Appalachian Community Histories – Tiptop, Tazewell County: Rail, Brick, and Iron Lithia Springs in the High Country
Tiptop, Virginia, does not announce itself like one of the better known coal towns of Tazewell County. It was not a large incorporated place, and its history is not preserved in one single town record or grand public monument. To understand Tiptop, a person has to read the land sideways through railroad maps, courthouse books, old advertisements, business ledgers, topographic maps, and the surviving traces of buildings once tied to work, travel, and rural community life.
That is fitting, because Tiptop was shaped by movement. It stood along the Norfolk and Western Railway in the high country of Tazewell County, where the railroad opened new paths through the mountains and made small places matter in ways they had not before. The name itself has long been associated with height and railroad geography. By the early twentieth century, Tiptop was known as a post village on the Norfolk and Western Railway, a place where the map, the mail, the rail line, and local industry met.
Its story belongs to the great change that remade southwest Virginia after the Civil War. Tazewell County had older roads, farms, churches, schools, and family settlements, but the coming of the railroad turned isolated valleys and ridges toward outside markets. Coal, timber, clay, mineral springs, freight, tourists, workers, merchants, and railroad crews all moved through the same landscape. Tiptop was one of the smaller names on that map, but it helps explain the larger world that grew around Tazewell, Richlands, Pocahontas, Cedar Bluff, and the Clinch Valley line.
The Railroad Comes to the High Country
Before the railroad era, Tazewell County depended on roads, turnpikes, farms, courthouse records, and local exchange. The Virginia Department of Historic Resources survey of Tazewell County describes the coming of the Norfolk and Western as one of the great dividing lines in the county’s development. The New River Division of the newly organized Norfolk and Western had opened to Pocahontas in 1883. A line was added to the Clinch Valley in 1888, giving service to Jeffersonville, later known as Tazewell. That new access to markets helped bring an industrial and population boom to the county.
Tiptop appeared in that railroad world. The DHR survey places Tiptop among the new towns and communities that grew along county rail lines during the Reconstruction and Growth period. It lists Tiptop beside Graham, Maxwell, Cedar Bluff, Richlands, and Doran, small places and growing towns where commercial, recreational, and industrial life followed the tracks.
That railroad connection was not just a matter of passenger travel. A right of way map held by the Norfolk and Western Historical Society identifies the Tip Top area on the Clinch Valley District, Pocahontas Division, as part of a 1916 valuation map later revised in 1933. The sheet covers milepost 374.2 to 376. Such maps were practical railroad documents, but for local historians they are rich evidence. They can show right of way, track placement, railroad property, curves, sidings, adjacent land, and the shape of a community whose paper trail might otherwise be scattered.
To the people who lived there, the railroad would have been more than a line on a valuation map. It brought sound, labor, smoke, schedules, strangers, and opportunities. It made it possible for a local brick works to ship out production. It gave a mineral spring resort a reason to advertise beyond the county. It connected Tiptop to the commercial bloodstream of the coalfields.
The Radford Brick Company at Tiptop
One of the strongest surviving anchors for Tiptop’s history is not a newspaper article or a county history, but a business ledger.
Virginia Tech Special Collections holds the Radford Brick Company Cash Ledger, dating from 1889 to 1921. The archival description says the Radford Brick Company operated a manufacturing plant at Tiptop around the turn of the twentieth century. The ledger recorded income and expenditures, beginning with stock sales in October 1889. Later entries documented brick sales, machinery, equipment, labor, and freight.
That one ledger opens a whole world. It places Tiptop inside the business history of southwest Virginia, not just as a rural settlement but as a manufacturing point. The company was chartered in 1889 for the purpose of manufacturing and selling brick. It bought about thirty acres at Tiptop and located its plant there. Under longtime manager George Shafer, clay dug on site was made into brick. By 1901, according to the Virginia Tech archival description, the plant was capable of producing six million bricks a year and was furnishing the Norfolk and Western Railway with the brick it used in construction.
That detail matters. It means Tiptop did not simply grow because the railroad arrived. Tiptop also helped build the railroad’s physical world. The clay under Tazewell County soil became brick. The brick became structures, platforms, buildings, and railway construction material. The railroad that brought freight and markets to Tiptop also bought from Tiptop.
Newspaper advertisements add another layer. Radford Brick Company advertisements in the Tazewell Republican in 1904 and 1905 placed the company’s office and works at Tiptop, Virginia. These ads marketed building and paving brick, including common and pressed brick, and show the company trying to reach regional buyers through the local press.
