Modest country churches mark the landscape in small rural communities. Cars in an informal yard create a pattern of human gathering.

The ‘holler’ or ‘hollow’ is ubiquitous in the mountains of SW Virginia. These networks of narrow valleys between ridges form a central organizing principle in human settlement and are often associated with coal mining. In order to avoid going up and down the mountains, railroads (and later on, roads) followed the contours of the river bank and to this day allow for the export of coal from the Appalachian coalfields.

Lines of ‘deforestation’ allow for electrical transmission lines to traverse the mountain ridges of SW Virginia. These long, impossibly straight scars cut across the landscape and mark an interruption in the pattern of native forest and rolling hills.

The coal-fired Glen Lyn Power Plant ceased operation in 2015. Its hulking mass still sits along the New River in Giles County, very near the border with West Virginia. A deep pit adjacent to the power plant contains remnants of coal, which erode and shift with the rains.

Part of a line of several hundred round hay bales wrapped in plastic in a field near the WNRV AM radio broadcast station. This pattern of agricultural production is typical during the fall and winter in rural SW Virginia. Submitted by Kevin Jones

Concrete piers stand sentry in the New River where the Glen Lyn railroad trestle, completed in 1909, once stood. It is not uncommon to run across remnants of forgotten infrastructure while navigating the New River.