Green Cove Station

K-62

Green Cove Station was a rail stop along the "Virginia Creeper" Railroad that ran from Abingdon, Virginia, to Todd, North Carolina. Built by the Virginia Carolina Railroad about 1914, it also served as a post office, general store, and telegraph office, managed primarily by William M. Buchanan. Famed photographer O. Winston Link memorialized this building in his 1956 photo "Maud Bows to the Virginia Creeper." The last train passed here in 1977, but the station remained as a general store for a few more years. In the early 1990s the former station was restored as a U.S. Forest Service visitor and education center for the Virginia Creeper National Recreational Trail.

Department of Historic Resources, 2005

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References/Bibliographic Citation:

Charles Francis Cocke, Recollections of Wilton Egerton Mingea, 1855-1938 (S.L.: Privately Printed, 1965); “Corporate Timeline of the Norfolk & Western Railway,” http://www.nwhs.org/nw_timeline.html, 11 Oct. 2005; Edward H. Davis and Edward B. Morgan, The Virginia Creeper Trail Companion: Nature and History Along Southwest Virginia’s National Recreation Trail (Johnson City, Tn.: The Overmountain Press, 1997); Green Cove Community Rail Road Station, Virginia Department of Historic Resources Archives File (95-99-1), Richmond; Louise Fortune Hall, A History of Damascus (Abingdon, Va.: John Anderson Press, 1950), 14-17; O. Winston Link, Ghost Trains: Railroad Photographs of the 1950s (Norfolk, Va.: Chrysler Museum, 1983), 10, 45-46; O. Winston Link (text by Tim Hensley), America’s Last Steam Railroad: Steam Steel & Stars (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1987), 126-133; O. Winston Link (text by Thomas H. Garver), The Last Steam Railroad in America (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1995), 92-100; Lloyd Lewis, “An Abingdon Branch Accolade: A Line From Another Time,” Trains 44 (June 1984): 20-28; Doug McGuinn, The “Virginia Creeper”: Remembering the Virginia-Carolina Railway (Boone, N.C.: Bamboo Book, 1998); O. Winston Link Museum, http://www.linkmuseum.org/1955-7.html; Richard E. Prince, Norfolk & Western Railway: Pocahontas Coal Carrier, Precision Transportation (Millard, Neb.: Prince, 1980), 66-67; Will Sarvis, “Green Cove Station: An Appalachian Train Depot and Its Community,” Virginia Cavalcade 42 (Autumn 1992): 52-61.