The company’s name changed with ownership. In 1912 the plant was purchased by Hoge Mason of Bluefield, West Virginia, and renamed Tiptop Brick Company. W. H. Shuff served as manager. The Virginia Tech archival record notes that after the sale, the ledger continued to record interest and Mason’s note payments, with the final entry dated January 1, 1921.
A later DHR survey statement says a brick plant was built at Tip Top before 1914. Taken together, the ledger, advertisements, and preservation survey show a small community tied to a serious industrial operation. Tiptop may have been rural, but its clay, workers, freight bills, and brick sales connected it to the larger rise of rail and industry across Tazewell County.
Iron Lithia Springs and the Resort World
Tiptop’s history was not only industrial. It also had a resort story.
The DHR survey notes that a mineral water resort opened at Iron Lithia Springs near Tiptop in 1892. The survey describes a two and a half story gambrel-roofed hotel standing on a hillside near the spring, surrounded by two-story galleries. It also mentions recreation at a poolroom and bowling alley known as the Plaza Bonita.
That image changes how Tiptop should be remembered. The same place associated with railroad grades, brick kilns, and freight cars also drew people for mineral water, porches, baths, dances, and summer leisure. The resort world of Appalachia often grew where railroads made travel easier and where mineral springs could be turned into health, pleasure, and advertisement.
Newspapers show Iron Lithia Springs reaching for that public. A June 12, 1903 notice in the Clinch Valley News announced that Iron Lithia Springs near Tip Top had been purchased and opened to the public. A 1909 Roanoke Times advertisement described Iron Lithia Springs at Tip Top as open for guests, with a new up-to-date hotel, hot and cold baths, acetylene lights, and large shaded porches. A 1910 Tazewell Republican notice said the Iron Lithia Springs Hotel at Tip Top would open under new management.
Those details are small, but they are vivid. Acetylene lights meant modern convenience. Hot and cold baths suggested comfort and health. Shaded porches promised rest in mountain air. The resort was not simply a spring in the woods. It was a business meant to attract paying guests.
Social notices give the place even more life. Newspaper references to an opening dance at Iron Lithia Springs and other recreation around the resort suggest that it served local residents as well as visitors. People came there not only to drink mineral water, but to gather, dance, watch or play ball, and take part in the social season of a mountain community connected by rail.
Stores, Mail, and Local Life
Like many Appalachian places, Tiptop’s history cannot be told only through its biggest businesses. Around the railroad, resort, and brick works were stores, houses, farms, churches, section houses, bridges, and families whose lives rarely made long newspaper columns.
The DHR architectural survey appendix lists numerous properties on the Tiptop quadrangle. These include Abb’s Valley School, Billups House, Bradshaw House, Harmon House, the North Fork Clinch River Railroad Bridge, Bailey Methodist Church, Tiptop Section House, Bowen Farm, Stowers House, Buchanan House, Cox House, Rocky Dell, Drytown Store, and a Norfolk and Western Railroad underpass. Some were surveyed intensively. Others were recorded at a reconnaissance level. Together, they show that the Tiptop area was not one isolated dot. It was part of a larger rural built environment where transportation, agriculture, religion, education, and commerce overlapped.
The Tiptop Section House is especially important because section houses were part of the everyday labor system of the railroad. They housed or supported the men responsible for maintaining a section of track. The railroad was not self-sustaining. It needed eyes, hands, tools, and laborers along its route. A section house reminds us that the line through Tiptop was kept open by workers whose names are often missing from broad histories.
The post office trail is another promising part of the story. Federal postal sources and postmaster records can help locate Tiptop in the world of mail routes, postmasters, site locations, and government geography. A post office made a place official in daily life. It tied families and businesses to catalogs, letters, newspapers, court notices, and distant relatives. For a place like Tiptop, postal records may help identify storekeepers, postmasters, and the exact relationship between the railroad stop and the surrounding community.
Coalfield Edges and Mountain Resources
Tiptop was not one of the famous coal camps, but it stood in a county transformed by coal and related industries. The USGS report Coal Resources of Tazewell County, Virginia, 1980 describes economically important coal beds in the northwestern part of Tazewell County and shows how deeply the county’s modern history was tied to mineral resources. The report notes that coal had been commercially mined in the county since the early 1880s, and that most coal production was shipped by rail.
This matters for Tiptop because railroad growth, coal development, brick production, and timber demand fed one another. Coal mines needed railroads. Railroads needed construction materials. Industrial towns needed brick, lumber, stores, roads, and labor. The Tazewell County landscape became a network of extraction, transport, and small manufacturing.
