Cooperative Living November/December 2016 - 32

Crossroads | Story and Photos Courtesy of Ed McCoy, Contributing Writer
ORISKANY, VA
Oriskany: Off Botetourt's Beaten Path
This quaint and remote mountain community is a side-trip destination well worth taking.
C
raig Creek literally meanders
through the 40-odd miles of Craig
Valley from its headwaters in Giles
through Craig County and New Castle
(the only incorporated town on its route),
finally connecting with the James River at
Eagle Rock.
Names such as Hipes, Parr, Strom and
Surber are dots on old maps, but they no
longer represent communities or even
clusters of homes, nor the rail stops where
the names came from.
In fact, the former C&O Railroad spur
that once served Craig Valley between
Eagle Rock and New Castle was
abandoned in the late 1950s.
The rail bed is still there, though. The
rail spur right-of-way was deeded to the
Virginia Department of Transportation, and
parts are now secondary roads; other parts
more or less unusable, and still other parts
serving as paths through the national forest
that covers most of the mountain land that
cradles the valley from both sides.
The valley's heyday - from the mid-1800s
until the 1930s and '40s - was because of
the iron ore and timber in the mountains,
and the bottomland along the creek where
generations of farmers worked the soil.
Today, there are a few reminders of
the iron ore days, much of the mountain
land is national forest where timbering
has been curbed for 30 years, and the
farming community is fading with age in
these isolated hinterlands of western
Botetourt (pronounced by residents as
Bot-e-tot) County.
There is one community left, however.
Oriskany.
Carol Surber Lewis describes it as " The
Little Village that Time Forgot. It's bucolic,
way out of the mainstream, peaceful, quiet,
lots of wildlife. "
While well out of the way, it's easy to
find on Rt. 615 or Craig Creek Road, that
also meanders through the valley between
Eagle Rock and New Castle. When you
reach the beautiful country church that sits
on a slight rise just off the secondary road,
you're there.
King Memorial Community Church is as
iconic as Craig Creek that - in one of its
many ox bows - is just across the road.
The end of Little Mountain seems to bow
appropriately to the community church
from the west.
Just around the corner from King
Memorial in what's named Oriskany
30 | Cooperative Living | November-December 2016
Square is the Oriskany Post Office.
Unlike many rural post offices, this one
is still open Monday through Saturday, but
only two hours a day, 12:30 to 2:30 p.m.
Right now, Karen Mitchell, a clerk from
the Eagle Rock Post Office that's about 17
miles and 30 minutes away, drives up to
open up. Customers are few in the small
building that once served as the
community's train station when the rail
spur was still in operation, but seven
people still pick up their General
Delivery mail there. The church and the
post office are the only two public
buildings in the village.
Carol Lewis and her husband Jack
moved to Oriskany when she acquired
property her family owned there. That
includes Surber Station, one of the stops on
the former Craig Valley Line. For several
years after renovating the building, the
Lewises provided vacation rentals in what
they named " Olde Surber Station. "
Recently, they moved back into the station
and stopped taking vacationers.
" Oriskany used to be a bustling place,
with the train station, iron ore mines,
schoolhouse, multiple stores, barbershop,
busy tomato canning businesses. There
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Cooperative Living November/December 2016

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