Danville, Virginia — My Own Historical Experience
Through my own observation, it sometimes seems like Danville is one of those cities that nobody ever knows about unless they have a reason to. I experience this firsthand whenever I tell anyone, even people from my state, that I live here — the responses I get usually range from “where is that?” to “why would you want to live in Danville?” depending on how familiar the other person is with the area. Usually, native Virginians go with the latter.
Having grown up on the western outskirts of Richmond, Virginia in what could best be described as a “yuppie wonderland,” I was also guilty of not knowing that Danville existed, so I guess I can’t really blame people for not knowing, either. It’s only due to the fact that Averett University, where I go to school, is located right in the middle of Downtown that I actually know that this place exists.
The Danville I Know
Over the years, I’ve grown to both love and hate Danville. It’s an odd, quasi-bipolar relationship — I enjoy the unique small-town-plus-city feel that Danville provides, but if I’m going to be perfectly honest, I must admit that there are days when I do wake up and wonder “why do I want to live here?”
Maybe the cozy bubble of the Richmond suburbs has spoiled me to anything else, but over the few years that I’ve lived here, I feel as though that bubble has slowly started to burst, and that I’ve slowly begun warming up to this city, which at first felt very foreign and cold. There’s more to see and do here than people realize — more than I realized at first — and it has its problems, but so does every other city in America. In reality, Danville is no different than any other small city on the East Coast.
The Danville I Read About
Danville does occasionally make headlines in the news, but when it does, it’s usually painted in a negative light. In the wake of the closing of Dan River Mills, once the largest single-unit textile factory in the world, in 2006 due to foreign competition, and the gradual migration of vital industry away from the city, Danville has developed an image problem. The accidental dumping of almost 40,000 tons of coal ash into the Dan River, which runs right through Danville, by Duke Energy in 2014 didn’t do much to paint Danville in a positive light, either. The Ikea factory here has also made headlines for not giving its workers the “Swedish treatment,” with forced overtime and hostile work environments being the main source of employee chagrin.
Admittedly, it’s depressingly easy to point out the negative aspects of Danville, but despite all of its woes, it does seem like the city has entered an upward trend in both image and function recently.
Ongoing crackdowns on gang-related activity and revitalization programs targeting the Downtown area have served to give Danville a much-needed facelift. Most of the coal ash spilt in the river has been cleaned up, too, and though the abandoned textile factory still looms over the southern bank of the river in a state of disrepair, there have been talks about prospective tenants moving in recently.
Some say that Danville is doomed to a bleak future , but I disagree. If anything, the future looks even brighter now than it did just a year ago — at least from my perspective.
A City Rooted in History
Danville is a history-rich city, which is something that many people tend to overlook. In the Civil War, as Richmond fell to Union troops, Jefferson Davis relocated the capital of the Confederacy here, albeit for only a period of seven days. Davis’ original war strategy was to hold and defend major cities, but after the capture of Richmond, he began to anticipate that the War would have to be fought differently, and that his strategy of using major cities as strongholds wouldn’t work out for too much longer.
After Robert E. Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant during the battle of Appomattox Court House on April 9, 1865, Davis and his Confederate government fled Virginia and moved to Greensboro, North Carolina (which happens to be the closest “major” city to Danville). The old Confederate capitol building still stands, and is today occupied by the Danville Museum of Fine Arts and History.
Danville also experienced a series of Civil Rights-related protests and demonstrations in the summer of 1963. Though the protests had started peacefully, it was the police who turned them violent, as protesters were attacked, beaten, and arrested en masse. In many instances, demonstrators were charged under laws that contained specifically racist terminology in an effort to taunt them.
Previously, in April 1960, a protest sit-in was attempted at the Danville Memorial Library, but the city responded by closing the Library’s doors for some time. It’s these sorts of notorious acts that made Danville infamous for its history during the Civil Rights era. Many mass protests, jail-ins, and visits from civil rights leaders later, the city finally desegregated, though some demonstrators’ sentences were not suspended until the early 1970s.
The events of the 1960s have left scars on the city itself, but as time has moved forward, so have the people, and today’s Danville is a city that welcomes everyone, regardless of who they are or where they are from. I can honestly say that I’m proud to be part of a city that welcomes a varied range of citizenry and ethnically diverse backgrounds.
