Alberta, Virginia: Where Two Railroads Met in the Pines

Alberta exists because two railroads happened to cross here. The Seaboard Air Line came through first, completed from Petersburg to North Carolina by nineteen hundred. Then the Virginian Railway opened in nineteen oh seven, running coal from West Virginia toward the Norfolk coast, and its tracks crossed the Seaboard's right here in the Brunswick County pines.

A junction needs a name, needs a depot, needs people to service the trains. Alberta grew up around the junction, and for much of the twentieth century it was a place where you could watch two separate railroad systems come and go at the same spot. The population hovered around a few hundred. The trains eventually slowed, but the junction kept the town on the map, and the town still marks where the rails once crossed.