Long before the trappers and pioneers and diviners of the dividing line trod upon this earth, Indians-Morotocks mostly, but perhaps a few Occaneechis-made their home in the lush county near the falls of the Dan.  In fact, Main Street (of Danville) follows the path of their principal hunting trail to the south.

However, by most all accounts, the history of Danville begins with the arrival of Col. William Byrd II in 1728.  While Byrd was the the first to record for posterity his travels in what he called the "land of Eden", he wand the members of his surveying party were not the first white men to pass through these parts.  One day in May of 1673, as Byrd was to discover 60 years later on his second trip through the :Land of Eden:, three woodsmen-John Hatcher, Henry Hatcher, and Benjamin Bullington-carved their initials into the trunk of a birch tree near the river which feeds this valley we call home.

Still, it was Byrd, remembering the biblical boundaries of Canaan-"From Dan to Beersheba"-who gave the river its name.  Commissioned to survey the dividing line of Virginia and North Carolina, he camped within the limits of presentday Danville in October 1728.  He noted then that the Valley of the Dan was "a beautiful dwelling, where the air is wholesome and the soil equal in fertility to any in the world."

Five years later, Byrd returned to the valley and presciently predicted that one day a town would grow near the falls, a town where folks would reside "with much content and gayety of heart."

This, however, did not come to pass overnight-forwhile Byrd's predictions for Danville would, one day, prove correct, his worth as a pioneer agronomist must be questioned.

The soil of the Valley of the Dan was by no means as fertile as he believed, suffering as it did by comparison to that in the Shenandoah Valley.  Whether this actually retarded the development of Southside is moot.  Suffice it to say though, it could not have  helped, for Pittsylvania's  County's population did not truly begin to grow until after the Revolutionary War.

Wynne's Falls

For a while, William Wynne and his family lived in what amounted to solitary splendor on the banks of the Dan.  In 1738, Wynne, a justice for Brunswick County received a grant for 2000 acres of river land on the south side of the Dan, beginning at a point near the old Indian encampment which straddled Rutledge's (now Pumpkin) Creek.

Fifteen years late, in 1753, Wynne finally moved westward, building a home near a shallow ford of the river just above where the Dan cascaded over a series of rocks.  In short time, this picturesque spot would be named "Wynne's Falls."

A slow but steady trickle of pioneer families eventually followed Wynne to the Valley of the Dan.  From New Jersey and Pennsylvania, via the Shenandoah Valley, would come Scotch-Irish and Germans; later, after the Revolution, would come the more impoverished denizens of Tidewater, seeking a jew life removed from the shadow of the aristocracy which held sway politically, economically and socially.

By 1767, enough new families had moved into Southside to warrant a bisection of Halifax County.

The new county was named Pittsylvania, in honor of William Pitt, Earl of Chatham.  By the time of the first national census in 1790, the county could claim 11,000 citizens.

At this time, the little settlement at Wynne's Falls served as a meeting place for veterans of the Revolution.  There the old soldiers would fish-the river boasted copious schools of sturgeon-and swap stories.

Many of these men, said Dr. George W. Dame (the founding father of the Episcopal Church of the Epiphany) in his "Notes on the Origin of Danville," decided to stay in the "very thinly settled part of the state to begin life again."  One such veteran, John Barnett, operated a ferry at the ford and ran a line of bateaux-long, broad flat-bottomed boats steered by pools-for trading purposes.

River Town Born

By the first decade of the new republic, tobacco had already taken root as the area's principal crop.

However, with the Roanoke River system-which included the Dan, the Stanton and the Banister-unnavigable in many places, early planters were forced to transport their leaf to Lynchburg and Petersburg for mandatory inspection by state officials.  This task was as arduous as it was expensive.

Thus, in October 1793, 15 prominent residents of southern Pittsylvania petitioned the General Assembly to establish a tobacco inspection warehouse at Wynne's Falls.

These men, tobacco planters who would later become the first trustees of Danville, were led y John Wilson, a former officer in the Continental Army, local public official and the region's representative in the General Assembly.  Wilson, the largest planter in the area with 59 acres of leaf under cultivation, also owned land on the Dan, where he ran a ferry service and a small general store.

Wilson was one of 12 men-the others being Thomas Tunstall, Matthew Clay, William Harrison, Thomas Fearne, George Adams, Thomas Worsham, Robert Payne, John Dix, John Southerland (Sutherlin), John Call and Thomas Smith-to whom the General Assembly granted a charter on Nov. 23, 1793, to erect a tobacco inspection warehouse.

These men were also enjoined to  lay out a town in streets and half-acre lots.  This town was to be named Danville.

However, it would be nearly two years-on May 4, 1795-before these trustees would offer any land for sale.  Purchasers of lots were obligated to build "a dwelling house 16 feet square at least with a brick or stone chimney" within five years.

Lots 1 (the present-day intersection of Main and Craghead) and 19 ( southwest corner of Main and Union) were sold to Thomas Barrett for 25 pounds "current money of Virginia."  However, by 1799, only five more lots had been bought, and no improvements had been made on them.  So, December of that year, the trustees petitioned the legislature for an additional three years to sell the property marked out along the old Indian trail, by then known as "the Salisbury road."  By 1800, 14 lots had been purchased, principally by the planter-trustees whose sons opened businesses in the tiny river town.

As tradition tells us, Danville's first building was a blacksmith shop, where horses could be shod before crossing the rocky river.  Soon thereafter an "ordinary" was added for the care of man as well as beast.  However, in no short time, the most important structure in the small frontier hamlet was the tobacco warehouse.  Its construction all by insured Danville's statue as a key trading post.  And once a series of canals rendered the Roanoke River system navigable, the little town became a drop-off station for crops  bound downriver to Weldon, N.C., the head of steam navigation on the Roanoke, into which the Dan flows.

Early Days

In years to come, Danville's future would become inextricably tied to balance-of-power Virginia politics and to the tension between the clashing political philosophies of the day.  to put it simply, in Jefferson's Virginia, Danville longed for the fruits of Hamiltonian Policies-policies grounded in a central banking system, protective tariffs and state-supported improvements.

Internal improvements-canals, turnpikes and the like-held the key to Danville's growth, said George Tucker a political economist who was the state's leading Hamiltonian in the morning decades of the 19th century.  In Danville, Tucker's views were mirrored by B.W.S. Cabell, who tirelessly promoted the town's commercial possibilities in the General Assembly.  The town on the Dan, as Cabell envisioned, could be a gateway to the lower South as well as to the western frontier.  That this vision never quite achieved reality can be attributed, ironically, the the existence of an agrarian economy-the Jeffersonian idea.  Folks in the South simply did not cluster in towns; such outposts as Dancville were needed only as places to market tobacco.

Thus, until 1800, Danville was little more than a trading station with an ordinary, a general store, the inspection warehouse-and few permanent residents.  As the method of marketing tobacco changed, Danville began to grow slowly.

In the early years, planters would bring their produce for inspection, receive a receipt, and then sell the tobacco to buyers, who would purchase the leaf sight unseen.