Apart from the more famous (and infamous) historical events that Danville has served as host to over the years, there are certain events in the city’s history that not even people from Danville are aware of. I recently had the opportunity to learn about one of these lesser-known events myself.
My Own Historical Discovery
Back in 1903, a Southern Railway mail train running a load of mail from Monroe, Virginia (just north of Lynchburg) down to Spencer, North Carolina (close to Salisbury, which sits about midway between Charlotte and Greensboro) ran off of the rails while moving through Danville. The locomotive itself, built by Baldwin Locomotive Works and known affectionately as the Old 97, was an hour behind schedule, and the crew, who were facing pressure by their company to deliver their shipment of mail on time, were traveling at a much higher rate of speed than usual.
Upon entering a railway trestle just north of the river, the train flew off of the rails and landed in a ravine, instantly killing nine of the 18 people on board — two died later as a result of injuries sustained from the derailment. The cause of the incident itself was attributed to excessive speed, and quickly became known as the worst rail accident in Virginia’s history.
Later on, the Old 97’s derailment served as inspiration for “Wreck of the Old 97,” a folk ballad written in the early ’20s by G. B. Grayson and Henry Whitter, and subsequently covered by a plethora of folk and country musicians ranging from Vernon Dalhart to Johnny Cash. The song itself exhibited great influence over the rise of country music, and has been referenced in movies such as Scarface and The Blues Brothers. It’s come to have been known as one of the most famous country and railroading-related songs of all time. The lyrics go something like this:
Oh, it’s a mighty rough road from Lynchburg to Danville,
For the line has a three-mile grade;
It was on that grade that he lost his airbrakes,
You can see what a jump that he made.He was goin’ down grade makin’ 90 miles an hour,
When the whistle broke into a scream;
He was found in the wreck with his hand on the throttle,
All scalded to death by the steam.A Telegram came from Washington station,
And this is how it read:
“That brave engineer who ran 97
is a-lyin’ down in Danville, dead.”
This bit of Danville history was completely unknown to me, even after living here for around two years. Several months ago, when I revealed to some railroad enthusiast friends of mine (they call themselves “railfans”) that I live here in Danville, some of them responded with “cool,” “really?” and “THAT Danville?” which are, by all means, not typical responses that I get from people after revealing my Danville residency.
Judging from their reactions, I figured that there was something about Danville that I had been missing out on. As it turns out, there was.
Later on, I learned about the Old 97’s unfortunate demise, and was thoroughly surprised that I’d never known about it before… especially since I’d driven my little Honda past the Old 97 tribute mural downtown many times, and puttered past the historical marker signifying the crash site over and over without even batting an eye. To top off the irony, I’m fairly certain I’d even heard Johnny Cash’s cover of the song before — though, in my defense, Cash doesn’t mention Danville in his version at all.
All in all, though, I think that I was more surprised to learn that more people knew about Danville than I had previously thought — all because a mail train derailed here in 1903.
Last night, with help from one of my railfan friends, I tracked down and confirmed the exact location of the Old 97’s crash site using an old zoning map from 1910. The Stillhouse Trestle, the piece of railroad track where the Old 97 derailed, was visible on the map, directly adjacent to a few streets that are still intact to this very day. I overlaid the older chart on a still image from Google Maps and confirmed the spot — the ravine that the Trestle spanned is still there, and there’s a patch of dirt that curves in the same way as the trestle did, but I’m not sure if there’s any correlation between the curve in the dirt patch and the curve in the trestle itself.
The historical marker is located about a hundred feet west of First Pilgrim Church and a gas station on Riverside Drive, directly next to the ravine, and the track itself ran from an area next the present-day baseball diamond just north of Riverside, down through the Stillhouse Trestle over the ravine, and then east along the north bank of the Dan River.
Southern Railway has since been absorbed into Norfolk Southern, who still run locomotives through Danville to this very day. Whenever I hear train horns blaring off in the distance at night now, I’m reminded of the little slice of railroading history that this city is famous for.
Conclusion
The moral of the story here is to appreciate history a little more — it can open up your mind to learning more about where you live and how things came to be. I’m not particularly interested in trains or railfanning, but I still had fun learning more about my city. Beyond a shadow of a doubt, I will definitely be paying more attention to those little (and possibly grossly overlooked) historical markers on the side of the road from now on, just in case something interesting pops up.
As I’ve learned, history can’t be appreciated until it’s realized.
