Southern RR Station Bluemont, VA
How Snickersville Citizens Brought the Railroad in 1900
Many know that the railroad came to Snickersville in 1900, reportedly making its initial run on the first Independence Day of the Twentieth Century. Many also know that at the suggestion of the railway company, and in the hope that a more upscale name might draw a stronger trade of summer visitors, the people of Snickersville acquiesced in changing the village’s name to “Bluemont.”
Many people know that story. But few know the story of what the citizens of Snickersville did for themselves to make the railway extension happen. They notified the public, organized themselves to conduct business, subscribed and collected money to construct the depot, and handled legal considerations around obtaining the right of way and adjusting “damages.” All these actions helped make the railway extension from Round Hill to Bluemont become a reality.
Volney Osburn
In 1900, as Snickersville was gaining a reputation as a popular summer destination, the Southern Railroad (later known as the Washington & Old Dominion) proposed expanding its tracks westward from Round Hill. This expansion was to be made possible with the financial backing of J.P. Morgan, the owner of the Southern Railroad, and assistance from Snickersville citizens.
Volney Osburn (December 19, 1852 – May 30, 1942) played a leading role in this citizen effort. Son of Phineas Osburn and Elizabeth Ann Hope, the 1870 Census finds Volney at age 17, living in Loudoun County with his father and three younger brothers and sisters. Volney married Virginia Humphrey (January 24, 1878) and they had one child, Pearl (born October 28, 1878).
A Tamworth hog
In addition to being a farmer who specialized in raising Tamworth hogs, and who eagerly wanted a railroad extension to Snickersville so he could more easily ship them, Volney Osburn had acted as executor of many estates. His farm lay in the planned path of the tracks. He understood legal papers and was in the habit of carefully saving his business records. His papers from the turn of the century have come down through the family to this day.
Judy Anderson, great-grandaughter of Volney Osborn, grew up in Bluemont. She and her husband Bud Anderson now live just outside Bluemont Village, off Route 7, on the same farm Volney purchased in 1898. (On October 24, 1997, this farm and house were awarded a recognition that the farm has been continuously farmed by the same family for 100 years.)
Judy and Bud Anderson kindly lent these documents to be transcribed, scanned, and digitized, and also shared their own valuable insights into the story.
Railroad Meeting!
Early April 1900, just over a century ago, there must have been a lot of excitement in the vicinity of Snickersville. Talk was flying about a proposed railroad extension from Round Hill and Volney Osburn was putting up posters everywhere announcing a railroad meeting.
According to the poster: “the Southern Railway Company, having made a proposition to the citizens of Snickersville and vicinity, that if they give the said Company right of way and money sufficient to construct a suitable depot, the Company will extend their road to Snickersville, in the near future.”
The poster’s call to the public: “All interested in said extension will please meet in Snickersville at 2 o’clock Saturday, April 7, 1900.”
We do not know exactly when the railroad made its original “proposition” or to whom. Three documents from mid-April refer to three deeds dated April 3, so it may have been in late March.
Eight citizens became the first “subscribers,” and they had been working on the project even before the meeting. They allowed their names to appear publicly on the poster, no doubt giving the matter more weight in the community:
Volney Osburn’s receipt for printing 100 flyers at the Loudoun Telephone Directory office in Hamilton
Volney Osburn was a man in a hurry. He called the meeting for Saturday, having only on the previous Monday, April 2, paid for the printing of his 100 flyers at the Loudoun Telephone Directory office in Hamilton. We know this because he saved the receipt. A newspaper article on the railroad meeting appeared, from what newspaper is not indicated. The article was probably written and submitted by C.H. Osburn, 
Volney’s cousin, who signed it as secretary, at the bottom.
The meeting evidently followed parliamentary procedure for “it was moved and seconded that a committee of three be selected by the Chair to meet on Tuesday April 10 and confer with Messrs J.R. Hill and Frank Purcell in regard to adjusting their damages.” Serving on the committee were “Mr. Townsend Frazier, Wm. L. Humphrey, and O.I. Thomas.”
