Ashland: The Railroad Resort That Became a College Town
Near Richmond, Virginia
The town you're passing through owes its existence to a train schedule. In eighteen thirty-six the Richmond, Fredericksburg and Potomac Railroad laid its tracks through this patch of Hanover County farmland. In the eighteen forties, the railroad developed a resort here: a place where Richmond's overheated residents could escape to shaded lawns, a horse-racing track, and a cluster of summer cottages. The town was incorporated in eighteen fifty-eight and named Ashland, in honor of the Kentucky estate of Henry Clay, who had died six years earlier and remained enormously popular throughout the South.
The Civil War wrecked the vacation trade along with most everything else. Ashland's hotels were commandeered; the racecourse fell silent. The railroad itself became a military artery, constantly contested and frequently torn up.
Recovery came from an unexpected quarter. Randolph-Macon College, a Methodist men's school chartered in eighteen thirty in Boydton, Virginia, lost its railroad link to Boydton during the war. The RF and P Railroad offered the college free land in Ashland if the school would relocate, calculating that a campus would generate steady passenger traffic. The college accepted and opened here in eighteen sixty-eight. It never left.
Today Randolph-Macon remains at the center of town life, its brick Victorians framing a main street where Amtrak trains still run directly through the downtown, literally down the middle of Railroad Avenue, at a pace slow enough that passengers can wave to people on the sidewalk. The resort is long gone, but Ashland's identity as a railroad town endures in every sense, and its nickname, the Center of the Universe, is entirely self-assigned and entirely affectionate.
