Midlothian, Virginia 1.35

Midlothian, Virginia is an unincorporated town in Chesterfield County, Virginia, U.S. Founded over 300 years ago as a coal town, it is now a suburban community located west of Richmond, Virginia and south of the James River in the Greater Richmond Region.It was named for the early 18th-century coal mining enterprises of the Wooldridge brothers. They called their new venture the Mid-Lothian Mining and Manufacturing Company. Midlothian is the site of the first commercially mined coal in the Colony of Virginia and in what became the United States.By the early 18th century, several mines were being developed by French Huguenots and others. The mine owners began to export the commodity from the region in the 1730s. Midlothian-area coal heated the U.S. White House for President Thomas Jefferson. The transportation needs of coal shipping stimulated construction of an early toll road, the Manchester Turnpike in 1807; and the Chesterfield Railroad, the state's first in 1831; each to travel the from the mining community to the port of Manchester, just below the fall line of the James River. In the early 1850s, the Richmond and Danville Railroad built Coalfield Station near the mines.