Appalachian Community Histories – Wise, Wise County: From Gladeville to the Courthouse Town of Southwest Virginia
At the center of Wise, Virginia, the twin towers of the Wise County Courthouse rise above Main Street as a reminder that this Appalachian town developed differently from many of the coal communities surrounding it. Wise was never simply a company town or a settlement built around a single mine. Its identity came first from government and the courts, then from education, commerce, transportation, and the enormous coal economy that transformed the surrounding county.
Before the community was called Wise, it was Gladeville, a small county seat established in the Big Glades during the middle of the nineteenth century. From a log courthouse and Civil War raids to coal-boom prosperity and the establishment of what became the University of Virginia’s College at Wise, the town developed into one of the principal civic and educational centers of far southwestern Virginia.
The surviving documentary record is unusually rich. Virginia legislation, Wise County court and land records, newspapers, census schedules, Sanborn maps, and historic preservation files make it possible to follow the town from its earliest days with unusual detail.
A County Seat in the Big Glades
Wise County itself did not exist until 1856. The Virginia General Assembly created the new county from portions of Lee, Scott, and Russell counties and named it for Henry Alexander Wise, then governor of Virginia. The legislation directed that the county seat be established on the land of Daniel Ramey in a place known as the Big Glades. The new courthouse settlement became known as Gladeville.
The choice immediately gave the small community a purpose larger than its population. People from scattered farms, ridges, and valleys throughout the new county had to travel to Gladeville to record deeds, settle estates, bring lawsuits, attend elections, serve on juries, and conduct other public business. Government created the nucleus around which the town would grow.
The earliest courthouse arrangements reflected just how young the community was. According to the National Register documentation for the present courthouse, the county’s first court met in a small Primitive Baptist church about three hundred yards from the location of today’s courthouse. The building was so cramped that jurors sometimes withdrew to a nearby flat stone that became remembered as “Jury Rock.” In 1857 county officials ordered the construction of a two-story courthouse of hewn logs.
That modest courthouse represented something important. Wise County had only recently been divided from three older counties, yet Gladeville had already become the place where the machinery of local government operated. Courthouse days brought lawyers, litigants, witnesses, merchants, farmers, and politicians into the settlement, establishing a pattern that would continue long after the original buildings disappeared.
The Civil War Comes to Gladeville
Gladeville’s remote mountain setting did not protect it from the Civil War. Southwestern Virginia stood close to contested eastern Kentucky and contained routes through which Union and Confederate soldiers could move between the two states. In 1862 Confederate Brigadier General Humphrey Marshall used Gladeville for a time as his headquarters while directing military operations in the region. His forces were connected to the fighting around Pound Gap and the larger struggle for control of the Kentucky and Virginia borderlands.
Federal troops raided Gladeville on June 1, 1862. Among those captured was Morgan T. Lipps, a preacher who also served as clerk of the Wise County court. Local accounts preserved a colorful story in which Lipps initially resisted requests from his captors to preach to them before eventually relenting. The raid damaged part of the town, and other military incursions followed as Union troops repeatedly tested Confederate control of southwestern Virginia.
Another Union attack struck Gladeville in July 1863, when Federal troops surprised Confederate forces in town and captured numerous prisoners. The courthouse settlement had become a military objective not because it possessed enormous factories or railroad yards, but because it served as the administrative center of Wise County and occupied a useful position in the mountain borderlands.
The most consequential destruction came in 1864 when Federal troops burned the courthouse. The National Register documentation notes that county records fortunately escaped the destruction. Court sessions temporarily moved to the Virginia Hotel, on the site associated with the later Wise Inn.
The war therefore left more than memories of troops passing through town. It disrupted the institution around which Gladeville had been created. Yet the county government survived, records remained intact, and the courthouse settlement was rebuilt.
Rebuilding Gladeville
Reconstruction after the Civil War brought the gradual rebuilding of Gladeville’s civic life. A second courthouse, constructed of brick, was completed in 1876. By then the town had also received formal municipal standing. Virginia’s charter history records that Gladeville was incorporated in 1874. The surviving legal record sometimes renders the old name as “Gladesville,” while census records and other contemporary material commonly use “Gladeville.”
