Qualla: Wise County, Virginia

Wise County, Virginia: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Skye Marthaler, CC BY-SA 3.0. Wise County is one of those places where everything happened. The actor George C. Scott was born here. So was Napoleon Hill, whose 1937 book Think and Grow Rich has sold tens of millions of copies. So was Ralph Stanley, the bluegrass tenor whose high lonesome voice carried the genre into the twenty-first century. So was John Fox Jr., whose 1908 novel The Trail of the Lonesome Pine made the southern mountains visible to American readers. So was Edith Maxwell, a schoolteacher whose 1935 conviction for killing her father set off one of the biggest media firestorms of the decade. The county is 405 square miles of Appalachian ridges in the southwestern corner of Virginia, formed in 1856 and named for Henry A. Wise, then the state's governor. Coal made it. The closure of coal is unmaking it. What comes next is still being worked out.

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Image: Skye Marthaler | CC BY-SA 3.0

Wise County, Virginia: Before Coal

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kestep at English Wikipedia, Public domain. The Cherokee held this country, with Shawnee and Iroquois challenges, through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In the summer of 1786, Cherokee and Shawnee hunting parties fought a two-day battle at the headwaters of the Clinch River - a Cherokee victory, with heavy losse...

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Image: Kestep at English Wikipedia | Public domain

Wise County, Virginia: The Coal Decades

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit J654567, CC BY-SA 3.0. Coal arrived in the 1880s and remade everything. The Stonega Coke and Coal Company organized in the town of Appalachia and built up the surrounding hollows with company houses, company stores, and rail lines. Labor came from far away - African American families moving north, and ...

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Image: J654567 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Wise County, Virginia: Famous Sons and One Famous Daughter

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit J654567, CC BY-SA 3.0. George C. Scott grew up in Wise in the 1930s, watched coal trains as a boy, and became the actor who refused his Patton Oscar in 1971 because he found the awards system absurd. Napoleon Hill, born in 1883 in Pound, drew on the discipline of his hardscrabble childhood to write the...

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Image: J654567 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Wise County, Virginia: Prisons, Power, and What Holds

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jack Corn, Public domain. Two of the highest-security prisons in Virginia opened in Wise County in the late 1990s, three years apart: Red Onion State Prison in 1998, Wallens Ridge State Prison in 1999. Both were built on coal-scarred ridges; both were seen, at first, as economic substitutes for the work t...

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Image: Jack Corn | Public domain