Living in the Commonwealth for so many years, I guess it presupposes I’ll notice Virginia mentioned in out-of-context situations. Such was the case with Virginia City, Montana which I saw while researching presidential counties.
It served as the seat of local government in Madison County, which derived its name from James Madison, the fourth U.S. President. Madison’s association with Virginia lasted his entire life. How fitting, I thought. Settlers arriving in Madison County named their primary town for the home state of the honoree (map). Except that wasn’t the case at all. It was a complete coincidence. Even so, that led me to another string of coincidences, of places named Virginia related to silver and gold.
Virginia City, Montana
I searched for that Virginia/Madison connection and actually found a more interesting story. As noted by the Virginia City Preservation Alliance,
“On June 16, [1863] …directors presented the charter to Dr. Gaylord Bissell (who had been elected as Judge of the Fairweather Mining District), the proposed name of the new town was ‘Varina;’ honoring the wife of Jefferson Davis-president of the Confederate States of America. Judge Bissell, a staunch Unionist, declared that there was no way he would approve of a charter which carried this name. One of the charter’s proponents hastened to explain that, inasmuch as Mrs. Davis was the daughter of a prominent New Jersey family, her name actually represented a thoughtful compromise in sectional consciousness. Somewhat mollified-if not totally convinced-Judge Bissell responded by crossing out the proposed name ‘Varina’ and writing in the name of the city as ‘Virginia.’”
It was a pretty bold move. Imagine trying to name a Montana town in honor of the Confederate’s first lady during the height of the Civil War. It surprises me that Judge Bissell even offered Virginia. Of course that was the home of the Confederate capital of said conflict.
Nonetheless Virginia City thrived for awhile as the gold mines prospered, and even served as Montana’s first Territorial Capital. The current population hovers around 200 residents. Recently it’s built a thriving tourist industry attracted to the Virginia City and Nevada City Historic District.
Virginia City, Nevada
I’ve actually visited Virginia City, Nevada although it was many years ago. A different mineral — silver — attracted miners in the late 1850’s. This was the site of the famous Comstock Lode. Miners extracted seven million tons of silver in twenty years between 1860 and 1880. This is how Nevada earned the nickname, “The Silver State.”
That was a fine statistic although I wanted to see the connection to Virginia. It was somewhat tangential. The name derived from James Finney (or Fennimore), “Old Virginny Finney.”
In 1859 he may or may not have discovered the Six-Mile Canyon portion of the Comstock Lode. There were various competing legends explaining how his name connected to the town. My favorite version involved his penchant for public intoxication: [link no longer works]
“‘[O]ne midnight Old Virginia, going home with the boys and a bottle of whiskey,’ wrote Charles Howard Shinn in The Story of The Mine (1896), ‘after an unusually protracted revel, fell down when he reached his cabin, broke the bottle, and rising to his knees, with the bottle-neck is his hand, hiccoughed, ‘I baptize this ground Virginia Town!””
He was a native of Virginia — thus the connection — and “probably Nevada’s oldest pioneer settler”. He was also a “frontier hunter, and miner, a man of more than ordinary ability in his class, a buffoon and practical joker; a hard drinker when he could get the liquor, and an indifferent worker at anything”. He died in 1861 after he fell from a horse while intoxicated.
Virginia, Free State, South Africa
It was hard to follow-up a story like that. However, Virginia in South Africa’s Free State province deserved a special mention because of its sheer distance from its namesake. This Virginia was,
“…named after the state in America by Louis Seymour, a mechanical and mining engineer who scratched the name of his birthplace on a boulder close to where a railway siding was subsequently built… Years later, after the discovery of gold in 1955 the emergence of a town took on the name of the railway siding. Life here revolves around the gold fields… Virginia’s claim to fame is it pipe-mine, the deepest on the planet, whilst the manufacture of sulfuric acid from gold ore and the mining of gold are what drives the town’s economy.”
I’ve seen neither gold nor silver in my little corner of Virginia. Even so, these colorful stories make me want to pull out a shovel and start digging in my back yard.
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