Clifton Forge, Virginia

The name Clifton Forge comes from a charcoal iron furnace established in Alleghany County in the eighteen twenties. William Lyle Alexander, who owned the forge in a gorge along the Jackson River, named it Clifton after his family's estate in Lexington, and the surrounding community eventually took that name too. The settlement was first called Williamson's Station when the railroad reached this corner of western Virginia in eighteen fifty-seven.

It incorporated as Clifton Forge in eighteen eighty-four, just as the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad began expanding its operations here into a major locomotive maintenance facility. At its peak, the railroad employed nearly two thousand people in the town. Clifton Forge became a Virginia independent city in nineteen oh six, then returned to town status in two thousand one when its population fell below the state threshold, a railroad boomtown that outlasted the steam age, if only just.