Virginia Sawmills of the 1900s

My interest in sawmills begins about 100 years ago in Tucker County, West Virginia, home to the first sawmill west of the Allegheny Mountains (Secondary Source 3).  While doing some family history research, I came across some information that gave me reason to believe that the Alderton family (the family of my paternal grandfather) had ownership of the mill.  The mill is a part of Tucker County culture, with a restaurant named after it in a town called Davis, so learning that my family may have had a part in the owning or managing of the mill was very exciting to me.  Unfortunately, discovering my family’s role in the mill was far too narrow of a research question to ask for the purposes of this project, so I had to broaden my topic.

I began researching sawmills in my own state of Virginia, and discovered that, according to my research, we currently have 29 sawmills (Secondary Sources 2, 4).  I decided to make a mini-database of these sawmills, which can be viewed on the “Database and Map of Sawmills” page of this website, and see if anything stood out to me.  I was surprised to discover that four of the sawmills in Virginia are in Covington.  Thus I came up with the question “Why are there so many sawmills in Covington?”