Archaeological evidence indicates that village sites along the Smith River were protected by wooden palisades, and relied heavily on the cultivation of maize.

Some of the earliest Europeans to visit the Smith River were members of a survey party led by William Byrd II in 1728, tasked with mapping the Virginia-North Carolina border.

This river we forded with much difficulty and some danger, by reason of the hollow spaces betwixt the rocks, into which our horses plunged almost every step.

In the mean time, neither that chain of rocks, nor any other that we could observe in this stream, was so uninterrupted, but that there were several breaks where a canoe, or even a moderate flat-bottomed boat, might shear clear.

[6] This name persisted through the late eighteenth century among colonial administrators in eastern and central Virginia, notably depicted and labeled on the Fry-Jefferson map of 1755.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Smith River emerged as an important source of water power for lumber and textile mills.

[9] Notable among these was Bassett Furniture, established in 1902, which continues to operate today on its original mill site on the Smith River.