A 1902 Tazewell Republican lead mentioning Tiptop stores, mining ties, and props points toward this supply economy. Mine props, timber, general stores, and rail connections were part of the practical world around coal even in places that were not full company towns. Tiptop belonged to that supporting geography, the kind of place that helped make the better-known coalfield communities possible.
Reading Tiptop Through Maps
Historic maps are essential for Tiptop because the community’s paper record is scattered. USGS topographic maps, Norfolk and Western right of way maps, and county land records can show what written histories leave out.
A 1904 federal gazetteer described Tiptop as a post village in Tazewell County on the Norfolk and Western Railway. USGS topographic maps from the twentieth century help trace roads, streams, ridges, rail lines, schools, churches, and local place names. The 1935 and 1958 Tiptop quadrangles are especially useful because they show the community after the early railroad and resort period but before many later landscape changes.
Maps also help with neighboring names. Anyone researching Tiptop should search not only for Tiptop, but also for Tip Top, Iron Lithia Springs, Drytown, Mud Fork, Abb’s Valley, Bailey Methodist Church, North Fork Clinch River, and nearby farms or road names. In mountain counties, communities often overlap. A person might live near Tiptop, receive mail from one post office, appear in a deed under another locality, attend church under a third name, and be remembered by descendants under a fourth.
The courthouse books are just as important. Tazewell County deed books, land books, will books, order books, and tax records can trace ownership of the brick plant land, resort property, road changes, estates, bridges, and local families. FamilySearch and the Library of Virginia both identify microfilmed Tazewell County records, including deed books and indexes from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Those records may eventually answer questions the newspapers only hint at. Who owned the spring before the resort opened? Who sold the land to the brick company? Which local families worked there, invested there, or leased property around it?
What Remains in the Record
Tiptop’s history survives in fragments, but they are strong fragments.
The railroad valuation map places it in the technical world of the Norfolk and Western. The Radford Brick Company ledger places it in the world of manufacturing, freight, labor, machinery, and sales. The Iron Lithia Springs advertisements place it in the world of mountain tourism and mineral water resorts. The DHR architectural survey places it in the built environment of schools, churches, bridges, farms, stores, and railroad support buildings. USGS and postal records place it in official geography.
Put together, those records show a place more complex than a dot on a county map. Tiptop was a high railroad community, a brick-making site, a resort neighbor, a postal place, and a rural settlement tied to the wider boom of Tazewell County. Its story is not as simple as saying it was a railroad stop or a brick company village. It was both of those things, and more.
It belonged to a generation when mountain communities were being pulled into new markets by steel rails. A spring could become a hotel. A clay bank could become millions of bricks. A section house could mark the labor of keeping trains moving. A small post village could become part of a countywide transformation.
Why Tiptop Matters
Tiptop matters because it reminds us that Appalachian history is often built from small places that carried large changes. Not every community became a county seat, a coal camp, or an incorporated town. Some places did their work quietly, supplying brick, hosting travelers, serving rail crews, sending and receiving mail, and holding together farms, churches, schools, stores, and families.
The best history of Tiptop has not been fully written yet. It waits in deed books, business ledgers, old newspapers, railroad maps, topographic sheets, survey files, and family photographs. The pieces already found are enough to show that Tiptop deserves a place in the story of Tazewell County.
It was one of those mountain communities where the modern world arrived by rail, but did not erase the older world all at once. The fields, springs, ridges, churches, roads, and family places remained. Around them came brick kilns, advertisements, resort porches, valuation maps, freight shipments, and the constant sound of trains moving through the high country.
For anyone driving through the Tiptop area today, the story may not be obvious at first glance. But in the old records, the place comes alive. There is the hotel at Iron Lithia Springs, lit by acetylene lamps. There are guests sitting on shaded porches. There are brick workers shaping clay dug from local ground. There are railroad men keeping the Clinch Valley line open. There are storekeepers, postmasters, farm families, schoolchildren, church members, and travelers passing through.
Tiptop’s history is not lost. It is waiting to be pieced together, one record at a time.