Five others– Wm L. Humphrey, Richard Frazier, C. H. Osburn, T.B. James, John Gill—were “selected to act as canvassers in raising the required amount of money.”
Thus, the key elements of the citizens’ part of the railway extension got underway quickly. Snickersville citizens were now organized to do business with the railway. The local citizens had begun to work on raising money to fund the construction of the depot. And, some citizens had taken it on themselves to indemnify the landowners across whose lands the tracks would be laid. They would agree to fund any damages if the railroad failed to keep its part of the bargain.
The documents left by Volney Osburn that relate to the extension of the railway to Bluemont include:
- A full (or partial?) list of lands to be “condemned” for the railroad;
- An April 14, 1900 agreement between the Mahlon Thomas heirs and extension subscribers;
- Two notes dated April 16 1900, apparently written by Volney (one to Edward Nichols or R.W. Lynn, the other to W.A. Tompson) concerning right-of-way arrangements;
- An April 16 agreement between Miss Virginia James and the subscribers;
- An April 16, 1900 typed receipt to Volney Osborn from the Southern Railway concerning deeds conveying the right of way, from “Miss Virginia James,” “Owen Thomas and wife,” and “Volney Osburn and wife;”
- An April 28 note on Southern Railway Stationary;
- A November 6 letter signed by Charles Janney to “Volney Osburn Esq,” discharging Volney “from all liability;”
- A November 6 endorsement in red ink on the April 14 agreement, releasing Dr. George Plaster and other subscribers, signed by William Birdsall as agent for the Mahlon Thomas heirs;
- An undated auditor’s note to Volney Osburn, requesting $100;
- A November 12 note from E.F. Packam, Assistant Treasurer, the Southern Railway Company to Volney Osburn, enclosing a check for $100.
See how the subscribers negotiated with the railway company and provided assurances to those whose land the railroad would cross: Roster of Bluemont Rail Documents.
One aspect of this that strikes the modern reader is how fast the Bluemont extension was arranged for, and how quickly it was accomplished. One wonders if the civic leaders of Snickersville were extraordinarily competent, or if it was simply easier to do business in those days―perhaps a combination of both.
We know a little about some of the people in this story. Dr. George Emory Plaster, born in 1826, was the father of Dr. Henry G. Plaster, Sr., and grandfather of current Bluemonter Henry G. Plaster, Jr. Henry Plaster’s uncle George E Plaster, Jr. (his father’s brother) built the dance hall in 1922. Another of his father’s brothers, Lloyd, along with two partners built the current grain elevator around 1920, after the previous two (or maybe three) wooden ones had burned down due to spontaneous combustion.
Dr. Charles Turner lived in Clayton Hall, according to From Snickersville to Bluemont, practicing in an office across the road during the 1890s and into the 1900s. He managed a 200-acre farm and was active in politics.
Bluemont thrived in the almost four decades of the railroad era, 1900-1939. There was a farm-stay tourist trade and a railroad trade. According to a 1911 summer schedule for the Southern Railway Company, passengers could board the train in Bluemont at 5:50 am, 7:15 am, 12:15 am, or 5:25 pm, and arrive in Washington DC at 8:32, or 8:00 pm, 9:15 am, 2:50 pm. The last train to Bluemont left Washington at 5:06 pm and arrived in Bluemont at 7:45 pm.
Farm produce went to market. People could take their children to Washington to have their portraits made and return by train the same day. In summer in the first years of the Century, readers of the Washington Post might find ads like this one from June 16 and 17, 1906:
| WANTED―SUMMER BOARDERS; NO CHILDREN under 10 years; ¾ of a mile from Bluemont Station. Apply to VOLNEY OSBURN. Bluemont, Va. |
Bluemont was also a day trip destination, with express trains operating on Sundays. Bluemont entrepreneur Earl Iden recalls in a 1978 interview (in From Snickersville to Bluemont: The Biography and History of a Virginia Village, by Jean Herron Smith, Evelyn Porterfield Johnson, and Robert Hoffman):
1901 transportation schedule in the Clarke Courier
Crowds of people rode the Sunday trains to Bluemont and spent the day here. Many times there was a solid line of people from the railroad station to Beatty’s Hotel. Just a mob of people up there. They’d have dinner at Beattys’ and then some would go horseback riding or walk up to Bears Den to take in the view and enjoy the cool air. In the afternoon they returned home to the city. [p. 161]
In 1912, the W&OD Railway leased the Southern Railway’s Bluemont Branch and electrified the trains.
