Appalachian Community Histories – Stickleyville, Lee County: Powell Mountain, Wallen Creek, and the School That Held a Community
Stickleyville sits in eastern Lee County, Virginia, in the valley country between Powell Mountain and Wallen’s Ridge. Modern federal geography records it as Stickleyville CDP, with 2.851 square miles of land and a representative point at 36.713329, -82.912188. That official measurement gives the place a modern boundary, but it does not fully describe what Stickleyville has been to the people who lived there. It has been a road community, a school community, a farming community, a church community, and a family-name place in the old Wallen Creek country.
The valley itself gives the community much of its story. The Duff Mansion House National Register form places the nearby house and farm within the Ridge and Valley province of the Southern Appalachians, near the headwaters of Wallen Creek, a tributary of the Powell River. It describes Powell Mountain wrapping around the Wallen Creek Valley and notes the unusual turn of Wallen Ridge nearby. The same form states that the Wilderness Road followed part of Wallen Creek between Powell Mountain and Wallen Ridge, tying the Stickleyville area to one of the best-known migration corridors through early southwestern Virginia.
The Road Before the Name
Long before Stickleyville became fixed as a postal and community name, the larger valley was part of the passageway through Lee County toward Cumberland Gap and Kentucky. The National Register form for the Duff Mansion House states that the Wilderness Road was critical to Lee County’s settlement and development, including the Wallen Creek Valley and nearby Stickleyville, which it identifies as being situated along the Wilderness Road itself. That makes the history of Stickleyville more than a story of one settlement. It is also part of the wider story of travel, land claims, family movement, conflict, and memory along the old route west.
The road also left behind layered traditions. Virginia’s historical marker program identifies and documents significant people, events, and places for public education, and one of the marker subjects associated with Stickleyville is K-32, “Death of Boone’s Son.” The Historical Marker Database entry for that marker places the event in the valley on October 10, 1773, when James Boone and others in a party traveling toward Kentucky were killed. That marker belongs to a frontier story that should be read carefully, since it sits inside a larger history of Native homelands, colonial expansion, violence, and competing claims to the mountain roads.
From Stickleysville to Stickleyville
The postal record preserves an important clue about the spelling and development of the community name. Jim Forte’s postal-history listing gives “Stickleysville, Lee County” beginning in 1850 and also lists “Stickleyville, Lee County” through 1907. That spelling shift is small, but it matters. It shows how a family-name place could pass through more than one written form before settling into the version known today.
Local tradition connects the name to Vastine Stickley, also rendered in family tradition as Stoekli. Mary Ruth Laster’s 2016 Cooperative Living article says Stickleyville was named for Vastine Stickley, identifies him as a descendant of Tobias Stoekli of the Shenandoah Valley, and links the Stickley family to the Duff family through Vastine’s marriage to Elizabeth Duff. The same account says Vastine died in 1855 after an injury connected to blasting work on Powell Mountain, and that his young children later appeared in a Lee County census in the home of their Duff grandparents.
That family thread continued into public life. Frederick Ross Stickley, born in Stickleyville on February 17, 1854, later became a farmer, merchant, justice of the peace, and Democratic delegate for Lee County in the Virginia House of Delegates during the 1926 to 1927 session and the 1927 extra session. His biography in the Virginia House of Delegates DOME project makes Stickleyville not only a family place-name, but also the birthplace of a local man who carried the community’s name into state political records.
The Duff Family and the Built Landscape
The Duff family is one of the major family names tied to the Stickleyville area and Wallen Creek. The Duff Mansion House, located north of the Wilderness Road near Stickleyville, was listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 2019. The Virginia Department of Historic Resources describes it as a Civil War era house and among the oldest buildings still standing in Lee County. The National Register form describes its rural setting, farm buildings, locally sourced materials, and connection to nineteenth-century farming life.
