Buena Vista: The City That Boomed and Busted in Four Years

In eighteen eighty-eight, a Rockbridge County entrepreneur named Benjamin Moomaw wrote a prospectus and sold shares in a plan to build a city at the junction of two rail lines in the Blue Ridge foothills. All shares sold in thirty days, raising four hundred thousand dollars. On February twenty-second, eighteen eighty-nine, iron ore was confirmed nearby and a boom ignited.

Moomaw built a tannery, a pulp mill, a canning factory. By eighteen ninety-two, Buena Vista had five thousand two hundred forty residents and received a city charter from the Virginia legislature on February fifteenth of that year. Then the iron ore proved inferior and the Panic of eighteen ninety-three hit. Banks and railroads failed. The city collapsed almost as fast as it had risen. Buena Vista survived, slowly, as a manufacturing and milling town. It sits today between the Blue Ridge and the Allegheny highlands, a small independent city with a short, spectacular history of optimism and loss.