had formerly been associated with the railroad park. W. A. Turner opened a Chevrolet dealership in 1946, another sign that automobiles were becoming increasingly central to local life.
For a brief period, St. Paul even supported two theaters on Broad Street. The Cavalier and Lyric competed for audiences in the early 1950s. Movie theaters, automobile dealerships, supermarkets, hotels, wholesalers, and passenger transportation made downtown an active gathering point for residents across a much wider area than the town limits suggest.
Railroad traffic continued to define the southern edge of town. The Norfolk and Western and Clinchfield lines crossed at St. Paul, making the community one of the most recognizable railroad junctions in Southwest Virginia. The 1933 concrete railroad overpass on Fourth Avenue, inscribed with the names “CLINCHFIELD RAILROAD” and “NORFOLK & WESTERN RAILWAY,” permanently recorded the two systems whose meeting had made the town possible.
When Coal Needed Fewer Men
St. Paul’s decline did not come because the coal disappeared overnight. Instead, the nature of coal mining changed.
Traditional underground operations required large workforces. Miners cut coal, loaded it, maintained equipment, timbered entries, transported material underground, and performed scores of other jobs. Coal camps and commercial towns grew around that demand for labor.
Increasing mechanization reduced the number of workers needed to produce the same amount of coal. Surface mining expanded. Machines became larger and more efficient. Consolidation changed both the industry and the communities dependent upon it.
The population figures show the consequences. The federal census recorded 1,156 residents in St. Paul in 1960 and only 948 in 1970, an 18 percent decline during a single decade.
At the same time, automobiles and highways weakened the town’s older role as a railroad-centered commercial hub. Residents could travel farther for shopping and services. Passenger rail declined across the country. Wholesale distribution changed. Small-town stores faced competition from businesses in larger regional centers.
St. Paul did not disappear, but the economic system that had created the town was no longer capable of supporting the same level of commercial activity.
One Town in Two Counties
While the economy was changing, the town’s geography changed as well.
St. Paul had originally been incorporated through the Wise County Circuit Court in 1911. The modern charter, however, defines municipal territory in both Wise and Russell counties. It specifically recognizes the original April 12, 1911, Wise County order and a December 19, 1972, Russell County order in describing the town’s boundaries.
The result is unusual. St. Paul’s historic downtown remains on the Wise County side, and the National Register historic district is entirely within Wise County. Yet the modern municipality crosses the Clinch into Russell County.
In a way, the arrangement brings the story back to the 1880s. Developers once imagined two separate cities facing one another across the river. Minneapolis failed, while St. Paul survived. Nearly a century later, rather than two rival municipalities occupying the opposite banks, one St. Paul extended across the county line.
Preserving the Railroad Town
Recognition of St. Paul’s historic importance grew as the old coalfield economy receded.
The St. Paul Historic District was listed on the Virginia Landmarks Register on March 17, 2011, and entered in the National Register of Historic Places on June 8 of that year. Preservation officials identified the community as an excellent surviving example of the small commercial towns that developed alongside coal mining and railroad expansion in Southwest Virginia. Its recognized period of significance extends from 1887 to 1960.
The district preserves much of the physical evidence of that story. Commercial buildings, the former hotel, bank, theater, mixed residential and business blocks, railroad structures, and the street grid all reflect the town’s rise.
Perhaps the most powerful surviving artifact is not any individual building but the relationship between them. Downtown sits immediately beside the railroad. The streets lead toward the tracks. The commercial blocks stand where arriving passengers and workers could reach them. The railroad overpass dominates the entrance to town.
St. Paul is a place where transportation history can still be read directly from the landscape.
From Coal and Rails to River and Trails
Modern St. Paul has increasingly turned toward a resource that was there before either coal companies or railroad promoters arrived: the Clinch River.
The town now promotes paddling, fishing, hiking, biking, wildlife viewing, and off-road recreation. Oxbow Lake Park occupies part of the river landscape near town, while the Sugar Hill trails pass through the same general area associated with the early De Tubeuf settlement. Bluebell Island, Clinch River trails, and the Mountain View portion of the Spearhead Trails system have helped connect the town’s economy to outdoor recreation.
That reinvention does not erase the industrial past. Instead, modern St. Paul has increasingly found ways to reuse it. Railroad heritage, the Western Front name, historic commercial buildings, mountain trails, former coal landscapes, and the Clinch River now exist within the same tourism story.
