A Railroad Town
March 24, 2006 (Clarke Bustard, Richmond Times Dispatch)
First, the train. Then, the resort. Finally, the town.
That's the short story of Ashland, a town that owes its existence to a railroad and whose character still is defined by the trains that run through its center.
The Richmond, Fredericksburg and Potomac Railroad Co. - the RF&P - purchased 457 acres in central Hanover County and completed a 20- mile rail line to the site in 1836.
The earliest name for the place may have been Adams' Shanty, "named for the shack that the track construction foreman is said to have built beside the tracks," Roseanne Groat Shalf wrote in "Ashland, Ashland," her 1994 history of the town. The site became a fueling stop for trains.
In 1851, the RF&P built a hotel on the land. Because a mineral spring was found nearby, the hotel grew into a resort. Named Slash Cottage, after the boyhood home turf of Hanover County native Henry Clay, it was "one of the lightest and most tasty establishments we know of in the country," a correspondent wrote in Richmond's Weekly Dispatch.
The hotel, centering on a large "saloon," or ballroom, was surrounded by 17 cottages. Several of those frame structures apparently survive as some of the oldest homes in Ashland, moved to sites several blocks south of the old hotel, Shalf said during a walking tour of the town.
A village grew around the resort. Residents named it Ashland, after the Kentucky home of native son Clay. The village was incorporated as a town in 1858.
By then, Slash Cottage was only one of its attractions. A racetrack had opened about a mile south of the hotel. Camp Robinson, a drilling ground for Virginia's militia, also was nearby. And "academies," or boarding schools, for boys and girls had opened in the town.
During the Civil War, Ashland's location on the rail line made it a base for Confederate troops, a target of Union raiders and a refuge for civilians from Richmond, Fredericksburg and other battlefront towns, Shalf wrote in her history.
Randolph-Macon College, founded by Methodists in 1830 in Southside Virginia, relocated to Ashland in 1868, taking over Slash Cottage and replacing its wooden structures with brick buildings.
The business district, which had grown up along the tracks, largely was destroyed in an 1893 fire. The older structures now standing in central Ashland date from the early 1900s.
The Henry Clay Inn, opened in 1903, became the town's principal hotel and a popular venue for social events. It burned down in 1946. A hotel modeled after the old structure was built in 1992 near the original site.
Electric streetcars, introduced in Richmond in 1887, made it to Ashland in 1907. The trolley line, soon dubbed "the Ashcan," led to a residential growth spurt in the town and sustained Ashland's appeal to Richmonders as a destination for day trips.
The streetcar stopped running in 1938. Bus service continued into the 1970s. Today, commuters come and go by car, like other suburbanites.
The town still runs to the rhythm of the trains. The RF&P tracks, now owned by CSX Corp., carry about 40 trains every 24 hours. The railroad station closed in 1967 - it's now the Ashland-Hanover Visitors Center - but the town remains a stop for seven Amtrak trains a day.
"Train coming!" was a frequent cry when Katherine Tinker grew up in Ashland in the 1940s. "The children stopped playing softball, the preachers stopped in the middle of their sermons, people paused during conversations, waited for the train to go by, then picked up where they left off.
"That's still the way it goes," said Tinker, who has lived alongside the tracks in Ashland for most of her 67 years.
Northbound trains rumble through town about 25 feet from her bed.
"I don't lose any sleep," she said. "That sound has been soothing me for as long as I can remember."
What's special about Ashland?
Trains (1): About 40 of them roll through the center of town every day. Seven Amtrak passenger trains stop there daily, so many Ashland residents are steps away from making connections to New York or Miami.
Nostalgia: "You can easily imagine Ward and June Cleaver living on Duncan Street, and Beaver and Wally walking to Henry Clay Elementary School," says Town Manager Charles W. Hartgrove.
Neighbors: Not only do Ashlanders have them, they actually know them. The houses have porches; people sit on them and greet passers- by. The streets are full of after-dinner strollers, residents walking their dogs, groups of kids riding their bikes. People go shopping on foot.
Trains (2): Ashland, longtime train riders say, is the first attractive scene you'll see out the window south of Boston. The town's grandest antebellum and Victorian homes, known as "the painted ladies," line both sides of the tracks.
Residents of these houses spend much of their time straightening pictures on the walls after freight trains rumble along outside their front parlors.
Not suburban: Never, ever, tell Ashlanders they live in a suburb. It is the only incorporated town in the Richmond area. It has its own government and municipal amenities - sidewalks, street lights, parks, town library, swimming pool, street maintenance, trash pickup - and a separate set of taxes to support them.
Not urban, either: Where else in the area can you parallel-park on a street and walk along a sidewalk to a retailer - Ashland Feed Store - to buy feed for your llama or the material you'd need to set up a habitat for deer in the woods behind your home?
In some parts of town, cocks crow at dawn and dogs answer enthusiastically, making alarm clocks unnecessary.
Trains (3): Want to get up close and personal with a locomotive or boxcar? Stop by the Ashland-Hanover Visitors Center, the town's old train station, in the center of town. You can stand safely about 6 feet off a long stretch of straight track, along which trains roll at 35 mph.
The college: Randolph-Macon College, which relocated from Southside Virginia to Ashland shortly after the Civil War, occupies much of the center of town. On and off campus, life revolves around football and basketball games, homecoming and commencement weekends, fraternity and sorority parties and other activities.
Love a parade: Ashland sure does. It boasts two big ones, at Christmastime and on the Fourth of July. The Strawberry Faire and other outdoor gatherings dot the town's calendar of events.
Home cookin': Ashland may be the only place in greater Richmond where you can choose among Virginia, North Carolina and Texas styles of barbecue under one roof - that of Virginia Barbeque. A couple of blocks away, The Smokey Pig offers different styles of Virginia barbecue (pork and beef).
-- Contact staff writer Clarke Bustard at cbustard@timesdispatch.com or (804) 649-6362.
ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO, MAP
MEMO: SPECIAL SECTION: EXPLORING ASHLAND
Credit: Times-Dispatch Staff Writer