Iron Gate, Virginia

Iron Gate sits at the point where the Cowpasture and Jackson rivers meet to form the James, a dramatic gorge in the Alleghany Highlands where limestone cliffs pinch the valley tight. The earliest settlement here was a handful of houses clustered around an iron furnace in that gorge, most likely giving the town its name. There is also a local legend of an actual iron gate in the river that permitted boats to pass through the narrows, but historians favor the furnace explanation.

The town incorporated around eighteen ninety, and for the next thirty years iron production drove it. A blast furnace operated until nineteen nineteen, when cheaper Minnesota ore undercut the local industry. A tannery run by the United States Leather Company kept the economy alive until nineteen fifty-one.

Today Iron Gate is quiet, its industrial age visible only in ruins and the gorge that once made it worth building at all.