It is another transformation for a place that has already survived several abandoned visions.
The City That Survived and the City That Never Was
St. Paul could easily have shared the fate of Minneapolis.
Both developments depended upon speculation. Both were promoted because investors expected railroads to transform the Clinch Valley. Both were laid out during a period when men with maps and capital believed they could build substantial cities almost anywhere a major railroad crossed Appalachian coal country.
Minneapolis failed when the larger transportation scheme collapsed. Its land returned largely to agricultural use, and its streets became lines on an old plat rather than the foundations of a city.
St. Paul had one crucial advantage. The railroad actually came.
Norfolk and Western reached the north side of the Clinch. The Clinchfield followed. Businesses clustered near their junction. Hotels opened. Banks formed. Wholesale houses supplied distant coal camps. Industries used the tracks to ship products. The town incorporated. Brick replaced frame construction. Generations of residents built lives around the trains passing through the valley.
Today, anyone looking only at St. Paul’s size might miss the scale of the history contained there. The community was once part of a plan to create Appalachian twin cities. It stood at the intersection of two major railroads. Its businesses served coal camps scattered across the mountains. Its industrial plants supplied products to markets far beyond Virginia. Its river divided two counties while simultaneously binding their histories together.
Across the Clinch lies the landscape where Minneapolis was supposed to rise. On the Wise County side stands the town that did.
That contrast may be the most revealing part of St. Paul’s history. Appalachian communities were shaped not only by the projects that succeeded, but also by the railroads that were never completed, the companies that failed, the cities that remained on paper, and the futures that disappeared before anyone could build them.
In St. Paul, both histories survive within sight of the same river.
Sources & Further Reading
Russell County Circuit Court. George Banner v. Thomas L. Rosser. Russell County Chancery Cause 1898-004. Library of Virginia. https://arvasarchive.org/catalog/vi_vi03183_c02
Library of Virginia. “Russell County Chancery Causes, 1840-1960.” Chancery Records Index. Accessed September 10, 2026. https://old.lva.virginia.gov/chancery/available.asp
Library of Virginia. “Wise County Chancery Causes, 1855-1925.” Chancery Records Index. Accessed September 10, 2026. https://www.lva.virginia.gov/chancery/available.asp
Commonwealth of Virginia. “Charter, Town of Saint Paul.” Virginia Law. Accessed September 10, 2026. https://law.lis.virginia.gov/charters/saint-paul/
Wise County Circuit Court. “Clerk of Circuit Court.” Virginia’s Judicial System. Accessed September 10, 2026. https://www.vacourts.gov/courts/circuit/wise/home
Russell County, Virginia. “Clerk of Circuit Court.” Accessed September 10, 2026. https://www.russellcountyva.us/176/Clerk-of-Circuit-Court
Supreme Court of Virginia. “Secure Remote Access to Land Records.” Accessed September 10, 2026. https://www.vacourts.gov/online/sra/home
University of Virginia, Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library. Thomas Lafayette Rosser Papers, 1860-1950. Collection 1171-a and 1171-b. https://arvasarchive.org/catalog/viu_viu03242_c01
Library of Virginia. “Virginia Land Office Patents and Grants.” Accessed September 10, 2026. https://www.lva.virginia.gov/node/192
Library of Virginia. Virginia Land Tax Records. Research Notes Number 1. Richmond: Library of Virginia. https://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/guides/rn1_landtax.pdf
Sanborn Map Company. St. Paul, Wise County, Virginia. Fire insurance map, 1927. Washington, DC: Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division. https://guides.loc.gov/fire-insurance-maps/sanborn-searching
United States National Archives and Records Administration. “Census Records.” Accessed September 10, 2026. https://www.archives.gov/research/census
United States Bureau of the Census. “1950 Census, Wise County, Virginia.” 1950 Census. National Archives and Records Administration. https://1950census.archives.gov/search/?county=Wise&page=1&state=VA
United States Bureau of the Census. “1950 Census, Russell County, Virginia.” 1950 Census. National Archives and Records Administration. https://1950census.archives.gov/search/?county=Russell&page=1&state=VA
