Qualla: Appomattox County, Virginia

Appomattox County, Virginia: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nyttend, Public domain. Until April 1865, Appomattox County was unremarkable - a young Virginia county, only twenty years old, settled in the rolling Piedmont southwest of Richmond. Its courthouse village had a tavern, a few stores, and a population that knew everyone by name. Then on a Palm Sunday afternoon, two generals met in a private home on the village's main street, and a quiet county became shorthand for the end of a war that had killed three-quarters of a million Americans. Today, fewer than seventeen thousand people live here. The land is still rolling and green. The name still belongs to a people who lived on these waters long before the surrender that made it famous.

Image: Nyttend | Public domain

Appomattox County, Virginia: The Name Came First

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit © 2005 Wyatt Greene, CC BY-SA 3.0. 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. T...

Appomattox County, Virginia: A County Built from Pieces

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Doug Coldwell, CC BY-SA 3.0. 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 t...

Image: Doug Coldwell | CC BY-SA 3.0

Appomattox County, Virginia: Palm Sunday, 1865

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit © 2005 Wyatt Greene, CC BY-SA 3.0. 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 ...

Appomattox County, Virginia: After the Cameras Left

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit © 2005 Wyatt Greene, CC BY-SA 3.0. 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...

Appomattox County, Virginia: Two Rivers, One Name

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit © 2005 Wyatt Greene, CC BY-SA 3.0. 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...