The house also helps show why Stickleyville history should be read through land, roads, and family records together. The National Register form explains that the Duff Mansion House stood in a mostly agricultural setting and that the surrounding landscape retained the feeling of a rural home and farmstead. It also connects the property to the headwaters of Wallen Creek, the Duff family’s landholdings, and the larger settlement history of the valley.
Farms, Stores, and Everyday Work
Stickleyville was not built around one courthouse square or one industrial town center. It was a valley community held together by roads, farms, schools, churches, stores, cemeteries, and kinship. Mary Ruth Laster described it as largely agrarian, with corn, tobacco, hay, cattle, and earlier dairy farming forming part of the local economy. Her article also remembered the importance of country stores, where people bought staples, traded goods, gathered around stoves, and carried home sacks of supplies when walking was still part of ordinary rural life.
Newspapers show Stickleyville appearing in the public record as a road and travel place as well. A 1931 “A Little Tour of Lee County” item in the Victoria Dispatch mentioned Stickleyville in connection with Federal Route No. 411, showing how the old valley community was being described in the automobile-road language of the early twentieth century. Later Powell Valley News volumes and other regional papers carried Stickleyville references tied to public notices, local news, and community life.
Stickleyville School
For much of the twentieth century, the school was one of the strongest community anchors. Laster’s school history says classes were held in the old log church known as Banner’s Chapel during the 1880s and that the Stickleyville School was likely one of the public schools listed in an 1884 to 1885 Virginia gazetteer report on Lee County schools. The old building stood near what later became the home plate of a baseball field that opened in 1910.
In 1909 and 1910, a new two-story school was built with a high school department. According to the local tradition recorded by Laster, Granville C. Duff of the pioneer Duff family deeded the property and accepted only a large plug of tobacco in payment. The old school was dismantled carefully, and its materials were reused to build a boarding house for students who lived too far away to walk or ride daily.
The high school department ended in 1937, when students were transferred to Pennington High School. From that time, the building became known as Stickleyville Elementary School. A new brick school building was built in 1954 at a cost of $141,000, and it remained in use through 2012. When the Lee County Board of Education closed the school after the 2012 term, Laster wrote that the “hub” of the community was gone.
Yet the school story did not end entirely with closure. Laster recorded that the Stickleyville School Community Center Association organized in 2013 to preserve the school and its memories. That detail matters because it shows a familiar Appalachian pattern. A school building could stop being a public school, but still remain a community landmark, a reunion space, a fundraiser site, and a vessel for shared memory.
Churches, Cemeteries, and Family Memory
Stickleyville’s history is also held in cemeteries and church ground. Laster’s article notes churches of various denominations scattered throughout the valley, and the Duff Cemetery appears in local cemetery transcriptions and family research as one of the burial places tied to Stickleyville. These sources need to be used carefully, especially when they are incomplete transcriptions or crowd-sourced cemetery pages, but they remain valuable guides to family names, burial patterns, and community memory.
This is where Stickleyville’s story becomes more than a place-name article. The census, maps, post office listings, chancery causes, cemetery readings, school histories, and newspaper notices all preserve different versions of the same place. One source may show a road. Another may show a family. Another may show a lawsuit, a school decision, a burial, a store, or a public officeholder. Together, they make Stickleyville visible across records that were never written as a single history.
Records That Survived and Records That Did Not
Researching any Lee County community requires attention to the courthouse record losses. The Library of Virginia states that Lee County formed in 1792 from Russell County, with part of Scott County added in 1823. It also notes that many loose records before 1860 are missing, including chancery and court judgments, probably destroyed when Union forces burned the courthouse in 1863. That means Stickleyville research must often work around gaps by combining surviving court books, tax records, land records, family papers, newspapers, maps, cemetery records, and later recollections.
The surviving chancery records remain especially important. The Library of Virginia announced that digital images for Lee County chancery causes from 1857 to 1912 were made available through its Chancery Records Index, and it explains that chancery causes are rich for local, social, legal, and genealogical history because they rely so heavily on witness testimony. For a place like Stickleyville, those cases can help reconstruct family relationships, land disputes, debts, estates, and daily conflicts that do not always appear in polished local histories.
