Caldwell: Crossroads on the Kanawha Turnpike

Caldwell sits a few miles southeast of Lewisburg on what was once the James River and Kanawha Turnpike, the main road connecting the Virginia coast with the Ohio Valley in the early eighteen hundreds. A toll bridge replaced a ferry crossing here in eighteen twenty-one, and the same year a traveler's inn called Elmhurst went up on the riverbank. That combination of bridge and tavern made Caldwell a natural stopping point for drovers, stagecoaches, and wagons working the turnpike trade.

When Confederate forces retreated after the Battle of Lewisburg in eighteen sixty-two, they burned the covered bridge to slow the Union advance. A replacement was built in eighteen seventy-two and stood until nineteen thirty-two. Today US Route Sixty runs through the community along almost the same corridor the turnpike once traced, and the Greenbrier River, which Caldwell straddles, draws paddlers and hikers using the Greenbrier River Trail.