Incorporated in 1836, their Mid-Lothian Mining and Manufacturing Company employed free and enslaved people to do the deadly work of digging underground.

Midlothian-area coal from Harry Heth's Black Heath mines heated the U.S. White House for President Thomas Jefferson.

[7][8] The transportation needs of coal shipping stimulated construction of a paved toll road (Virginia's first), the Manchester Turnpike in 1807; and the Chesterfield Railroad, Virginia's first, in 1831; each traveled the 13 miles (21 km) from the mining community to the port of Manchester, just below the Fall Line of the James River.

Midlothian is located in the Piedmont geologic region of the state, and is made up of mainly a hilled, fertile land (it is somewhat of a plain.)

The Midlothian area serves as the headwaters to a number of creeks which ultimately contribute their waters to the flow of the James River.

[15] In 2004, completion of State Route 288 connected Midlothian to the circumferential highway network of greater Richmond Region.

After years of discussion, in March 2006 Chesterfield County approved intensive zoning for the Watkins Centre, promoted as a large, mixed-use office complex and retail "lifestyle center" at the intersection of Route 288 and U.S. 60, 2 miles (3.2 km) west of the Village of Midlothian.

They often came into conflict with the Algonquian-speaking members of the Powhatan Confederacy, who were generally located to the east in the Virginia Tidewater area.

In 1700 and after, French Huguenot settlers, who were Protestant, came to the area in the Virginia Colony to escape Catholic religious persecution in France.

About 10 miles (16 km) west of the fall line of the James River at present-day Richmond is a basin of coal, which was one of the earliest mined in the Virginia Colony.

It was rebuilt in 1877 after a fire, and the reconstruction included a small one-room building to be the first public school for Black children in the area.

[21] The Village area of today's Midlothian started as a settlement of coal miners in the 18th century which were among the oldest mining shafts in the United States.

Among other participants in the area's emerging coal business was Colonel Henry "Harry" Heth, a businessman who emigrated from England about 1759.

By the end of the War, developers shipped Chesterfield coal to Philadelphia, New York, Boston and to every city in Virginia.

[25] Midlothian Mines Park, on the site of the first commercially-mined coal deposits in the Colony of Virginia, first opened for visitors in 2004.

They wanted the construction of a macadam toll road at least 30 feet wide from Manchester to Falling Creek bridge.

The heavily loaded coal wagons tended to cut deep ruts in the turnpike, raising clouds of dust in summer and churning the road into mud in the rainy season.

As there were few options for shunpiking, citizens whose faster buggies dawdled along behind the lumbering wagons urged the state legislature to do something about it—a canal, a better road, but something.

The result was the Chesterfield Railroad, a 13 miles (21 km) mule- and gravity-powered line that connected the Midlothian coal mines with wharves located at Manchester, directly across from Richmond.

Gradually, post-war construction of the highway network and the growth of metropolitan Richmond brought subdivision residential development.

When the Swift Creek Reservoir was created in 1965, the availability of water and sewer service accelerated residential growth, with Brandermill built in 1975.

In 1988, an extension of the Powhite Parkway and widening of Midlothian Turnpike and Hull Street Road (U.S. Route 360) provided much-needed highway infrastructure.

"It’s meant to be a stylized, satirical, comic book, fantasyland version of what I remember Midlothian, Virginia to be, I guess," filmmaker Richard Kelly has explained.