Lynchburg: Tobacco, Canal, and the Hill City

Lynchburg traces its beginning to seventeen fifty-seven, when John Lynch established a ferry crossing here on the James River. A church followed in seventeen sixty-five, and by seventeen eighty-six the Virginia legislature formally established the town. The Lynch family's ferry became the nucleus around which one of the most important tobacco markets in the antebellum South would grow.

By the eighteen fifties, Lynchburg was among the wealthiest cities per capita in the United States, its fortunes built on tobacco inspection warehouses, river commerce, and the labor of enslaved people. The James River and Kanawha Canal, completed to Lynchburg in eighteen forty, connected the city to Richmond and the coast, accelerating trade. At its peak, Lynchburg handled more tobacco than almost any other inland American city.

The Civil War disrupted the economy, but Lynchburg survived largely undamaged by combat and served as a major Confederate hospital and supply center. The city sits on seven hills above the James, which is why locals still call it the Hill City. Its nineteenth-century architecture reflects the tobacco wealth that once made this riverside town a commercial powerhouse of the Virginia interior.