This is the last installment of my visit to Danville, Virginia, which is chock full of historical surprises and architecture. While many gleaming historic cities draw throngs of tourists, some historical cities like Danville wallow in relative obscurity while working hard to resurrect their past glories and preserve historic sites. I’ve reported on Danville’s Millionaires Row, Armored Tank Museum, Fine Arts Museum and Science Museum and today just a walk around the city.
Danville is located on the border between Virginia and North Carolina, and made its fortune in the tobacco and subsequent textile industries. But like many cities, it lost ground to other locations and is now working on making a comeback in modern businesses and renovating their shuttered buildings.
To get around the city on Friday and Saturday (6PM to midnight) without a vehicle, the Danville Mainline Trolley has a $1 fare, with children under 12 riding for free, and has a new door-to-door service within ¼ mile of their regular route. If you call their local phone number, the Trolley will alter its route to go to your hotel, restaurant or other location. Getting around the city is simplistic as everything downtown is close by and parking is pretty much free and easy. I found vacant and free parking areas in all the locations I visited. The easiest way to visit Danville is by car although Amtrak’s Crescent train service connects Danville with cities like New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, Charlotte, Atlanta, Birmingham, and New Orleans.
Danville is a common place name in the United States and a directional marker sign in town shares those other locations. I believe Jonathan L. did a Travel Gumbo story on Danville, Kentucky a couple years ago and PortMoresby said she resided in Danville, California at one time.
Japan Tobacco International (JTI), which has a corporate presence in Danville, provided a $400,000 grant to design and construct an entertaining fountain in the Main Plaza as part of the city’s rejuvenation effort. The fountain has seven fish and seven vertical water jets with a few benches to relax and watch the water show as the jets slow, stop, then burst forth powerfully once more. At night the fountain lights change colors. I had read where the seven jets represent the seven blocks in the Danville Tobacco Warehouse District.
On the outskirts of the city is the Dan Daniel Memorial Park with a Veterans Memorial wall and a walkway with 6,400 bricks with local Veteran’s names and inscriptions who “did what they had to do” per the brochure. The city was not named after Dan Daniel who hailed from Danville; rather he was a famous politician, WWII veteran and American Legion National Commander. The city name originated from a colonist William Byrd who said the area reminded him of the City of Dan mentioned in the Hebrew Bible, described as the northernmost city of the Kingdom of Israel, so he named the local river “Dan” which gave Danville its eventual name. The Memorial Park is free and located at River Point Drive and is open year-round, dawn to dusk.
I enjoy visiting and photographing covered bridges in the mid-Atlantic states. I was really excited to see the Riverside Cotton Mills Covered Bridge over the Dan River. This was the longest covered pedestrian bridge in Virginia connecting mills on both sides of the river. Only seven of the original nine spans exist and I was disappointed to not be able to cross the bridge or get close enough to get an interior photo. I talked to a local historian who said it was going to cost millions of dollars to repair the bridge, and for now it will just be kept as is. As a water powered mill town, Danville has many dams and bridges, a few of which I photographed after scaling down embankments below the spans.
Long before the textile industry blossomed, Danville was known as “The World’s Best Tobacco Market” and many city buildings still bear the stenciled outlines of tobacco company names and products.
To add another Dan in the mix, the Worsham Bridge over the Dan River was designed by Dan Luten. It was the highest point above the river and was built for tobacco farmers to get their product from the fields over the river to the warehouses for eventual storage and transport.
DIMON was one of the largest tobacco presences in Danville. DIMON Inc. is the second-largest independent leaf-tobacco merchant in the world and is engaged in virtually all areas of the industry, including purchasing, processing, storing, and selling leaf tobacco. The company owns tobacco leaf growing companies in the United States and more than 30 other countries, as well as 15 factories for processing the product, which is then sold to manufacturers of American-blend cigarettes throughout the world.
The origins of DIMON go back to the 1850s, when Richard H. Dibrell became a tobacco merchant in Richmond, Virginia. When Union troops set fire to the capital of the Confederacy shortly before the close of the Civil War, the contents of his warehouse went up in smoke. This resulted in Dibrell’s decision to relocate a portion of his operations in Danville, Virginia. In 1873 he sent his two sons to Danville, where they became leaf-tobacco brokers and formed Dibrell Brothers, a partnership incorporated in 1904 with Richard L. Dibrell as president.
Both new and old brick industrial architecture abounds in Danville like the Kingoff Building, Grinnell Alarm and Sprinkler Systems, Smith Seeds and more, finishing with the exquisite Danville Train Station. The Danville Historical Society conducts a tour called Tales of Tobacco, Textiles, and Trains which is a tour of the Tobacco Warehouse District where you’ll see the best of industrial architecture constructed in Danville in the late 1880s. They also conduct two other guided walking tours: The Secrets Inside is a tour of Danville’s magnificent Millionaires Row, a part of the Old West End Historic District and There’s a Story Here is a tour of the Holbrook-Ross District, the professional African-American neighborhood that was created shortly after the Civil War.