The Bluemont station closed in 1939, although the W&OD did not cease to operate the Leesburg Line until 1968. Earl Iden had the rails torn up and sold them for scrap. Then Mr. Iden had another recycling idea:
Judy Anderson remembers the day in the early 1950s when she, along with a fascinated crowd of children watched Mr. Iden who had purchased the old depot, cut it up into the makings of three houses. He later moved these to nearby sites, to offer them for rent. One of them still stands next to the old Post Office on Rail Road Street, across from the E. E. Lake store.
Today the Bluemont Train Station has been rebuilt by landowner, Rosemary Stanger, who is restoring it as a museum.
Volney continued as a farmer and paterfamilias during the first decades of the 1900s, living at various times with his daughter Pearl Osburn Jones (later universally called “Granny Jones” in her later years); Judy’s father and mother, Robert Jones and Ellen McClaughry Jones; and Judy’s older brothers, Carroll and Robert Jones―living in his home at various times.
That he continued raising hogs is evident in the records he saved of shipped hams. Volney Osburn died on May 30, 1942 in the same farmhouse where Judy and Bud Anderson live today. Judy’s older brothers, Carroll and Robert Jones, can remember the tense morning they were told to not come downstairs but to stay upstairs, well away from the first-floor room that had been their great-grandfather’s bedroom.
The first train came into the village on July 4. To enhance the tourist appeal of a village with the potentially risible moniker of “Snickersville,” the railroad named its station “Bluemont.” The post office soon changed its name to match.
Resort Era
Blue Ridge Inn Bluemont, VA. It was destroyed by fire in 1912.
Bluemont’s resort era began in 1893 when
“White House chef Jules Demonet, helped by the cash outlay of William Lynn of Airmont built the Blue Ridge Inn at Bears Den Rocks, a classy Atlantic city miniature, guaranteed to attract Washingtonians tired of the summer heat and fearful of epidemics.”
-Henry G. Plaster, “Bluemont’s Historic E.E. Lake Store,” p. 9.
Bluemont Station, Bluemont, VA
Another hotel, the Loudoun House, opened in the village. (Later the building housed Loudoun Seminary, a finishing school for girls. Later in 1914 under the name of the Willow Brook Academy, it was a school for boys.) Stage coaches connected Snickersville and Berryville with Hamilton when it was the railway terminus.
The E.E. Lake store was built around 1901. The space offered a cluster of shops and services—a general store, an ice cream parlor, a barbershop, the post office, and a meeting and dance hall upstairs. A branch of the Loudoun National Bank of Leesburg operated there for a while but closed after robbers opened the safe with explosives in 1907.
In many ways, this was Bluemont’s heyday. As Dr. George Plaster described it in 1902:
The Loudoun House, Bluemont VA
“An extensive section of land adjacent to the Railroad Station has been laid out in lots and streets—‘The Loudoun House,’ two dwelling houses, a commodious storehouse, and a large warehouse and elevator, have been built and are now occupied. Since the building of the hotel in the Gap, eight new houses have been built on the summit of the mountain, in the immediate vicinity of the village, and four more are now in the course of erection. We have now in the village three well-equipped stores, selling general merchandise, one millinery establishment, one concern at the elevator, dealing in wheat, corn, fertilizer, flour, meal, feed, grass-seeds, etc., a livery stable and three hotels all doing a lively business, and seemingly prospering. Also blacksmiths, wheelwrights, carpenters and harness shop. Two physicians and a dentist are prepared to do needed repairs to the human machine.”
The Loudoun House, Bluemont VA
-George E. Plaster, M.D., “A History of Bluemont”