My Vote for “Virginia’s Road”

There are few states more blessed with scenic byways than Virginia. Except for the hopeless snarl of superhighways around Washington, Richmond, and Norfolk, and the nerve-wracking pandemonium of nearly all of I-95 and parts of I-81, there is hardly a road in the Commonwealth that doesn’t afford the traveler some of the most beautiful, serene, and historic scenery in the United States. It’s been my experience that Virginians who live on any of these roads are avid partisans of them and what they afford both visitors and locals.
 
Amanda Cockrell’s article on Route 11 on this website is a good example of this brand of patriotism, and as an addendum to her article, readers might like to know why it is also known as the Dixie Highway. Actually, most of the states east of the Mississippi had a Dixie Highway by the 1920’s, and a movement to commemorate “fifty years of peace” between the North and the South created them. Although the original idea was to create a “Cotton Belt Highway” connecting the South and the Midwest, the Dixie Highway Association was formed at an organizational meeting in Chattanooga, TN on April 3, 1915 and was instrumental in establishing the modern network of public highways in the United States. By the time the federal government started numbering (and paying for) public highways, the movement had incorporated East/West routes as well. The Dixie Highway Association disbanded in 1927, but many states, including Virginia, kept the old designation sentimentally. US 11, which originally connected New York with New Orleans, is one of them. It goes through beautiful country, and it’s worth an occasional side trip to exit I-81, which it largely parallels in Virginia, to experience the towns and countryside one will not see on a limited access highway.
 
But I’m certain that if you asked someone who lives on US 29 from Lynchburg to Charlottesville, or a denizen of US 58 from Norton to Martinsburg, they would politely offer their own recommendation for their road. All these places offer unique perspectives on the culture of Virginia, one of the most diverse and, at the same time, one of the most unified of states.
 
In view of all these competing allegiances, it would be hard to attempt to select one particular road as “Virginia’s Road,” but should a contest ever be held, my vote would be for US 460, and not merely because that road caused one of the most dramatic upheavals in my life, but because it has always been there.
Those who have read my books know that I was propelled on my journey into the past of my family and my people when the reconstruction of US 460 in Pike County, Kentucky came calling on my family cemeteries. At first, I was incensed that this road, always my favorite, would have caused me such grief. Taking up each grave was much like having a funeral all over again, perversely different of course, and made more painful by the lack of family I could have turned to in my sorrow. They were nearly all now buried there and there was no one left for solace.
 
But strangely, it also reminded me of the good times I had on that highway, from the first time I saw Virginia from its roadbed to the time the bulldozers came to Greasy Creek to make a new route which, for better or worse, will be nothing like the old one.
 
Two other US highways converge on Pike County; in addition to US 460, US 23 and US 119 have already been rebuilt to modern standards. US 23 was, for most of us in the coal country, the major escape route. It is known as the “Country Music Highway” for the country stars who were born there. Dwight Yoakum and Patty Loveless were both born in Pikeville, and Yoakum wrote a song about it. “Readin’, Writin’, and Route 23” was the catchphrase for the crop of high school graduates who took the road to the North every year, looking for jobs that did not exist in the coalfields. The name, and the expectation, continued through Virginia, where Ralph Stanley was born and still lives, and where the high, lonesome sound of Bluegrass music can still be heard.
 
I took that road myself in the 1960’s, but in the 1970’s, I took the route that I first traveled two decades before, when my father packed up his family in his great, green 1951 Packard and set out to visit his sister in Seaford, Virginia. It was an all day drive from the wee hours of the morning to nearly midnight when we finally arrived on the Virginia coast and I had kept my face pressed to the window practically all the way. It was the first time I had ridden across the breadth of Virginia, and I never forgot it.
 
Our trips were an annual summer event, and as I grew older, I made mental notes about the state as we passed through the mountains into the rolling plains. We would often visit historical sites along the way, and the first time we visited Appomattox, I could still feel the sadness of events that unfolded a century before. The official title of the site is the Appomattox Court House National Historical Park, but the people of Appomattox County still call it simply “the surrender grounds.” It is appropriate.
 
Sometimes we stopped to visit family in Christiansburg, and I would occasionally pile into a car with my cousins and drive up to Roanoke, where the drive-in restaurant craze was as popular, I noted, as it was back in Kentucky. I remember how the cars changed over the years as the great chrome dinosaurs of the 1950’s reached their heyday and every drive-in had Buddy Holly or Jerry Lee Lewis on the jukebox. And somewhere on the road, bulletproof young men (or so they thought) drag-raced their hot rods in violation of most of the laws of the state or of physics. One of my heroes in Pike County was “Eight-Ball” Coleman, a distant cousin who had a lowered 1958 Chevrolet Impala convertible, and who shut down every contender with his 348 cubic-inch engine with three two-barreled carburetors. Three Deuces was the epitome of power then; fuel injection was too far in the future to be even considered. Virginia had its share of Eight-Balls as well, from Grundy to Blacksburg to Farmville, and I occasionally had the opportunity to test my 1964 Ford Fairlane 500 with a four-barrel against them when I later lived along the road.
 
Life on US 460 from Kentucky through Virginia was much different in many places, but also much the same. In a way, the road linked us all together, and it still links the parts of Virginia together today, more than any other of her roads. It is mostly a Virginia road today; a small part of it snakes up through West Virginia for a few miles and in Kentucky, the road goes no farther than halfway across the state. It once went all the way from Norfolk to St. Louis, but it is “truncated” now, a more pleasant term than “abandoned.” But for most of its length, it is in Virginia, a concrete ribbon of commerce, connecting the state as no other of her roads can do.
 
Now it is largely four-laned, with only a small section of Buchanan County, Virginia awaiting upgrade as the Kentucky section churns its way to where they will meet at the Breaks Interstate Park, on the Virginia/Kentucky border. Progress is inevitable (the reconstruction of US 460 in Pike County even has its own website: http://www.us460online.com/index.php ), but for some of us, memories of the old road will remain as long as we can draw breath. Now, with fall in the air, I tend to remember summers on US 460 even more wistfully, and sometimes late at night I could almost swear I have seen see Eight-Ball’s 1958 Chevy pulling out in front of me as I pass where the old 460 Drive-In used to be, even though the restaurant, the car, and the man are all gone.
 
Memories endure, I have learned. I suspect that somewhere along US 460 in Virginia, some other gray-haired old boy like me can remember those days, and if there is ever a statewide petition to name Virginia’s Road, he will vote my proxy.