The James River runs east through central Virginia from the Blue Ridge to the Chesapeake Bay, and Lynchburg sits on the south bank where Blackwater Creek joins it. The seven hills nickname is literal — the city climbs and descends and climbs again, with downtown sitting low along the river and residential districts spreading up the bluffs above. Spring is short and unstable, summers hum at ninety degrees with thick humidity, autumns settle into a long mild spell, and winters can bring repeated foot-deep snowstorms. Locals call the city "Drenchburg" for the way rain systems hang over the hills for days. The warmest part of the day, oddly, tends to be late afternoon — around five, not noon. The Peaks of Otter rise visibly to the west; on clear days the Blue Ridge sketches the horizon.

Through the nineteenth century, Lynchburg made plug tobacco. Farmers across the Piedmont brought leaf in by wagon, factories along Fifth Street and the river processed and pressed it, and the Virginia and Tennessee Railroad and later Norfolk Southern hauled the finished product south and east. James Albert Bonsack, born in Lynchburg in 1859, invented the first practical cigarette-rolling machine in 1880 at the age of twenty-one — a device that transformed the American tobacco industry by automating what had been skilled hand labor. Beyond tobacco, the city built brick: most of downtown's Federal and Greek Revival commercial blocks date from the second and third quarters of the nineteenth century. During the Civil War, Lynchburg's industrial capacity and rail connections made it a Confederate supply hub and hospital town. Jubal Early — the Confederate general buried in the city — defended it from a Union assault in June 1864.

The Old City Cemetery, established in 1806 on land John Lynch donated, holds an estimated 18,000 to 20,000 burials — roughly two-thirds of them African American, including more than 90% of Lynchburg's enslaved and free Black residents from 1806 to 1865. Point of Honor, the 1815 Cabell-family mansion on Daniel's Hill, was both a stately Federal house and, eventually, home at various times to the Langhornes — a family whose daughters included the original Gibson Girl and Nancy Astor, the first woman to take her seat in Parliament. The Anne Spencer House on Pierce Street was the home of the Harlem Renaissance poet and the place where Marian Anderson stayed after a 1934 concert, where Langston Hughes and W. E. B. Du Bois and Thurgood Marshall and Martin Luther King Jr. were guests. Thomas Jefferson's octagonal retreat villa, Poplar Forest, sits about twelve miles west in Bedford County. Lynchburg holds an unusual density of layered American history per square mile.

The modern story of Lynchburg has been reshaped by Liberty University, founded in 1971 by Jerry Falwell Sr. The university now enrolls roughly 96,000 students between its residential campus and online programs, and its 275-foot Freedom Tower has surpassed the 1931 Allied Arts Building as the tallest structure in town. Politically Lynchburg has long been conservative, though by 2020 the city narrowly voted Democratic for the first time since 1948 before flipping back in 2024. The Amtrak Northeast Regional reaches Kemper Street Station twice a day; the Lynchburg Hillcats play Class-A baseball at Calvin Falwell Field. Notable native sons and daughters include astronaut Leland Melvin, country singer Phil Vassar, actress Connie Britton, and Medal of Honor recipient Desmond Doss — the World War II combat medic whose Okinawa rescue of 75 men was dramatized in Hacksaw Ridge.