Toano, Virginia

For a century this crossroads in James City County went by the name Burnt Ordinary, because an ordinary, meaning a tavern, burned here during the Revolution in seventeen eighty. When the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway laid track through in eighteen eighty-one to link Richmond to Newport News, the story goes that the crew had come from railroad work in the far West. They noticed the land sloping upward from Windsor Shades toward this spot and reached for a Paiute word meaning high ground: Toano.

The railroad transformed the place almost immediately. Toano became the largest potato shipping point between Newport News and Richmond, and the old burned tavern crossroads became a genuine rail depot community. The name stuck, swapping a memory of Revolutionary-era destruction for a word borrowed from the far western mountains by a transcontinental railroad crew passing through.