Qualla: Big Stone Gap, Virginia

Big Stone Gap, Virginia: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Pancreas13, CC0. In October 1978, Elizabeth Taylor walked into Fraley's Coach House diner in Big Stone Gap to help her husband campaign for the U.S. Senate, ordered fried chicken, and nearly died on a bone. The actress was rushed to Lonesome Pine Regional Hospital, where doctors saved her life. Months later she mailed the hospital a thank-you donation. That story still circulates in town, partly because it is unbelievable and partly because Big Stone Gap is a place where the unbelievable seems to happen with some regularity - a Virginia coal town that produced a major American novelist, played itself in a movie, and became the first locality in the country to formally back the federal Black Lung Disability Trust Fund.

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Image: Pancreas13 | CC0

Big Stone Gap, Virginia: Mineral City to Pittsburgh of the South

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit KJPurscell, CC BY-SA 3.0. Before it was Big Stone Gap, it was Mineral City and Three Forks, and the men who renamed it in 1888 were dreaming of an industrial future. The town sits in a valley cut through the Appalachian wall between Big Stone Gap and the neighboring town of Appalachia, and in the 1880s an...

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Image: KJPurscell | CC BY-SA 3.0

Big Stone Gap, Virginia: John Fox Jr. and the Lonesome Pine

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit KJPurscell, CC BY-SA 3.0. The novelist John Fox Jr. moved to Big Stone Gap in the 1890s when his brothers were prospecting for coal, and what he saw became the material of his fiction. His 1908 novel The Trail of the Lonesome Pine was a national bestseller and made the southern mountains visible to reader...

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Image: KJPurscell | CC BY-SA 3.0

Big Stone Gap, Virginia: Adriana Trigiani Comes Home

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Blackoffee, CC BY-SA 3.0. In 2000 Adriana Trigiani, raised in Big Stone Gap, published a novel called Big Stone Gap. In 2014 she came back to direct the movie. It starred Ashley Judd, Patrick Wilson, and Whoopi Goldberg, and most of the crowd-scene extras were neighbors. Carmine's restaurant - the movie's...

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Image: Blackoffee | CC BY-SA 3.0

Big Stone Gap, Virginia: Black Lung and What Comes Next

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Wth272, CC0. On August 16, 2018, the Big Stone Gap town council passed a resolution backing the federal Black Lung Disability Trust Fund. It was the first municipality in the United States to do so. Coal had built the town and had also poisoned its lungs - black lung disease, caused by years ...

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Image: Wth272 | CC0