Education also became an early part of the town’s identity. In 1882 the Virginia General Assembly incorporated Gladeville College and designated the territory surrounding it as a sub-school district. The institution belonged to an earlier generation of Appalachian educational efforts, decades before the establishment of the modern college that would eventually dominate the western side of town.
Gladeville was still small, but it was acquiring the institutions associated with a permanent county seat. Churches, schools, lawyers’ offices, hotels, stores, government offices, and newspaper publishers had reasons to locate close to the courthouse. The town’s importance could not be measured by population alone.
Coal Transforms Wise County
The closing years of the nineteenth century changed Wise County more dramatically than almost anything since its creation. Railroads penetrated southwestern Virginia while investors opened enormous coal reserves beneath the mountains. Mining camps, coke operations, railroad settlements, and commercial towns expanded across the county.
Gladeville was somewhat removed from the largest mining operations, but it could not remain untouched by the transformation surrounding it. The Virginia Department of Historic Resources describes the 1890s as a boom period in Wise County, fueled by rising coal and coke production and the expansion of railroads serving the industry. Workers, investors, lawyers, engineers, merchants, and corporations entered the region in growing numbers.
The county seat itself wanted better access to this new transportation network. In 1897 and 1898, the General Assembly authorized the Gladeville town council to issue bonds in support of the construction and equipment of the Gladeville Railroad Company. The legislation reveals the town’s desire to overcome one of its most significant disadvantages. Unlike places such as Norton, Appalachia, and Big Stone Gap, the courthouse town was not positioned directly on the great railroad arteries that were reshaping the coalfield.
That disadvantage became serious enough that some interests advocated moving the county seat. The National Register history of the courthouse notes that railroad companies, citizens of Norton, and development interests complained that Wise was not situated on a railroad. A major highway bond issue in 1911 eventually improved access enough that efforts to relocate the county seat were abandoned.
Wise survived as the governmental heart of a county increasingly dominated economically by coal.
A Courthouse for the Coal Boom
Nothing expressed the new era more clearly than the courthouse completed in 1896.
The previous brick courthouse no longer reflected the ambitions of a county being transformed by coal and transportation. Wise County commissioned Washington architect Frank P. Milburn to design a new courthouse in the Renaissance Revival style. Local contractors Gilliam and Flanary completed the building, which remains one of Wise’s most recognizable landmarks.
Its size and appearance were statements of confidence. The building rested on a rough-cut stone foundation and incorporated towers, arched windows, masonry detailing, and architectural features uncommon among the simpler public buildings of the earlier mountain county. The Virginia Department of Historic Resources directly connects its construction to the prosperity generated by expanding railroads and increased coal mining.
The new courthouse represented a striking change from the little Baptist church where county officials had met forty years earlier. In a single generation, Gladeville had moved from log buildings and mountain isolation toward the civic architecture of a community benefiting from an industrializing coalfield.
Gladeville, Wise Post Office, and the Changing Name
The history of the town’s name is more complicated than a simple overnight change from Gladeville to Wise.
By the early twentieth century, “Wise” was already being used in ways that existed alongside the older municipal name. The 1910 federal census listed the community as “Gladeville town (Wise P.O.),” showing that Gladeville remained the incorporated town name while the post office used Wise. The census counted 806 residents in 1910, compared with 511 in 1900 and only 186 in 1890.
The Library of Congress provides another revealing piece of evidence. A Sanborn fire insurance map published in January 1908 was already titled Wise, Wise County, Virginia. Its three sheets recorded the streets, businesses, public buildings, construction materials, and other features of the courthouse town. These maps show that “Wise” had become an established practical name years before the General Assembly formally altered the municipal charter.
The legal change finally came in 1924. Virginia’s official charter history states that the former Town of Gladesville became the Town of Wise under an act of the General Assembly that year. The 1930 federal census likewise specifically noted that Wise’s name had been changed from Gladeville in 1924.
By then, the older name belonged increasingly to history, although it survived in references such as the Gladeville Magisterial District and in the documents of earlier generations.
