Dickenson County VAGenWeb
From VAGenWeb Dickenson County Project
Welcome to the Dickenson County VAGenWeb Page!
Welcome to the VAGenWeb Dickenson County, VAGenWeb page. This page is maintained to help you find your Dickenson County, Virginia ancestors and cousins. This page is made possible by roaming packs (well, at least a handful) of volunteers willing to transcribe records, submit reports, and in general, support the public research community. This is a non-commercial site so feel free to use its contents for your own non-commercial purposes. Hopefully you will find some information (or a hyperlink) here that will help you unlock your Southwestern Virginia roots.
If you have any questions, please feel free to contact the site's webmaster and Dickenson County Coordinator for VAGenWeb, Dennis V. Stanley. Thanks for visiting!
What's New
Site News
- Robot Attack! One of the problems with a collaborative web site is that sometimes people get carried away. There are plenty of security precautions that can be taken to avoid this, but sometimes certain webmasters *cough* don't implement them as they should and havoc follows. By mid-February 2008 this site had over 500 bogus user accounts and untold pages filled with spammer links. Spam-bots comb the internet for vulnerable sites *ahem* and then fill them with links to who-knows-what. Needless to say, I had to take the site down, delete it, re-install it, and have since got things back up and running. During this process, I've found areas that needed more love (i.e., Cemeteries) and so have been working furiously to bring those sections up-to-date. Check them out!
- Cemeteries! One of the more useful resources for genealogists are cemeteries. While the carved information is not always correct, gravestones give names, dates, relations, and a sense of location. If you have ANY information on Dickenson County cemeteries (e.g., transcriptions, photos, directions, descriptions) please contact me, I would love to incorporate what you know into the site! It doesn't matter if it's only one stone or a whole cemetery; every bit of information might be a missing key for someone else!
- Thanks to Sherrie Stinson for contributing photos and transcriptions!
Reunions
- Family of Alfred and Annie (Clay) Stanley Reunion will be held on July 19th, 2008 at the old Yates School ground on Caney Ridge. Contact Gary Large or Debbie Yates Hill for more info.
Contributions
Eric McCowan submitted some links for Dickenson County Online Information and an online Dickenson County Coal Miners Memorial. Keith Deel sent me some Dickenson County church information for the Churches page. Jeff Turner submitted a good photo of John H. Turner and Nora Ann Yates! Please keep in mind that most of the Gallery photos on this site have been optimized for display on the web. This often entails resizing, cropping, color level adjustment, reducing the DPI, etc. If you're looking for a copy of the original raw photo, send me an e-mail (I may still have the original submission) or contact the listed submitter. Do not publish any of the included photos without the consent of the original submitter.
Introduction
Dickenson County, Virginia was formed in 1880 from Buchanan, Russell, and Wise counties. It was named after W. J. Dickenson, a member of the Virginia Assembly. The Dickenson County seat is Clintwood, Virginia.
Dickenson County is located in the Southwestern corner of the Commonwealth of Virginia, cradled within the Appalachian mountains and forests (see Virginia Counties Map).
The region remained largely uncharted until the 1800s. Before this, the only people to move through the area were Native Americans and southwest Virginia long hunters, both of which used it as hunting grounds. The first European-American settlements were at Sand Lick ("Fighting Dick" Colley) and Holly Creek (John Mullins), which would later become Clintwood.
Before the 1900's, Dickenson County was a pioneer area, with most of the population sustaining themselves on small farms. It wasn't until the 1880's that the timber and coal industries would begin to chop and mine their way into the county. The residents of Dickenson County were poor, and many jumped at the chance of selling mineral rights to industry prospectors. It would be another 35 years before the Carolina Clinchfield & Ohio Railroad would arrive, and begin to fully exploit the rich forests and mountains. The resulting jobs ignited a growth which doubled the population in 15 years. In the 1930's natural gas reserves were also found in the region. By the 1950's the lumber companies had exhausted their reserves, but the coal and natural gas industries continue strongly to the present.
