Schuyler, Virginia

Schuyler, Virginia
CDP
Schuyler Schuyler
Coordinates: 37°47′33″N 78°41′54″W
Country	United States
State	Virginia
County	Nelson
Elevation	394 ft (120 m)
Population  (2010)
• Total	298
Time zone	UTC-5 (Eastern (EST))
• Summer (DST)	UTC-4 (EDT)
Area code	434
GNIS feature ID	1500039

The Rockfish River at Schuyler after the passage of Hurricane Camille

Schuyler (/ˈskaɪlər/ SKY-lur) is a census-designated place (CDP) in Nelson County, Virginia, United States, close to Scottsville. The population as of the 2010 Census was 298.

In 1882, the community—originally "Walker's Mill"—was named for Schuyler George Walker, a local mill operator, and the area's first postmaster of the old United States Post Office Department.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the community became a small industrial center with the establishment of a stone cutting plant for reshaping and shipping blocks / sheets from the area quarries of the Alberene Stone Company, which took the prized native and acid-resistant soapstone and milled the rock into flat table tops for labs and hospitals. The Great Depression of the 1930s with its bad economic / financial conditions unfortunately essentially destroyed this industry and the area never fully recovered.

Schuyler was the birthplace and home of now famous writer / author (novelist) and later film / television screenwriter Earl Hamner Jr. He is best known for the CBS (Columbia Broadcasting System) television series The Waltons from 1972 to 1981, which was based on his experiences of growing up the eldest child of a large rural family in Depression-era America. Earl and his mother and siblings attended the Schuyler Baptist Church near their homestead.

In 2014 a special service was held there to honor Hamner on his last visit to his home community. Although under two different fictional names, but which the spirit and mountain heritage of which he had made famous throughout the nation and world through first in his original 1961 novel Spencer's Mountain, then followed two years later by the 1963 feature film of the same name Spencer's Mountain, but changed and set by Hollywood producers in the western United States of the Grand Teton Mountains chain of the Rocky Mountains in Wyoming. It starred Henry Fonda, Maureen O'Hara and a young James MacArthur as "Clay-Boy".

Then a decade later came the November 1971 pilot introductory TV holiday film for Thanksgiving Day, starring Andrew Duggan and Patricia Neal. With high audience ratings and critical acclaim, then followed in the next September by the long-running TV series (1972-1981) with its now legendary locale in the "Old Dominion" with familiar Walton family characters and actors / actresses of Richard Thomas, Ralph Waite, Michael Learned, Will Geer and Ellen Corby, followed by the gaggle of five other children and assorted other "Walton's Mountain" country village-dwellers with frequent weekly visitors in and out.

Six subsequent made-for-TV movies aired by two different television networks, three that followed in 1982 on NBC-TV (National Broadcasting Company) and three more during the next decade of the 1990s on the original TV home of CBS-TV (Columbia Broadcasting System). Hamner died two years later much loved and appreciated after that special sentimental occasion in 2014, mourned across America and his passing and numerous works (other movie and TV projects in earlier decades), noted in all the major American and foreign media - press and TV. Country singer Jimmy Fortune participated in the 2014 event.

The region also suffered great damage from the remnants of Hurricane Camille, which dumped floods of 2 feet (61 cm) to 3 feet (91 cm) from heavy rain downpours in the Middle Atlantic states region in August 1969.

The Schuyler Historic District was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2007.

External links

• Walton's Mountain Museum
• The Walton Hamner House Archived 2019-04-15 at the Wayback Machine
• The Quarry Gardens at Schuyler