Small Towns of Virginia Series

Small Towns of Virginia Series - Clintwood

Clintwood, the county seat of Dickenson County, was established in 1882 when the Virginia General Assembly moved the Dickenson County Seat from Ervinton to what was then known as Holly Creek. Ervinton was located near the present-day community of Nora, a few miles to the south.

Many small towns in Southwestern Virginia including Clintwood have roots in bluegrass and mountain music. Clintwood is located on Virginia's Crooked Road and is home to the Ralph Stanley Museum and Traditional Mountain Music Center. Stanley, considered to be the patriarch of Bluegrass music, was born in nearby Big Spraddle and was a resident of Dickenson County his whole life. Stanley and his brother Carter formed the legendary Stanley Brothers group with the Clinch Mountain Boys as their band. After his brother's death in 1966, Stanley would continue solo with the Clinch Mountain Boys. Stanley was inducted into the Grand Ole Opry in 2000. That same year, Stanley would gain new notoriety when the hit film O Brother, Where Art Thou? was released. Stanley would win a Grammy in 2002 for the Best Male Vocal Country Performance. Ralph Stanley passed away at age 89 in June of 2016.

The Jettie Baker Center is the renovated home of the former Mullins Theatre. The 350 seat theatre was built in the late 1940s and was donated to the town by Jettie Baker. It is home to numerous performances year round including an open bluegrass jam on Friday nights.

Dickenson County Courthouse

Site Navigation:

Return to Small Towns of Virginia Series Index

Comments

Tena Greear said…

My Hometown! I grew up going to Mullins theatre on Saturday nights. Friday night was reserved for Clintwood Greenwave championship football!

10:07 PM

Anonymous said…

Crime corruption and greed is all you'll find in this beautiful county if not for coal mines jails and prison they'd be no industry there's 5 dr s offices and 6 pharmacies on main street and they wonder why they have a drug problem and our justice system is so corrupt they make up their own laws as they go along

2:24 PM

Paper Highways: The Unbuilt New Orleans Bypass (Proposed I-410)

There are many examples around the United States of proposed freeway corridors in urban areas that never saw the light of day for one reason or another. They all fall somewhere in between the little-known and the infamous and from the mundane to the spectacular. One of the more obscure and interesting examples of such a project is the short-lived idea to construct a southern beltway for the New Orleans metropolitan area in the 1960s and 70s. Greater New Orleans and its surrounding area grew rapidly in the years after World War II, as suburban sprawl encroached on the historically rural downriver parishes around the city. In response to the development of the region’s Westbank and the emergence of communities in St. Charles and St. John the Baptist Parishes as viable suburban communities during this period, regional planners began to consider concepts for new infrastructure projects to serve this growing population. The idea for a circular freeway around the southern perimeter of t

Hernando de Soto Bridge (Memphis, TN)

The newest of the bridges that span the lower Mississippi River at Memphis, the Hernando de Soto Bridge was completed in 1973 and carries Interstate 40 between downtown Memphis and West Memphis, AR. The bridge’s signature M-shaped superstructure makes it an instantly recognizable landmark in the city and one of the most visually unique bridges on the Mississippi River. As early as 1953, Memphis city planners recommended the construction of a second highway bridge across the Mississippi River to connect the city with West Memphis, AR. The Memphis & Arkansas Bridge had been completed only four years earlier a couple miles downriver from downtown, however it was expected that long-term growth in the metro area would warrant the construction of an additional bridge, the fourth crossing of the Mississippi River to be built at Memphis, in the not-too-distant future. Unlike the previous three Mississippi River bridges to be built the city, the location chosen for this bridge was about two

Memphis & Arkansas Bridge (Memphis, TN)

Like the expansion of the railroads the previous century, the modernization of the country’s highway infrastructure in the early and mid 20th Century required the construction of new landmark bridges along the lower Mississippi River (and nation-wide for that matter) that would facilitate the expected growth in overall traffic demand in ensuing decades. While this new movement had been anticipated to some extent in the Memphis area with the design of the Harahan Bridge, neither it nor its neighbor the older Frisco Bridge were capable of accommodating the sharp rise in the popularity and demand of the automobile as a mode of cross-river transportation during the Great Depression. As was the case 30 years prior, the solution in the 1940s was to construct a new bridge in the same general location as its predecessors, only this time the bridge would be the first built exclusively for vehicle traffic. This bridge, the Memphis & Arkansas Bridge, was completed in 1949 and was the third

Gribblenation

Search This Blog