Qualla: Tazewell County, Virginia

Tazewell County, Virginia: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Smash the Iron Cage, CC BY-SA 4.0. Near the summit of Paintlick Mountain, somebody carved figures into the rock long before anyone in Europe had heard of Virginia. The petroglyphs are extraordinarily rare for the eastern United States, where soft sandstone and 10,000 years of weather have erased most of what indigenous people left behind. Paintlick endured because the mountain wanted it to. So did Tazewell County, the southwestern Virginia county that wraps its 520 square miles around the headwaters of four watersheds and one of the strangest landforms in the Appalachians: Burke's Garden, a bowl-shaped valley that geologists call a doubly plunging anticline and that everyone else just calls God's Thumbprint.

Image: Smash the Iron Cage | CC BY-SA 4.0

Tazewell County, Virginia: First Permanent Settlement

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Justin van Dyke, CC BY-SA 3.0. Thomas and John Witten arrived in the spring of 1771 and built cabins at Crab Orchard. They were the first permanent European settlers in what would become Tazewell County, though the Cherokee and Shawnee had been hunting these high valleys for as long as anyone remembered. The c...

Image: Justin van Dyke | CC BY-SA 3.0

Tazewell County, Virginia: Burke's Garden

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit jpmueller99 from Columbus, OH, USA, CC BY 2.0. If you were going to design a hidden valley, you would design Burke's Garden. The bowl sits at roughly 3,100 feet, surrounded on every side by Garden Mountain rising another 1,500 feet above the valley floor. The rim is unbroken save for a single narrow gap, and the result is a l...

Image: jpmueller99 from Columbus, OH, USA | CC BY 2.0

Tazewell County, Virginia: The Pocahontas Boom

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jarek Tuszyński (user:Jarekt), CC BY 3.0. After the Civil War, railroads pushed into the Clinch Valley and found coal and iron in commercial quantities. The Pocahontas Coalfield made Richlands a boomtown in the early 1890s, and at its peak the Richlands Hotel was said to rival the best in New York. Saloons multiplied, mo...

Image: Jarek Tuszyński (user:Jarekt) | CC BY 3.0

Tazewell County, Virginia: Four Rivers Begin Here

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Russell Lee, Public domain. Tazewell County sits high enough on the Appalachian spine that four major watersheds begin within its boundaries. The Upper Clinch rises here and flows southwest toward Tennessee. The Middle New flows north into the New River Gorge. The North Fork Holston drains south into the Te...

Image: Russell Lee | Public domain

Tazewell County, Virginia: The Lassie Country

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jack Corn, Public domain. Paramount Pictures filmed its 1994 Lassie here, the studio drawn by the same pastoral folds of Burke's Garden and the Clinch Valley that have always made Tazewell County look more like an idealized America than the actual one. The county is part of the Bluefield, WV-VA Micropolit...

Image: Jack Corn | Public domain