Castlerun Historic District

Castlerun Historic District is a tiny cluster of buildings at the heart of a rural community in the foothills of Clinch Mountain, near Castlewood in Russell County, Virginia. It includes a ca. 1895 one-room schoolhouse and a 1924 Missionary Baptist church that face each other across Route 682, along with a ca. 1926 privy and a recent concrete-block bathroom. Both main buildings are tall, rectangular frame structures with steep metal roofs, gable fronts and log piers. The school is the earliest and most intact of only three one-room schools surviving in the county, and it closed in 1951 when a bus route carried children to a larger school. The church, updated with vinyl siding and paneling in the 1950s, still holds services. Together they served as the educational, religious and social centre for farm families and coal miners living in isolation, and they show how such communities lived in the early twentieth century.