BUENA VISTA - Tucked away in eastern Rockbridge County's Blue Ridge foothills is the incorporated city of Buena Vista. Although the city's 100th birthday was celebrated either in 1990 or 1992 depending on how one counts such things, the settlement in the area goes back a great deal longer.
Even the name Buena Vista has been around longer than the city itself. Just outside the city is an ironworks that was known by the name of Buena Vista because it supplied iron munitions to the Army at the Battle of Buena Vista in the Mexican War. The foundry was built about 1840 and was destroyed by Union troops in 1864. Today it is called Old Buena Vista, and the ruins are still visible.
The area where the city of Buena Vista is located has gone by several names over the last couple of centuries. The earliest is probably Hart's Bottom after the 18th-century landowner who patented land in the area along what is now the Maury River.
In the late 19th century, Benjamin C. Moomaw began operating a tannery in the area and founded a town called either Green Forest or Green Valley. It was a natural transportation crossroads. In the decade before the Civil War the river, then called North River, provided easy transportation of goods east to Richmond. Making such water transportation even better was the construction of the North River Canal from Lexington to what is now Parry McCluer. Moomaw's Landing was on that canal. During the Civil War, a packet boat passed through here carrying the body of General Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson. After the war, General Robert E. Lee's family was known to have traveled on the canal boats.
In the 1880s, the entrepreneur Moomaw and some northern backers expanded along the canal and the newly built Shenandoah Valley Railroad. By the late 1880s there was also a pulp mill, a cannery and houses for employees.
Soon Moomaw's ideas for expansion took a grand twist, and he organized the Buena Vista stock company in order to create a town. Within a month all the stock had been snapped up and Moomaw had $400,000. The boom was on! The town, now renamed Buena Vista and chartered on January 24, 1890 and laid out in nice, neat streets. New industries sprang up overnight including: a firebrick maker, a silk mill, a stationery company, a saddle factory, a glass company, a wire fencing company, and a fertilizer business.
Buena Vista soon took on a rough-and-rowdy character despite the fact that there were two churches in the town by March 1890 and by May of that year a new school had been built that would hold 240 students. The principal's name was Parry McCluer.
Soon a move was afoot to incorporate the town and make it a separate political entity from Rockbridge County. Incorporation requires a population of 5,000 and one local historian notes that "it is alleged, and it would seem with reason, that the count of the inhabitants was padded." Nonetheless, Buena Vista became an independent city on Feb. 15, 1892.
During the boom the magnificent Hotel Buena was built at a cost of $85,000. Unfortunately the boom ended, the hotel failed to turn a profit and was sold and turned into a college which it still is today.
For Buena Vista, the hey-day of the boom was over by March of 1892 and the city then settled into the normal ups and downs of the national economic cycles. Ever present through those boom and bust times was the double-edged sword of the river. Not only did the river provide a source of power and transportation, but it periodically flooded and devastated the city. In 1999, the $34 million Jim Olin Floodwall was dedicated in hopes that flooding can now be controlled. The Army Corps of Engineers project used a series of retaining ponds, canals and flood gates to tame the river.
The city also readies to open the new Parry McCluer High School named after the its first principal who died in 1924.
Now well into its second century, Buena Vista is settling into revitalizing its historic downtown district. In January 2001 the city was designated as a Virginia Main Street Start Up Community with an eye toward preserving its past and caring for its future.