Main Street and the Courthouse Economy
Government remained the foundation of Wise’s economy, and the businesses around the courthouse reflected it. Hotels were especially important because attorneys, witnesses, officials, salesmen, and residents from distant parts of the county often needed lodging when conducting business in town.
One of the strongest reminders is the Colonial Hotel, later known as the Inn at Wise. The present building was constructed in 1910 on a location associated with hotel use since shortly after the Civil War. Its predecessor, the Dotson Hotel, burned in 1909. Local businessmen organized the Wise Hotel Corporation and built a new twenty-two-room hotel, creating a gathering place that served courthouse visitors and became an important center of community life. Future Virginia governor George C. Peery was among those associated with the corporation.
Nearby houses also reflected the emergence of a professional and commercial class. The E. M. Fulton House, begun around 1905, stood prominently along the road through town. Its National Register documentation describes the residence as unusually elaborate for the area and closely connected to the civic and commercial life of the courthouse community.
Wise also developed its own newspaper tradition. The Gladeville Sun was published during the 1890s, followed by The Wise News in the early twentieth century and later publications including the Wise Gazette, Vagabond Gazette, and The Liberal. Their surviving issues provide a record of elections, businesses, court proceedings, schools, churches, deaths, social events, and the routine details through which the history of a small Appalachian town can be reconstructed.
The attached research material identifies these newspapers, along with Sanborn maps and Wise County court records, as some of the richest primary sources for rebuilding the town’s everyday history.
A College Comes to Wise
Another transformation began during the 1950s, and this one would permanently change Wise’s identity.
In December 1953, local residents Mary Thompson and Lois Tracy met University of Virginia Extension Division representative Samuel R. Crockett Jr. at the Inn at Wise and argued that southwestern Virginia needed greater access to higher education. At the time, there was no public college in Virginia west of Radford, leaving students in the far southwestern counties with limited options close to home.
Community leaders pushed the idea forward. Kenneth Asbury, Fred Greear, and William Thompson, remembered as the “Three Wise Men,” traveled to Charlottesville and Richmond seeking university and state support.
In 1954 the new college opened on the former Wise County poor farm with 109 full-time students. Two-thirds of them were Korean War veterans. The following year the institution received the formal name Clinch Valley College of the University of Virginia, and in 1956 the university acquired the college building and 110 acres from Wise County for one dollar.
What began with two buildings grew steadily. Miriam Morris Fuller became the first African American student admitted to the college in 1960. State legislation approved four-year degrees in 1966, and the college awarded its first Bachelor of Arts degrees in 1970.
In 1999 the institution officially became The University of Virginia’s College at Wise. By then the school had become one of the defining institutions not only of the town but of southwestern Virginia as a whole.
The development of the college gave Wise something relatively unusual among Appalachian coalfield towns. Even as mining employment rose and fell across the surrounding region, Wise possessed a major educational institution whose students, faculty, buildings, events, and employment increasingly shaped the community.
A Growing Courthouse Town
Census records show the scale of Wise’s transformation. The community counted only 806 residents in 1910. By 1940 the population had reached 1,226, and the preliminary 1950 census count recorded 1,568 residents.
The town continued expanding in the decades that followed, particularly as the college grew and Wise developed further as a center for education, government, professional services, and commerce. The 2020 Census recorded 2,971 residents within the town.
Those numbers tell only part of the story. Wise’s influence has always extended beyond its incorporated population. People from across the county have traveled there for court proceedings, government services, education, employment, shopping, cultural events, and other purposes. In that sense, the role first assigned to Gladeville in 1856 never disappeared. It simply expanded.
From the Big Glades to Modern Wise
Modern Wise still carries physical reminders of nearly every major stage in its history. The courthouse recalls the coal and railroad prosperity of the 1890s. The Inn at Wise represents the old courthouse-town tradition of hotels serving lawyers, travelers, and public officials. Historic houses preserve evidence of the professional class that emerged as the county economy expanded. UVA Wise reflects a twentieth-century effort to bring public higher education into a part of Virginia that had long been geographically distant from the state’s major universities.
