A railroad town:
Ashland's rich history began, and remains forged, by
the tracks
Tuesday, Mar 20, 2007 - BY CLARKE BUSTARD
Times-Dispatch Staff Writer
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."
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