Place to see: Bluefield, West Virginia, Pribble, Virginia, United States

About this place:

Nature's Air-Conditioned City

(Provided by Wikipedia)

The history of Bluefield begins in the 1780s, when two families settled in a rugged and remote part of what is now southern West Virginia, and built a small village with a mill, a church, a one-room schoolhouse, and a fort for defending the small settlement against invasions by the much larger Shawnee Indian tribe on the banks of the Bluestone River. The Davidson and Bailey family had to sell a portion of their land when in 1882, Captain John Fields, of the Norfolk and Western Railroad pioneered the area and began building a new railroad through the hills of Bluefield (named after the chicory flowers in the area that painted the landscape a purplish blue hue during the summer) and nearby Harman, Virginia.

Underneath the feet of the Davidsons and Baileys lie the largest and richest deposit of bituminous coal in the world - the soft burning coal which was ripe for fueling the industrial machines of the developing world. The first seam was discovered in nearby Pocahontas, Virginia, in the backyard of Jordan Nelson, which was, in the words of President Frederick Kimball of the Norfolk and Western Company, the "most spectacular find on the continent and indeed perhaps of the entire planet." The seam is mentioned in Thomas Jefferson's "Notes on the State of Virginia," but it was not mined until 1890

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So-called "Summit City", because of its high elevation, and its naturally sloping divides in the coal yards, Bluefield became one of the first cities in the world to have a noticeable skyline - with high rises that were only comparable to New York and Chicago in their day. Today, those high rises remain, but they are nowhere near the height which are common in many modern American cities today.

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In 1924, nearby Harman, Virginia decided to rename itself Bluefield, Virginia to try and cash in on the opulent growth of its West Virginia neighbor. Additionally, Nobel-prize-winning economist and mathematician John Forbes Nash was born in Bluefield in 1928.

The Great Depression however, broke the city's back. With the government nearly bankrupt, and series of devastating structural fires that swept through the downtown area and nearly took down every high rise the city had so feverishly built, the city was nearly destroyed. It was not until World War II came that the coal fires started burning again.

The importance of the city was so great that Adolf Hitler even put Bluefield on its reputed list of German air raid targets in the United States. Air raid practice drills were common in the city during this time, as anyone living from those days can clearly recall.

Ironically, the worst thing to happen to Bluefield was the interstate road system, which finally punched through East River Mountain in the 1960s and for the first time allowed automobile traffic to pass through the city without crossing the top of the mountain. The dependence on railroad traffic waned and the city began to shrink in population and eventually lost its Amtrak station in the 1980s. As the importance of the railroad continued to decline, the city shriveled to a much smaller version of its prior glory.