Even the town’s two names reveal something about its development. Gladeville belonged to the mountain community created around a new courthouse in the 1850s. Wise emerged gradually as the same settlement became more closely tied to the wider coalfield economy and adopted an identity shared with the county surrounding it.
The old name was not erased immediately. Federal census records could still call the municipality Gladeville while identifying its post office as Wise. Maps could label the place Wise before the legislature formally changed its corporate name. Local government, postal practice, everyday speech, and legal terminology did not always change at the same moment.
That complexity is what makes the documentary history of Wise especially useful. Its transformation can be followed through laws, deeds, court books, newspapers, maps, census schedules, photographs, college records, and buildings still standing along Main Street.
Why the History of Wise Matters
Wise tells a different part of the Appalachian coalfield story.
The surrounding county contains communities whose existence was closely tied to mines, coke ovens, railroad spurs, and individual coal companies. Wise grew along another path. Coal still transformed it, but often indirectly. Mining created population, wealth, corporations, legal disputes, political power, and transportation demands throughout the county. Those forces flowed toward the courthouse town even when the mines themselves were located miles away.
Wise therefore became a place where the coalfield came to conduct its business.
Before that, it had been a Civil War crossroads where soldiers raided a courthouse settlement in the mountains. Before the coal boom, it had been a small place where jurors reportedly gathered on a flat rock because the first courtroom was too cramped. After the coal boom began, county leaders constructed one of southwestern Virginia’s most imposing courthouses. In the twentieth century, residents helped establish a college that gave generations of Appalachian students an opportunity to pursue higher education close to home.
The towers above Main Street remain perhaps the clearest symbol of that continuity. The community around them has been called Big Glades, Gladeville, and Wise, but for more than a century and a half it has served essentially the same purpose: a gathering place for a mountain county whose history has been shaped by war, coal, law, transportation, education, and the people who continued building institutions among the ridges of southwestern Virginia.
Sources & Further Reading
Virginia General Assembly. “Charter, Town of Wise.” Code of Virginia, Charters. Includes the incorporation history of Gladesville and the 1924 statutory name change to Wise. Accessed September 11, 2026. https://law.lis.virginia.gov/charters/wise/
Library of Virginia. “Wise County Microfilm.” County and City Records. Richmond: Library of Virginia. Includes court order books, deed records, charter books, Board of Supervisors minutes, bonds, wills, tax records, and other county records dating from Wise County’s creation in 1856. Accessed September 11, 2026. https://www.lva.virginia.gov/collections/ccmf/VA/VA297
Sanborn Map Company. Sanborn Fire Insurance Map from Wise, Wise County, Virginia. New York: Sanborn Map Company, January 1908. 3 sheets. Library of Congress Geography and Map Division. https://www.loc.gov/item/sanborn09095_001/
United States Bureau of the Census. Thirteenth Census of the United States, 1910: Supplement for Virginia. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1913. Includes Gladeville town, identified as “Wise P.O.,” and comparative population figures for 1890, 1900, and 1910. https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/decennial/1910/abstract/supplement-virginia.pdf
United States Bureau of the Census. Bulletin 360: Population by Counties and Minor Civil Divisions, 1910, 1900, 1890, Part 4. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1912. https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/decennial/1910/bulletins/demographics/360-population-by-counties-minor-civil-divisions-1910-1900-1890-part-4.pdf
United States Census Office. Bulletin No. 83: Population of Virginia. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1891. Includes Wise County and the Gladeville Magisterial District in the 1890 census. https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/decennial/1890/bulletins/demographics/83-population-of-va.pdf
United States Bureau of the Census. Fifteenth Census of the United States: 1930, Population, Virginia. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1932. Includes Wise County, Wise, and the Gladeville District after the town’s name change. https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/decennial/1930/population-volume-3/10612982v3p2ch10.pdf
