The history of Christiansburg.

Christiansburg exists because Montgomery County needed a courthouse near its middle. The county was formed in 1776 out of Fincastle County, and it was much larger then. In 1789 the General Assembly cut a new county, Wythe, from its western end, and told Montgomery’s justices to meet the next May at the house of James Craig and choose a place for the court as near the center of the county as they could.

After Wythe County took effect in 1790, the court moved to James Craig’s house and tavern at Hans Meadow. Craig gave the county title to land for the public buildings, and on May 21, 1790, the new town was surveyed.

The General Assembly made it official on November 10, 1792. Its act established as a town 180 acres belonging to Montgomery County, where the courthouse and the other public buildings stood, “already laid off into lots and streets,” by the name of Christiansburg, with nine trustees in charge. Most historians believe the town was named for Colonel William Christian, a justice of the county from 1779, who was killed in 1786.

Christiansburg grew up on the main road west. The western branch of the Great Wagon Road, which ran from Philadelphia toward the backcountry of the Carolinas and Georgia, crossed the New River Valley, and that branch became known as the Wilderness Road. After Daniel Boone and others improved it about 1775, it was the main route of migration to Kentucky and the West through the Cumberland Gap. Its route climbed the Allegheny Mountains at Christiansburg and crossed the New River at Ingles Ferry, a state historical marker records. Main Street is that road, the one the Town’s history calls the Great Wilderness Road; today it is U.S. Route 11.

Travelers made the town’s first business. In 1793 five householders were licensed to keep ordinaries, the taverns of the day. When the French prince Louis Philippe, later King of the French, passed through in April 1797, he found a village of about ten houses.

Other roads came to meet the Great Road. From 1806 to 1809 the Alleghany Turnpike was built from Salem to Christiansburg, a market route east. The cross street ran south toward the Little River, the label South Franklin Street once carried, and north, after the 1850s, toward the railroad depot. About 1855 the Jacksonville and Christiansburg Turnpike, running north and south, crossed the railroad at the depot, and in the 1850s the Yellow Sulphur Turnpike, today’s Cambria Street, was built from the depot toward the springs resort. Peppers Ferry Road, now Route 114, is named for a ferry crossing that Samuel Pepper set up in the 1770s.

The town filled in along its two streets. It was incorporated in 1833, with trustees, and an act of 1861 gave it elected officers. In 1835 it had 335 people, 45 houses and 5 stores. In 1852 Henry Howe’s Historical Collections of Virginia placed Christiansburg 203 miles southwest of Richmond on the main stage road from Richmond to Nashville, with 4 stores, 2 churches and about 400 people. The Bank of the Valley opened in 1853 in a two-story brick building facing the square, and the brick Presbyterian church was built the same year.

The folk artist Lewis Miller visited a cousin here four times between 1846 and 1871 and sketched the town. His drawings and an 1855 painting by Edward Beyer show buildings only along Main and Franklin streets.

The railroad did not come to the square. In 1851 the Virginia and Tennessee Railroad chose a site along Crab Creek about a mile north of the courthouse, where the grades allowed it. The tracks reached the depot in 1854, and a permanent station followed in 1857. In 1864 Union troops burned the depot complex. Its replacement, built by the railroad about 1869, still stands on Depot Street: one of only two known railroad buildings from the Reconstruction years left in Southwest Virginia.

A village grew up around the station. It got a post office in 1873 and the name Bangs, became Ronald in 1885, and in 1892 took the name Cambria, from the rock formation beneath it. The depot was the transfer point for guests bound for the Yellow Sulphur Springs resort, and a turnpike ran from the station to the springs along what is now Cambria Street.

Cambria was incorporated as a town of its own in 1906, the year the railroad built a new passenger station a short way east and turned the old depot into a freight station. In 1908 a wholesale grocery and the Bank of Cambria went up facing the depot square; together they are the Surface-Lee Block. By 1913 a lumber company, a furniture factory and a flour mill worked near the tracks. Upstairs over a Cambria drugstore was the county’s first hospital. Farmers from Floyd County came north to Cambria to trade.

Fires in 1947 and, by the Town’s account, 1959 destroyed some of Cambria’s oldest commercial buildings. The two towns then became one: the state’s charter record dates the consolidation to 1964, and the Town’s history to December 31, 1965. Cambria’s depot square, its storefronts and its houses on Depot, Montgomery and Cambria streets are now the Cambria Historic District.

In 1866, the year after the Civil War ended, Captain Charles S. Schaeffer, an agent of the Freedmen’s Bureau, began teaching freedpeople in Christiansburg. It was five years before Virginia had public schools. With help from the Friends’ Freedmen’s Association of Philadelphia, a Quaker group, the school added a normal school building in 1873, and in 1885 it built the Hill School, a brick building on a high point overlooking the town. The Hill School still stands on High Street, between downtown and Cambria.

In 1895 the Friends asked Booker T. Washington to supervise the school, and it was reorganized on the model of Tuskegee and Hampton, with a Tuskegee graduate as principal from 1896. Washington remained its supervisor until his death in 1915. The school bought farmland on Crab Creek west of the Hill School in 1898, 1899 and 1905, and built a campus there with dormitories, a dairy and a barn, where students worked the farm and learned trades.

Its centerpiece, the Edgar A. Long Building, was begun in 1927 and opened for classes in December 1928, named for the principal who led the school from 1906 to 1924. In 1932 the Institute was accredited as a four-year high school, one of three Black high schools in Virginia with that standing.

The county began leasing the school in 1934. In 1947 the campus was deeded to the school divisions of Montgomery County, Radford and Pulaski County, and it served as the high school for Black students from all three, under the name Christiansburg Institute from 1950. When the county’s schools were desegregated, the last class graduated in the spring of 1966, and the campus was sold in 1967.

The Hill School was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1979 and the Long Building in 2001. The school’s alumni founded Christiansburg Institute, Inc., which keeps its history, its archives and a museum.

Further reading: Christiansburg Institute, Inc. (museum and archives)

In the second half of the century, shopping moved out from the square. The town’s first shopping center, Hill’s Plaza, opened on October 15, 1969, on Roanoke Street about a mile east of downtown. Rose’s closed its downtown store in the late 1970s, and downtown answered with the Old Town Mall in the mid-1980s. In 1988 Leggett’s department store moved from downtown to the newly built New River Valley Mall north of town.

The town grew to meet the new stores. In 1975 it annexed 3.03 square miles, adding 1,072 people. In 1986 it asked to annex another 7.96 square miles in three parcels, land that held about 13 subdivisions, a shopping mall under construction, an idle glass plant and a good deal of farmland. The state’s Commission on Local Government reviewed the case in 1987 and recommended a somewhat smaller area. By the Town’s account, the annexation that took effect in 1988 took in Belmont Farms, the mall site, the former Virginia Tech horticulture farm and the top of Christiansburg Mountain, and boundary adjustments in the 1990s and 2000s added industrial parks, more of the shopping district, and in 2009 the middle school and the Harkrader Sports Complex.

The shopping district along North Franklin Street and Peppers Ferry Road kept growing: Spradlin Farms from 2000 and the New River Center in 2007, by the Town’s account. The town’s Recreation Center opened on North Franklin Street in 1997. In 2020 the mall’s owner renamed it Uptown Christiansburg.