Hill Directory Company. Virginia Business Directory and Gazetteer. Vol. 2. Richmond, VA: Hill Directory Company, 1917. https://ldsgenealogy.com/VA/books/Virginia-business-directory-and-gazetteer-1917-v-2-part-75.htm
Library of Virginia. “Virginia Newspaper Directory.” Accessed September 10, 2026. https://www.lva.virginia.gov/collections/vnd
Library of Virginia. “Wise County Newspapers.” Virginia Newspaper Directory. Includes the Big Stone Post, Big Stone Gap Post, and Clinch Valley Times. https://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/vnd/results.php?counties=Wise
East Tennessee State University, Archives of Appalachia. Carolina, Clinchfield & Ohio Railway Engineering Department Collection, 1908-1978. https://archivesofappalachia.omeka.net/collections/show/175
East Tennessee State University, Archives of Appalachia. William Cary Hattan Collection, 1889-1940 and Undated. AppMs-0339. https://archivesofappalachia.omeka.net/collections/show/25
East Tennessee State University, Archives of Appalachia. “Journals of William Cary Hattan, 1908-1917.” In William Cary Hattan Collection, 1889-1940 and Undated. https://archivesofappalachia.omeka.net/collections/show/25
Wentworth, Chester K. The Geology and Coal Resources of Russell County, Virginia. Bulletin 22. Charlottesville: Virginia Geological Survey, 1922. https://play.google.com/store/books/details/Chester_Keeler_Wentworth_The_Geology_and_Coal_Reso?id=aXFGAAAAYAAJ
Eby, J. Brian, with M. R. Campbell and G. W. Stose. The Geology and Mineral Resources of Wise County and the Coal-Bearing Portion of Scott County, Virginia. Bulletin 24. Charlottesville: Virginia Geological Survey, 1923. https://ngmdb.usgs.gov/Prodesc/proddesc_93590.htm
Tate, Leland Burdine. An Economic and Social Survey of Russell County. University of Virginia Record, Extension Series 16, no. 1. Charlottesville: University of Virginia, 1931. https://books.google.com/books/about/An_Economic_and_Social_Survey_of_Russell.html?id=GqbXAAAAMAAJ
Kennedy, Ralph Emerson. An Economic and Social Survey of Wise County. Charlottesville: University of Virginia, 1928. https://babel.hathitrust.org/
Virginia Department of Historic Resources. St. Paul Historic District: National Register of Historic Places Registration Form. 2011. https://www.dhr.virginia.gov/VLR_to_transfer/PDFNoms/294-0001_St_Paul_HD_2011_NR_FINAL.pdf
Virginia Department of Historic Resources. “St. Paul Historic District.” Virginia Landmarks Register and National Register of Historic Places. Accessed September 10, 2026. https://www.dhr.virginia.gov/historic-registers/294-0001/
Tolson, Edward. Wise County, Virginia, City of Norton, Historic Architectural Survey. Richmond: Virginia Department of Historic Resources, 1995. https://www.dhr.virginia.gov/pdf_files/SpecialCollections/WS-057_Wise_County_Norton_Historic_AH_Survey_1995_Cost_share_report.pdf
Virginia Department of Historic Resources. Comprehensive Survey Report: Survey of Architectural Resources in Russell County, Virginia. 2009. https://www.dhr.virginia.gov/pdf_files/SpecialCollections/RU-045_AH_survey_Russell_County_2009_WMCAR_report.pdf
Evans, N. H., and K. W. Troensegaard. Geology of the St. Paul and Carbo Quadrangles, Virginia. Publication 106. Charlottesville: Virginia Division of Mineral Resources, 1991. https://www.energy.virginia.gov/commerce/ProductDetails.aspx?productID=2261
Hagy, James William. “The Frontier Dreams of Francois Pierre De Tubeuf.” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 77, no. 3 (July 1969): 329-335. https://www.jstor.org/
Thomas, William G., III. “Under Indictment: Thomas Lafayette Rosser and the New South.” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 100, no. 2 (April 1992): 207-232. https://www.jstor.org/
United States Geological Survey. “Historical Topographic Map Collection.” topoView. Accessed September 10, 2026. https://ngmdb.usgs.gov/topoview/
Brown, Andrew, Henry L. Berryhill Jr., Dorothy A. Taylor, and James V. A. Trumbull. Coal Resources of Virginia. Geological Survey Circular 171. Washington, DC: United States Geological Survey, 1952. https://pubs.usgs.gov/
Author Note: St. Paul’s history stood out to me because the town that survived is inseparable from the city across the Clinch that never did. I hope this story helps preserve how railroads, coal, speculation, and county lines shaped communities throughout the Appalachian coalfields.