Maps also fill in what narrative sources leave out. USGS topoView explains that historical topographic maps are especially useful for tracing older natural and cultural feature names, and the USGS publication record includes Leonard D. Harris and Ralph L. Miller’s 1963 Geology of the Stickleyville Quadrangle, Virginia, a 1:24,000 scale geologic quadrangle map. For Stickleyville, those maps help place roads, ridges, valleys, creeks, churches, cemeteries, and farms into the physical setting that shaped the community.
Why Stickleyville Matters
Stickleyville is the kind of Appalachian community that can be missed if history only follows county seats, coal towns, battlefields, or famous names. Its story sits in the quieter records of a valley. It appears in a post office spelling, a school closing, a country store memory, a road notice, a cemetery transcription, a delegate’s birthplace, a National Register farmstead, and a map of Wallen Creek country.
That is what makes Stickleyville worth preserving in writing. It is not only a dot on a federal map or a CDP boundary in a census file. It is a Lee County place where the Wilderness Road, the Stickley and Duff families, the Wallen Creek landscape, rural schooling, local farming, and community memory all meet. Its history shows how a small place can carry a large record, even when some of the courthouse paper trail was burned, scattered, or never written down at all.
Sources & Further Reading
U.S. Census Bureau. “2020 U.S. Gazetteer Files: Virginia Places.” 2020. https://www2.census.gov/geo/docs/maps-data/data/gazetteer/2020_Gazetteer/2020_gaz_place_51.txt
U.S. Geological Survey. “Stickleyville.” Geographic Names Information System. https://edits.nationalmap.gov/apps/gaz-domestic/public/gaz-record/1499204
U.S. Geological Survey. “Geographic Names Information System.” https://www.usgs.gov/tools/geographic-names-information-system-gnis
U.S. Geological Survey. “topoView.” National Geologic Map Database. https://ngmdb.usgs.gov/topoview/
Harris, Leonard D., and Ralph L. Miller. “Geology of the Stickleyville Quadrangle, Virginia.” U.S. Geological Survey Geologic Quadrangle 238, 1963. https://doi.org/10.3133/gq238
National Geologic Map Database. “Geology of the Stickleyville Quadrangle, Virginia.” U.S. Geological Survey. https://ngmdb.usgs.gov/Prodesc/proddesc_692.htm
Library of Virginia. “Lee County Microfilm.” https://www.lva.virginia.gov/collections/ccmf/VA/VA149
Library of Virginia. “Chancery Records Index.” https://www.lva.virginia.gov/collections/cri
Library of Virginia. “Lee Co. Chancery Goes Digital!” The UncommonWealth, November 2, 2012. https://uncommonwealth.lva.virginia.gov/blog/2012/11/02/lee-co-chancery-goes-digital/
Library of Virginia. “Lee County Personal Property Tax.” Research Guides and Indexes. https://lva-virginia.libguides.com/personal-property-tax/lee
Library of Virginia. “Personal Property Tax Records.” Research Guides and Indexes. https://lva-virginia.libguides.com/personal-property-tax
Library of Virginia. “Digital Collections.” https://www.lva.virginia.gov/collections/digital-collections
Lee County Circuit Court Clerk. “Circuit Court Clerk for Lee County Virginia.” https://www.leeccc.com/
Virginia’s Judicial System. “Lee Circuit Court.” https://www.vacourts.gov/courts/circuit/lee/home.html
Jim Forte Postal History. “Virginia Post Offices.” https://www.postalhistory.com/postoffices.asp?county=&pagenum=328&searchtext=&state=VA&task=display
Jim Forte Postal History. “U.S. Post Offices.” https://www.postalhistory.com/post_offices/index.htm
United States Postal Service. “Sources of Historical Information on Post Offices, Postal Employees, Mail Routes, and Mail Contractors.” April 2026. https://about.usps.com/who/profile/history/pdf/sources-of-historical-information.pdf