Library of Virginia. “Virginia Newspaper Bibliography: Wise County.” Includes The Gladeville Sun, Wise News, Wise Gazette, Vagabond Gazette, and other newspapers documenting the county seat and surrounding coalfield. Accessed September 11, 2026. https://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/vnd/results.php?counties=Wise
Virginia Department of Historic Resources. “Wise County Courthouse.” Virginia Landmarks Register and National Register of Historic Places. Richmond: Virginia Department of Historic Resources. Accessed September 11, 2026. https://www.dhr.virginia.gov/historic-registers/329-0001/
Virginia Department of Historic Resources. Wise County Courthouse: National Register of Historic Places Inventory-Nomination Form. Richmond: Virginia Department of Historic Resources, 1980. Particularly useful for the creation of the county seat, early courthouses, Civil War destruction, and construction of the 1896 courthouse. Wise County Courthouse record and nomination
Tolson, Edward. Wise County, Virginia, City of Norton: Historic Architectural Survey. Warrenton, VA, 1995. Prepared for the Virginia Department of Historic Resources. https://dhr.fr.virginia.gov/pdf_files/SpecialCollections/WS-057_Wise_County_Norton_Historic_AH_Survey_1995_Cost_share_report.pdf
Virginia Department of Historic Resources. “Colonial Hotel (The Inn at Wise Courthouse).” Virginia Landmarks Register and National Register of Historic Places. Accessed September 11, 2026. https://www.dhr.virginia.gov/historic-registers/329-0002/
Virginia Department of Historic Resources. “E. M. Fulton House.” Virginia Landmarks Register and National Register of Historic Places. Richmond: Virginia Department of Historic Resources. Accessed September 11, 2026. Wise County historic-register listings
University of Virginia’s College at Wise. “Historical Milestones.” UVA Wise. Documents the 1953 campaign for a college, the 1954 opening on the Wise County poor farm, expansion to a four-year institution, desegregation, and later development. Accessed September 11, 2026. https://www.uvawise.edu/about/our-history-mission/historical-milestones
Lee, Anne Carter. “Wise.” SAH Archipedia. Edited by Gabrielle Esperdy and Karen Kingsley. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012–. Accessed September 11, 2026. http://sah-archipedia.org/essays/VA-02-0005-0017-0001
Lee, Anne Carter. “Wise County.” SAH Archipedia. Edited by Gabrielle Esperdy and Karen Kingsley. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012–. Based on Buildings of Virginia: Valley, Piedmont, Southside, and Southwest. http://sah-archipedia.org/essays/VA-02-0005-0017
Lee, Anne Carter. “Wise County Courthouse.” SAH Archipedia. Edited by Gabrielle Esperdy and Karen Kingsley. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012–. http://sah-archipedia.org/buildings/VA-02-WI1
Addington, Luther Foster. The Story of Wise County, Virginia. Wise, VA: Centennial Committee and School Board of Wise County, Virginia, 1956. Reprint, Johnson City, TN: Overmountain Press, 1988. https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Story_of_Wise_County_Virginia.html?id=BMwwuiHQgA8C
Addington, Luther Foster. The Story of Wise County, Virginia. Wise, VA: Centennial Committee and School Board of Wise County, Virginia, 1956. Digitized copy, Internet Archive. https://archive.org/details/storyofwisecount00addi
Johnson, Charles A. A Narrative History of Wise County, Virginia. Norton, VA: Norton Press, 1938. Reprint, Johnson City, TN: Overmountain Press, 1988. https://books.google.com/books/about/A_Narrative_History_of_Wise_County_Virgi.html?id=6RyGQfOhl18C
Wise County Historical Society. The Heritage of Wise County and the City of Norton, 1856–1993. Wise, VA: Wise County Historical Society, 1994. This community history is particularly useful for identifying families, institutions, businesses, schools, churches, and local traditions for further primary-source investigation. Its use is also documented in Virginia historic-preservation research.
Wise County Historical Society. The Heritage of Wise County and the City of Norton, Virginia, 1856–2001. Vol. 2. Wise, VA: Wise County Historical Society, 2001.
Author Note: Wise has always interested me because its story is larger than the town’s population, with the courthouse, coalfields, and college each shaping Southwest Virginia in different ways. I wanted to follow that history from Gladeville forward through the strongest surviving records while showing how one mountain county seat continually reinvented its role.