Rural Retreat: A Name Coined by a Railroad General

This Wythe County community started out as Mount Airy, a German Lutheran farming settlement known for livestock and dairy. The Virginia and Tennessee Railroad arrived in eighteen fifty-six and instantly tangled the name: there was already a Mount Airy in North Carolina. Something had to give.

General William Mahone, a railroad man and one of the most colorful figures in Virginia business, is said to have suggested the replacement. Looking at the open mountain vistas and thin population, he called it Rural Retreat, and the name stuck. The depot that followed became one of the oldest surviving railroad stations in Southwest Virginia. Mahone later became a Confederate general and, after the war, a Readjuster Party senator who briefly upended Virginia's Bourbon Democratic machine. But out here in Wythe County, his most durable legacy may simply be a two-word phrase on a post office sign.