William Nelson Page

William Page became one of the leading managers and developers of West Virginia's rich bituminous coalfields in the late-19th and early-20th century, as well as being deeply involved in building the railroads and other infrastructure necessary to process and transport the mined coal.

In the town of Ansted, for 28 years, the Page family lived in a large Victorian mansion built by carpenters of the Gauley Mountain Coal Company.

Instead of giving up, working with Rogers discreetly providing the millions needed for financing, William Page and his associates expanded the "short line" all the way hundred of miles across the Virginias to a new coal pier built on Hampton Roads, creating the Virginian Railway.

One of their younger sons, Randolph Gilham "Dizzy" Page, was an early pioneer of the U.S. air mail industry during this time until his death of a heart attack at 36.

Through the Nelson family, he was a descendant of Robert "King" Carter (1663–1732), who served as an acting royal governor of Virginia and was one of its wealthiest landowners in the late 17th and early 18th centuries.

By this time, William had become well-established in the region and had been named as General Manager and a Director of the Gauley Mountain Coal Company at the urging of an old friend and trustee, attorney Thomas D. Ransom of Staunton, Virginia.

Emma and William settled in the town of Ansted in Fayette County, West Virginia, where they raised their family, which included four children who lived beyond infancy.

A knowledgeable man with the training and experience as a civil engineer and the spirit of an entrepreneur, Page was well-prepared to help develop West Virginia's hidden wealth: huge deposits of "smokeless" bituminous coal, a product exceptionally well-suited for making steel.

Ansted sits on high bluffs on Gauley Mountain near an outcropping of rocks called Hawk's Nest overlooking the New River far below, where the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway tracks occupied both sides of the narrow valley.

Described years later by author H. Reid as "the idea man from Ansted," Page spent long hours working in the den just off the main entrance to his resplendent home.

In addition to pursuing business interests, Page also found time to serve as the mayor of Ansted for 10 years and rose to the rank of brigadier inspector general in the West Virginia National Guard.

The story of the building of the Virginian Railway has been described as a textbook example of natural resources, railroads, and a smaller company taking on big business (and winning) early in the 20th century.

Some historians will hold that the Loup Creek enterprise originally was planned to be just another local mining operation, one that would ship primary product, coal, out of the region via the common carrier railroads.

However, other historians believe that a goal of the plan from the outset was to transport from the mineheads to reach a shipping point without using these common carriers, who as owners of vast coal lands and many mines, were also competitors.

One of the silent investors Page had enlisted was millionaire industrialist Henry Huttleston Rogers, a principal in John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil Trust.

While Page continued to meet with the big railroads for rate negotiations that always seemed unproductive, he and Rogers secretly planned a route and acquired rights-of-way all of the way across Virginia to Hampton Roads, a distance of some 440 miles (710 km).

This proved just in time for the new railroad to serve the Jamestown Exposition, which was held on land adjacent to the VGN coal pier site at Sewell's Point.

In addition to President Roosevelt, the newly renamed Virginian Railway (VGN) transported many of the 3 million persons who attended before the Exposition closed on December 1, 1907.

Work progressed on the VGN during 1907 and 1908 using construction techniques not available when the larger railroads had been built about 25 years earlier, achieving a more favorable route and grade.

While neither William Page nor Henry Rogers ended up running their newly completed Virginian Railway, it was arguably a crowning lifetime achievement for each man.

Together, they had conceived and built a modern, well-engineered rail pathway from the coal mines of West Virginia to port at Hampton Roads right under the noses of the big railroads.

He was a classmate at the College of William and Mary with a young Thomas Jefferson, who stayed at his home while working on the early documents relating to independence for Virginia and the other colonies.

However, during the War, when William was only 10 years old, his father, Edwin Randolph Page, died at their home "Locust Grove" in Campbell County, where he is interred in a family cemetery.

Thomas, educated as a lawyer, was to gain fame writing of the "lost era" and an idealized antebellum Virginia (a style which became known as the plantation tradition genre).

Wise, and was involved with early training of cadets at Camp Lee in Richmond, Virginia as the American Civil War broke out the following year.

Emma spent her teen-aged years in the former Confederate capital, where she was a débutante at one of Richmond's earliest "Germans", which were formal social gatherings for the young people (the name of these events had no relationship to Germany).

The seemingly remotely located terminal Page and Rogers planned and built at Sewell's Point played an important role in 20th-century U.S. naval history.

The VGN transported the high quality "smokeless" West Virginia bituminous coal favored by the US Navy for its ships and submarines, providing a reliable supply during both World Wars.

Formed in 2002, Virginian Railway (VGN) Enthusiasts a non-profit group of preservationists, authors, photographers, historians, modelers, and rail fans, has grown to over 650 members.

were engraved in the rails of a short stretch of new roadbead laid for a caboose to be displayed at Victoria, a town they caused to be founded on the "Mountains to Sea" railroad.