Virginia House of Delegates. “Frederick Ross Stickley.” DOME: House History. https://history.house.virginia.gov/members/9067
Virginia Department of Historic Resources. “Highway Markers.” https://www.dhr.virginia.gov/programs/highway-markers/
Historical Marker Database. “Death of Boone’s Son.” https://www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=254045
Historical Marker Database. “Historical Markers in Stickleyville, Virginia.” https://www.hmdb.org/results.asp?Search=Place&State=Virginia&Town=Stickleyville
Virginia Department of Historic Resources. “Duff Mansion House.” https://www.dhr.virginia.gov/historic-registers/052-5122/
Fleenor, Lawrence J., and Virginia Department of Historic Resources. “National Register of Historic Places Registration Form: Duff Mansion House.” February 8, 2019. https://www.dhr.virginia.gov/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/052-5122_DuffMansionHouse_2019_NRHP_FINAL.pdf
Laster, Mary Ruth. “Stickleyville, Virginia.” Cooperative Living, October 2016. https://www.co-opliving.com/coopliving/issues/2016/October%202016/Oct16Crossroads.pdf
Wise County Historical Society. “Bonnie Sage Ball and Theodosia Wells Barrett.” September 7, 2010. https://wisevahistoricalsoc.org/2010/09/07/historians-4/
Ball, Bonnie Sage. Stickleyville: Its Early History, People, and Schools. Listed in Goodreads author catalog. https://www.goodreads.com/author/list/116777.Bonnie_Sage_Ball
Tennessee Genealogy Trails. “Biographies of Monroe County, Tennessee.” https://genealogytrails.com/tenn/monroe/bio2.html
TNGenWeb Project. “Goodspeed Biographies of Monroe County, Tennessee.” https://www.tngenweb.org/monroe/goodsp3.htm
FamilySearch. “Lee County, Virginia Genealogy.” https://www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/Lee_County%2C_Virginia_Genealogy
FamilySearch Catalog. “Lee County, Virginia, Court Records, Compiled by Ada Grace Catron.” https://www.familysearch.org/en/search/catalog/121160
Catron, Ada Grace. Early Records of Lee County, Virginia: Volume I. Pennington Gap, Va.: A. G. Catron, 1968. Internet Archive. https://archive.org/details/early-records-lee-co-va-1
Catron, Ada Grace. Early Records of Lee County, Virginia: Volume II. Pennington Gap, Va.: A. G. Catron, 1972. AccessGenealogy. https://accessgenealogy.com/virginia/early-records-of-lee-county-virginia.htm
FamilySearch Catalog. “Personal Property Tax Lists of Lee County, 1795–1850.” https://www.familysearch.org/en/search/catalog/407391
“Page Five.” Gate City Herald, August 4, 1932. Virginia Chronicle. https://www.virginiachronicle.com/?a=d&d=GCH19320804.1.5
“A Little Tour of Lee County.” Victoria Dispatch, March 13, 1931. Virginia Chronicle. https://www.virginiachronicle.com/?a=d&d=VTD19310313.1.3
Powell Valley News. 1951. Internet Archive. https://archive.org/details/powell-valley-news-1951
Powell Valley News. 1952. Internet Archive. https://archive.org/details/powell-valley-news-1952
Powell Valley News. 1959. Internet Archive. https://archive.org/details/powell-valley-news-1959
Powell Valley News. 1961. Internet Archive. https://archive.org/details/powell-valley-news-1961
Appalachian Regional Commission. “Appalachian Counties Served by ARC.” https://www.arc.gov/appalachian-counties-served-by-arc/
Appalachian Regional Commission. “Virginia.” https://www.arc.gov/appalachian-states/virginia/
Author Note: I like stories like Stickleyville because they show how much Appalachian history can sit inside a small valley name. This one is worth reading through the roads, schools, maps, cemeteries, and families that kept the community visible in the records.