Because of the different gauge of its track, and much to the annoyance of passengers, all cargo had to be unloaded at Danville from the Richmond and Danville Railroad and reloaded onto the Piedmont Railroad. Its chief engineer, Captain Edmund Myers, completed the task with inferior and insufficient supplies, and it took more than two years.
It even purchased the vast majority of stock in the new Piedmont Railroad, which was to run from Danville south to Greensboro, North Carolina. It erected a telegraph line, replaced inferior rails, utilized captured locomotive parts, and manufactured gun carriages for the Confederacy. The Richmond and Danville Railroad made continuous improvements that kept trains going and greatly aided the war effort.
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The town government supported soldiers’ families and the poor by such means as creating the Corporation Store to distribute free food and firewood to the needy. Clothing mills and weapons manufacturers churned out huge amounts of uniform fabric, arms, and armament. One church supported the war effort by donating its brass bell to be melted down to make cannons.
Enough townsmen eventually volunteered for Confederate military service to form one company each of cavalry and artillery and more than two companies of infantry, as well as a home guard. Not long after that, on April 17, the Virginia Convention, meeting in Richmond, voted to secede.ĭanville’s wartime contributions extended from individuals to entrepreneurs to government. president Abraham Lincoln‘s call in April for volunteers to suppress the rebellion. By early in 1861, however, many Danvillians had endorsed leaving the Union, and celebrated the fact that public opinion turned in their favor following U.S. In the winter of 1860, some of the town’s residents, and most of those in the surrounding county, opposed secession because war would threaten the prosperous tobacco industry. By inspecting, storing, manufacturing, shipping, and marketing tobacco, it developed lucrative economic and commercial links with the rest of Virginia, North Carolina, and beyond, perhaps most important, in the form of the Richmond and Danville Railroad, which began construction in 1848. Danville with a population of 3,500, meanwhile, had emerged as the capital of a vast leaf-tobacco empire in Southside Virginia. The 1860 United States Census reported a free population in Pittsylvania County of 17,764 and a total population of 32,104. Union forces occupied the town briefly at war’s end, leaving by the end of 1865. Lee‘s surrender at Appomattox Court House, many homeward-bound Confederate troops found the town an attractive passing-through point. After the fall of Richmond on April 2, Confederate president Jefferson Davis and his cabinet relocated to Danville, and following Robert E. The same isolation and wealth that protected Danville throughout the war made it the object of widespread interest at the end of the war.
Because of their relative prosperity throughout the war years, Danville’s residents extended charitable assistance to the families of soldiers and other needy individuals. It successfully converted its pre-war tobacco industry–related buildings into a variety of facilities that supported the Confederate war effort, such as hospitals, factories, and prisons. During the American Civil War (1861–1865), its relative remoteness spared its citizens from many of the hardships experienced by other Virginians. Danville, Virginia, in Pittsylvania County, is situated on the banks of the Dan River just three miles from the North Carolina border.
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