A History of the Crossing

Three centuries of getting over the Blue Ridge at Fancy Gap.

A Way Through the Mountains

Fancy Gap has always been a way through. It sits in a low notch in the Blue Ridge escarpment — the steep eastern wall of the mountains — where the land gives an easier grade up from the Carolina Piedmont to the Virginia high country. Everything here traces back to that crossing: the roads that found the gap, the travelers who used it, and the small community that grew where they stopped.

The First Roads

Long before it had a name, the gap was a route. The earliest records sit in the Montgomery County court road orders: in 1782 the county ordered a road marked toward "the Flower Gap," and in 1785, "that a waggon road be opened from the good spur." These were rough wagon roads, opened and kept up by local men under statute labor — the way a mountain community built its links to the outside world.

According to local tradition, part of that old road ran through the rugged hollow now protected as Devil's Den Nature Preserve, where traces are said to survive. That story is told locally rather than documented, but the gap's role as a crossing is old and real.

How the Gap Got Its Name

How the gap got its name is told locally rather than written down. As the story goes, a young teamster named Ira Coltrane, hauling over the mountain around 1830, judged the crossing "a fancy way up" — and years later, as a colonel laying out the road over the crest, gave it the name that stuck. Coltrane was a real figure of that era (per the Carroll County Historical Society), but the naming anecdote itself is oral history, not documented fact. It has been passed down for generations, and it fits the place.

War Over the Gap

The crossing cut both ways. On April 3, 1865, in the closing weeks of the Civil War, Union cavalry under General George Stoneman crossed the Virginia line at Fancy Gap in pursuit of a Confederate wagon train; their first stop, once they had it, was Hillsville. The same low notch that had eased wagons over the ridge had let an army through.

The 1912 Courthouse Tragedy

The area's most infamous chapter began in the county seat at Hillsville, ten minutes north. Floyd Allen — a well-known figure from the Cana community below the mountain — was on trial for interfering with sheriff's deputies in a 1911 incident. On March 14, 1912, the jury found him guilty and recommended a year in prison. When the judge ordered him jailed, Allen refused, and the courtroom erupted in gunfire. When it stopped, five people were dead: the judge, the sheriff, the commonwealth's attorney, a juror, and a young woman who was there as a witness. About seven more were wounded, Floyd Allen among them. Who fired the first shot was never established — the prosecution blamed the Allens, the family blamed court officers — and it is disputed to this day.

Floyd's brother Sidna Allen was among the shooters, and several of the clan fled into the Blue Ridge. What followed was a months-long, multi-state manhunt: the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency of Roanoke, backed by the governor, ran the fugitives down. Sidna Allen and his nephew Wesley Edwards — the local telling has them first taking cover in the cave at Devil's Den — got as far as Des Moines, Iowa, working as carpenters, before detectives caught them that September.

The trials, held that year in Wytheville, ended hard. Floyd Allen and his son Claude were convicted of first-degree murder and executed in the state's electric chair on the same day in March 1913 — Claude minutes after his father, despite widespread appeals for clemency. Sidna Allen was sentenced to thirty-five years and pardoned in 1926; Wesley Edwards drew twenty-seven years and Friel Allen eighteen, both later pardoned as well. As the story is often told, the case was front-page news across the country until the Titanic sank a month later. It has since produced a shelf of books, a play, and folk ballads.

The Sidna Allen house

Just before it all, Sidna Allen had finished the finest house for miles — an elaborate Queen Anne on the road north of Fancy Gap, designed by Sidna Allen and his wife and built by a local carpenter, Preston Dickens. It had oak floors, stained glass, and — remarkable for the mountains in 1911 — gas lighting run off its own generator, a showpiece said to have cost around $13,000. He lived in it barely a year before the shooting sent him running, and never returned; the state seized it after his conviction. The house still stands on US-52 and is on the National Register of Historic Places. The Carroll County Historical Society keeps it today as the J. Sidna Allen Home museum.

The Automobile Age

As the automobile arrived, the old mountain road was folded into the numbered highways — becoming US-52 by the 1930s, the two-lane Fancy Gap Highway that still climbs the escarpment. In 1935, work began on the Blue Ridge Parkway, the Depression-era scenic route that crosses US-52 at Fancy Gap near milepost 199. The crossing that had carried wagons and cavalry now carried tourists — the beginning of Fancy Gap as a place travelers stop rather than simply pass.

The Interstate and the Fog

In 1977, Interstate 77 opened through the mountain at Fancy Gap, taking over the through-traffic the gap had always carried — and inheriting its oldest hazard. Fog forms fast and thick on Fancy Gap Mountain, and the interstate has seen a string of chain-reaction pileups, most severely on Easter Sunday 2013, when roughly 95 vehicles crashed in the fog near the foot of the mountain and three people died.

The fog is nothing new — the mountain's weather has never much cared what kind of traffic it slows. It is why we keep a live travel & conditions report and a closer look at the fog itself.

Sources: the 1912 courthouse tragedy draws on Encyclopedia Virginia and the Library of Virginia's Dictionary of Virginia Biography; the Sidna Allen House on the Virginia Department of Historic Resources register; the early roads on Historic Roads of Virginia: Montgomery County Road Orders (the 1782 and 1785 orders); Stoneman's 1865 crossing on the Virginia Center for Civil War Studies at Virginia Tech; the Blue Ridge Parkway on the National Park Service; Colonel Coltrane's dates on the Carroll County Historical Society; and the 2013 Interstate 77 pileup on the National Weather Service (Blacksburg) Spring 2013 newsletter — the same source behind our fuller corridor crash history. The name-origin and Devil's Den stories are noted as local tradition where they appear.

Explore

Things to Do

Including the Sidna Allen House and other heritage stops.

Scenic Drives

The Blue Ridge Parkway and the roads over the gap.