Ca Ira: A Ghost Town Named for the French Revolution

Just off Route Sixty in Cumberland County, the ghost town of Ca Ira carries a name straight from the French Revolution. The phrase, meaning it will be fine or it will work out, was a popular revolutionary song of seventeen ninety that spread across the Atlantic in the era when American and French republicans saw themselves as kindred spirits.

The settlement was established in seventeen ninety-six and grew as a small post road community serving the Virginia Piedmont interior. A post office operated here, and the crossroads had the modest commerce of a rural county town. But Ca Ira never developed into anything larger. After the Civil War the community declined quickly, and by the end of the nineteenth century most of it had been abandoned. Today little remains of the original village, though the name itself has survived on maps and in local memory as one of the more unexpected pieces of French Revolutionary spirit embedded in rural Virginia geography.