Virginia 250: The Stoplight That Stopped a Town

 

Sometime in the 1930s, or maybe even the late 1920s, the town of Fincastle had a stoplight.

 

That's not a sentence most people would expect to read. Fincastle, the quiet county seat of Botetourt County, tucked into the Valley and Ridge country of western Virginia, doesn't exactly conjure images of traffic control. But there it hung: a big black four-way stoplight, suspended on a diagonal wire between two poles at the intersection of Main and Roanoke Streets, overseeing what was then one of the busier crossroads in that part of the state.

 

I reported this story in 2005, when the Fincastle Volunteer Fire Department donated the old stoplight to the local museum. The department had kept it since 1970, when firefighters pulled it from the basement of the Botetourt County Courthouse during the fire that destroyed that building. It had followed them to their new firehouse in the mid-1980s, sat on display for a while, then ended up in a closet. Former fire chief Jimmy Firebaugh told me at the time that as far as he knew, it no longer worked and some of the parts were missing.

 

But the light itself wasn't the story. The story was what people remembered about it.

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Virginia Cronise, who was 83 in 2005, believed the light hung at the intersection from about 1935 to the early 1940s — no more than ten years, she thought. But Virginia Smith of Buchanan, who was 80 at the time, remembered it from even earlier. Her family moved to the corner of Roanoke and Murray Streets in 1927, when she was just three years old, and she grew up watching that light.

 

"When I got old enough they taught me to walk out to the drugstore corner and watch the stoplight and cross over to what was then Smith's store," she told me.

 

When she was about eight, she received a puzzle map of the United States. That summer, she sat and watched the vehicles coming through the light and wrote down the out-of-state license tags in a tablet, then checked her map to see which car had come the farthest distance.

 

Patty Ellis, about thirteen years younger than Cronise, started school in 1941 and had no memory of the light at all. "I think I would have remembered walking up and down the street and seeing it," she said.

 

So the window was probably somewhere between the late 1920s and the early 1940s. No one knows exactly when the Fincastle Town Council voted to take it down. The old town records were in storage and not readily available when I reported the piece.

 

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The light oversaw a genuinely busy corner. US 220 ran down Roanoke Street in those days, meaning all the traffic between Roanoke and Clifton Forge passed through Fincastle. A Greyhound bus stopped right there on its way to Covington, causing a regular little knot of congestion when it pulled in for passengers. Whittlers sat on a bench nearby and watched the traffic go by, and, according to town character Bobby Waid, they also whittled on one of the light poles so persistently that it had to be wrapped in cable to keep them from working it down to nothing.

 

Waid had the best story. He remembered his grandfather deciding one day that he'd watched people drive long enough to know how to do it himself, and he set out from the family farm. He made it all the way into town without a problem, until he hit the stoplight.

 

"Daddy said, 'You have to stop, the light's red,'" Waid told me. "And the old man started pulling back on the steering wheel and started hollering, 'Whoa! Whoa!'"

 

Waid wasn't sure whether his grandfather ran the light.

 

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Why did the light come down? That's where the memories diverge.

 

Waid believed it was the war. Like the rest of the nation, Fincastle participated in total blackouts to keep enemy aircraft from spotting the lights of the town. Twelve bulbs on a four-way stoplight would have been hard to explain away in that context.

 

Local historian Dottie Kessler had a different theory. She believed the light came down after US 220 was rerouted. Once all of the through-traffic stopped going through town, the need for a stoplight simply evaporated. She had a photograph dated 1940 showing the light still in place, which at least narrowed the timeline a little.

 

Virginia Smith knew what happened to it after it came down: it went into storage at the old Western Hotel, because her aunt and uncle ran the hotel at the time. From there it made its way to the Courthouse, where it sat in the basement until the building burned.

 

Corky Bolton, a Fincastle native, put it simply: "Most people couldn't believe there was a stoplight in Fincastle, but it was there all the years I was growing up."

 

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Does the intersection need one now? Bobby Waid had thoughts on that, too.

 

"I don't see a lot of broken glass up there," he said. "It's so congested people are real careful, because everybody's parking all over the place."

 

Some things about small Virginia towns don't change much, even across 250 years.

 

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Adapted from a piece originally published in The Fincastle Herald, 2005. Quotes and ages reflect interviews conducted at that time.