Appomattox is older than the county, older than Virginia, older than English settlement on the James. The Appamatuck were an Algonquian-speaking people of the Powhatan Confederacy whose villages stood along the lower Appomattox River when the Jamestown colonists landed in 1607. Their werowance, Coquonasum, met John Smith. Their towns appear on the earliest English maps of the Chesapeake. When the colony took their river name, then their county name, then the surrender site name, the words traveled forward into American memory while the people who first spoke them were pushed off the land. The Appamatuck did not vanish - they were absorbed, dispersed, and partly intermarried with other Powhatan groups - but their voice in their own naming was lost.

Appomattox County is one of Virginia's youngest counties, formed in 1845 from corners of Buckingham, Prince Edward, Campbell, and Charlotte. Samuel D. McDearmon bought the 'Clover Hill' tract that year and donated thirty acres for a new county seat. He built a tavern, lots, and the mansion he hoped would anchor his fortune. McDearmon went bankrupt within a decade, but the village he laid out - Appomattox Court House - became the county's heart. Tobacco farms, mills along the river, and the Southside Railroad reaching west in 1854 wove the county into the Confederate economy. Twenty years after its founding, it would become the site of that economy's collapse.

On April 9, 1865, Robert E. Lee rode into the village of Appomattox Court House from the west. Ulysses S. Grant rode in from the south. They met in the parlor of Wilmer McLean, a merchant who had moved his family from Manassas in 1863 to escape the war. The surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia ended four years of fighting on the eastern front. About 28,000 Confederate soldiers stacked arms in the days that followed. For nearly four million Black Americans held in bondage, the end of the war meant the beginning of legal freedom. For the surrendering soldiers, paroled and allowed to keep their horses, it meant the long walk home through a Virginia they no longer ruled. The McLean house still stands at the National Historical Park, reconstructed from the original materials after a tourist-era dismantling.

The Southside Railroad bypassed the old courthouse village in favor of Appomattox Station, three miles west - the modern town of Appomattox. The county seat moved with it. The old village around the McLean House emptied out, eventually preserved as Appomattox Court House National Historical Park. The new town grew up around the railroad: the 1892 courthouse, the 1895-97 jail, the Knickerbocker Hotel, the Bank of Appomattox. The county settled into a rural pattern of tobacco, lumber, and small farms. Today the population sits around 16,000 - smaller than many American suburbs. The county has voted Republican consistently since 1964, after generations as part of the Solid South Democratic bloc.

The Appomattox River rises in this county, three miles northeast of the town of Appomattox, in a field beside a state route. From there it flows 157 miles east through Farmville and Petersburg before joining the James at City Point in Hopewell. The county sits on the western edge of the Appomattox watershed and on the northwestern edge of the Lynchburg metropolitan area. Adjacent counties include Nelson to the north, Buckingham to the northeast, and Amherst to the northwest - all small, all rural, all part of the central Piedmont quilt. From the air the county reads as forest and pasture cut by Route 460 and the old railroad. From the ground it reads as one of the most consequential places in American history, hiding inside a landscape that gives no sign of what happened here.