Altavista, Virginia

Altavista is an incorporated town in Campbell County, Virginia, United States. The town is in the Lynchburg Metropolitan Area, and its population was 3,378 at the 2020 census. It was founded in 1907 by John Edward Lane and Henry L. Lane of the Lane Company, and was chartered in September 1912.

Prior to the colonization of Virginia, the area around what would be Altavista was inhabited by the native Saponi people, in a tribal town that was called "Sapon Town", near what is now the Staunton River. The Saponi cleared out large networks of paths through the forests to connect their villages, inadvertently enabling colonists to come through the area with ease. The more hostile Occaneechi people were also present in the area, and killed some of the first colonizers in the area. Cherokee and Iroquois people also came through the area.

In 1905, John and Henry Lane's firm, The Lane Brothers Construction Company, had been awarded a contract to build 51 kilometers of railroad between Leesville and The Mansion for the Tidewater Railway Company, which was incorporated by William Nelson Page and Henry Huttleston Rogers. This railroad would also intersect the Southern Railway.

Recognizing the excellent location for a new town, the Lane Company bought 2000 acres of land around the intersection and started planning a town named Lane's Siding. On September 9, 1907, the first settlers arrived to the town of Lane's Siding in a small red caboose. A firsthand account of the early settlement of the town was written by Mrs. E. G. Fitzgerald:

When I first came to Altavista there wasn't hardly any body living there. There was the foundation to two stores. Then people began to come and build houses and stores. Then they built a hold and two depots. After awhile some people built a house and used it for a church. They used it for a school house too. Now there are about one thousand people here.

Between July 1908 and May 1909, the town of Lane's Siding, which (after a hat toss in one of the company bungalows) was renamed to Altavista after the Lane family farm near Charlottesville, had grown rapidly, with a "$100,000 machine shop, a $20,000 foundry and iron working plant, a $15,000 wood working plant, a $15,000 brick and tile making plant, a banking building and the home office of a $2,000,000 contracting and railway building company, a half dozen stores, a water works plant, an electrict lighting plant, a $30,000 hotel nearing completion, and about fifty residences" all being built in under a year.

In September 1912, the town of Altavista had been incorporated

In March 1912, John Edward Lane had bought a small box company which had gone bankrupt in an auction for $500, and put his son Edward Hudson Lane in charge of the facility even though he had no experience in the field. Because of how uncertain this new venture was, it was simply incorporated as the Standard Red Cedar Chest Company.