Blackford (Honaker, VA)

Written by John Henry Smith III

Now, if you drive Route 80 toward Honaker, immediately when you cross the River, on the left is the state shop(VDOT). This is where the Blackford Station was. It was built solely for loading livestock on the train to be shipped to the northeast and a little freight business. I always heard the land was donated by Gov. Henry C Stuart with a reverter clause and that’s what happened. When N&W closed the little station it reverted back to Stuart Land and Cattle. Now earlier there were big cattle drives from Southwest Virginia to Philadelphia, Baltimore and Northern Virginia to deliver these “export” cattle either northeast packers or loaded on the boat to England.

When the rail lines were extended to handle the mineral wealth of the mountains, it became the natural evolution to ship livestock to the cities by train. Thus became Blackford!

It was an unusual rail line! One set of tracks came from the station at Honaker and the trains backed down to Blackford. You rarely saw the engine since it was way up the tracks but

always saw the caboose since it backed in. The station consisted of a small Depot with livestock pens. The station master was a hair-lipped man named “Charmie” McNew. He was the first hair lipped person that I ever saw and he also had a considerable speech impediment. Nice man and good friend of my fathers..Charmie would let me go into the caboose and even once I got to ride in it to the Honaker Station.

I can barely remember Elk Garden Farm (Harry Stuart) cattle being driven to Blackford. Stuart Land & Cattle,H. O. Pratt, Smithfield etc all drove livestock to the train at Blackford. You asked how this was possible? It was a different time…small two lane road, little traffic, no sub-divisions— all farmland with fences on both sides. With men on horses, here came hundreds of cattle on their way to the train!

After trucks became more common, the cattle and lambs were trucked to Blackford where they were graded , weighed, sorted and loaded. Russell County Wool was also taken up there.

My father had a lot of his freight shipped to Blackford. One of my most memorable trips was to pick up a dog, ordered from Montgomery Ward and shipped to Blackford in a wooden crate. With the advent of the tractor and trailer, livestock by rail (just like the cattle drives )became a piece of history.

On a lighter note, when I was a child I had a stuttering problem. My father would tell me to slow down—your mouth is running faster than your brain. If I continued he would say “your talking like “Charmie” McNew

Letterhead from various Blackford businesses in the 1920s