Union Level

The story

Union Level sits in the old tobacco country of Southside Virginia, near the North Carolina line. The village was established in 1836 but only came alive after 1890, when the Atlantic & Danville Railway ran a line through and turned the crossroads into a shipping point — a bank, general stores, a boarding house, a barber shop, and warehouses handling the region's bright-leaf tobacco.

The Depression of the 1930s took the town apart piece by piece. C.P. Jones's bank and store were among the first to fail, and the barber shop, boarding house, and other businesses followed. The railroad that had built the place gradually withdrew, the trains stopped by the mid-1980s, and the post office closed in 1990, rerouting the mail to South Hill.

What's left is a short, striking row of derelict false-front stores and the old bank, standing empty along the former rail line while a handful of residents still live in the surrounding countryside — a small, well-preserved picture of how the railroad both made and unmade the crossroads towns of the rural South.

What remains today

A row of abandoned false-front stores, the old bank building, and scattered houses along the former Atlantic & Danville rail line.