Sources & Further Reading
Virginia Department of Historic Resources. Historic Architectural Survey of Tazewell County. 2001. https://www.dhr.virginia.gov/pdf_files/SpecialCollections/TZ-045_Tazewell_AH_Survey_2001_GWorsham_report_cost_share.pdf
Virginia Tech Special Collections and University Archives. Radford Brick Company Cash Ledger, 1889 to 1921. Ms2010-025. https://aspace.lib.vt.edu/repositories/2/resources/2578
Norfolk and Western Historical Society Archives. Right-of-Way and Track-Map, Norfolk and Western Ry., Clinch Valley District, Pocahontas Division, Station 422+40 to Station 528+00, Sheet 5 of 75. 1916, revised 1933. https://www.nwhs.org/archivesdb/detail.php?ID=131637
Norfolk and Western Historical Society Archives. Right-of-Way and Track-Map, Norfolk and Western Ry., Clinch Valley District, Pocahontas Division, Station 316+80 to Station 422+40, Sheet 4 of 75. 1916, revised 1933. https://www.nwhs.org/archivesdb/detail.php?ID=131636
Norfolk and Western Historical Society Archives. Right-of-Way and Track-Map, Norfolk and Western Ry., Clinch Valley District, Pocahontas Division, Station 528+00 to Station 633+60, Sheet 6 of 75. 1916, revised 1933. https://www.nwhs.org/archivesdb/detail.php?ID=131638
“Iron Lithia Springs.” Clinch Valley News, June 12, 1903. https://www.virginiachronicle.com/?a=d&d=CVN19030612.1.1
“Iron Lithia Springs.” Roanoke Times, June 9, 1909. https://www.virginiachronicle.com/?a=d&d=TRT19090609.1.9
“Iron Lithia Springs Hotel Will Open Under New Management May 26th.” Tazewell Republican, May 12, 1910. https://www.virginiachronicle.com/?a=d&d=TR19100512.1.4
Radford Brick Company advertisement. Tazewell Republican, April 14, 1904. https://www.virginiachronicle.com/?a=d&d=TR19040414.1.2
Radford Brick Company advertisement. Tazewell Republican, July 6, 1905. https://www.virginiachronicle.com/?a=d&d=TR19050706.1.1
“Mining Ties and Props.” Tazewell Republican, April 10, 1902. https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn95079154/1902-04-10/ed-1/?sp=2&st=text
Englund, Kenneth J., and Roger E. Thomas. Coal Resources of Tazewell County, Virginia, 1980. U.S. Geological Survey Bulletin 1913. Reston, VA: U.S. Geological Survey, 1991. https://www.usgs.gov/publications/coal-resources-tazewell-county-virginia-1980
United States Geological Survey. USGS 1:24,000-Scale Quadrangle for Tiptop, Virginia, 1958. https://prd-tnm.s3.amazonaws.com/StagedProducts/Maps/HistoricalTopo/PDF/VA/24000/VA_Tiptop_186970_1958_24000_geo.pdf
United States Geological Survey. topoView. https://ngmdb.usgs.gov/topoview/
United States Geological Survey. Geographic Names Information System. https://www.usgs.gov/tools/geographic-names-information-system-gnis
Gannett, Henry. A Gazetteer of Virginia. U.S. Geological Survey Bulletin 232. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1904. https://pubs.usgs.gov/bul/0232/report.pdf
Library of Virginia. “Tazewell County Microfilm.” https://www.lva.virginia.gov/collections/ccmf/VA/VA273
FamilySearch. “Deed Books, 1800 to 1900; Indexes to Deeds, 1800 to 1923.” https://www.familysearch.org/en/search/catalog/399488
FamilySearch. “Will Books, 1800 to 1932; General Indexes to Wills, 1800 to 1985.” https://www.familysearch.org/en/search/catalog/366527
FamilySearch. “Order Books, 1800 to 1904.” https://www.familysearch.org/search/catalog/374078
Tazewell County Public Library. “Genealogy.” https://tcplweb.org/genealogy/
Tazewell County Circuit Court. “Genealogy Research.” https://www.courts.state.va.us/courts/circuit/Tazewell/genealogy
Bickley, George W. L. History of the Settlement and Indian Wars of Tazewell County, Virginia. Cincinnati: Morgan and Company, 1852. https://books.google.com/books/about/History_of_the_Settlement_and_Indian_War.html?id=gWFAAAAAYAAJ
Pendleton, William C. History of Tazewell County and Southwest Virginia, 1748 to 1920. Richmond, VA: W. C. Hill Printing Company, 1920. https://archive.org/details/historyoftazewel00pendrich
Harman, John Newton. Annals of Tazewell County, Virginia, from 1800 to 1922. Richmond, VA: W. C. Hill Printing Company, 1922. https://archive.org/details/annalsoftazewell01harm
Author Note: Tiptop is one of those Appalachian communities whose story survives in scattered pieces rather than one complete local history. If you have photographs, family records, business papers, Iron Lithia Springs material, or memories connected to Tiptop, they may help fill in the missing parts of the record.