By HANNAH AUSTIN
Contributing Writer
The question at the heart of this article is one that was posed to me by one of my classmates while I was studying at Washington and Lee University.
“Hey, you’re from Buchanan, right? What’s the name of that mountain right by there?”
“Oh, you must be talking about Purgatory.”
My fellow history major, John Crum, had been studying old maps of Rockbridge and Botetourt counties for a project, and had run across some of the oldest maps of the counties. He’d noted the unusual names on a map from the second half of the 18th century.
“That’s fascinating – what a strange name! It’s really called that?”
“Well, yes, it is.”
“Why?”
There was no hesitation before I quipped, “Because apparently it’s hell to climb.”
The response was one that I’d been taught from asking the question myself. Ask any resident of Buchanan or Botetourt County, and they’ll probably answer the same. John had a good laugh over it, and we moved on to another topic.
But the question has been lingering in my mind since then. The answer I gave almost seemed too simple. Why is Purgatory Mountain actually named Purgatory?
So I did a little research.
The map that my classmate probably saw was one created by Joshua Fry and Peter Jefferson, father of Thomas Jefferson. In 1750 the acting governor of Virginia, Lewis Burwell, commissioned Fry and Jefferson to create a map of the Shenandoah region of Virginia.
This was no easy task – up until that point, the mountainous region had been largely untouched. There were no roads or easy paths to take through the mountains. One of the men accompanying this journey, Thomas Lewis, wrote in his journal that “it was with the greatest Difficulty we Could get along – the mountains being prodigiously full of fallen Timber & Ivey as thick as it could grow, so interwoven that horse or man Could hardly force his way through it.”
That sounded a little bit familiar.
Lewis’ journal goes on to describe more of the details of their journey. He writes about a place “where we Could not find a plain Big enough for one man to Lye on. No fire wood Except green or Roten Spruce pine no place for our horses to feed.”
The place sounded awful.
Finally, Lewis tells his readers the crucial piece of information that I had been looking for. He says that, in this place, the surveyors were so “often in the outmoust Danger this tirable place was Calld Purgatory.”
It seems like oral history hasn’t failed us yet.
