The history of Blacksburg.

People lived in the New River Valley long before Europeans arrived. The written record of the region begins in the 17th century, when the explorers Thomas Batte and Robert Fallam reached the area.

By 1755 there was a settlement at Draper’s Meadow, on land that is now part of the Virginia Tech campus. That July, at the start of the French and Indian War, Shawnee raiders from the Ohio country killed and captured settlers there. A state historical marker on campus records it.

The town’s land was once part of the Draper’s Meadow Patton tract. In the mid-1770s William Preston, a surveyor, member of the House of Burgesses and Revolutionary War officer, built Smithfield, his plantation house, nearby. Smithfield is listed on the Virginia Landmarks Register and the National Register of Historic Places.

Samuel Black also bought land here, 600 acres of it. When he died in 1772 his land was divided between his sons, William and John. The dividing line seems to have followed what is now Draper Road, and it would decide where the town went.

Virginia Agricultural and Mechanical College opened in 1872 as a land-grant college for agriculture and mechanics. It was housed at first in the old Olin and Preston Institute, near what is now Alumni Mall. On October 1, 1872, Addison Caldwell walked 26 miles from Craig County to enroll as its first student.

The college changed the town. Lybrook’s Row, built about 1870, housed early students and earned the nickname “Hell’s Row.” In 1875 Charles A. Deyerle moved his store to North Main Street, directly across from the College Building, and advertised it as the “store nearest and most convenient for students.” The building is one of the earliest and best preserved commercial buildings in the county.

In the same years New Town took shape, where Collegiate Square stands today. It was a primarily African American neighborhood established near the end of Reconstruction. In 1874 Gilbert Vaughn, who had been enslaved, bought a half-acre lot and became New Town’s first Black landowner. An 1884 deed calls the place “New or Clapboard town.”

After major academic changes in 1896, the college took a new name: Virginia Agricultural and Mechanical College and Polytechnic Institute, known as VPI.

The town more than doubled in the 1950s, to 7,070 people in 1960. In 1970 the General Assembly made the college a university: Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. Nearly everyone calls it Virginia Tech.

The 1980 Census counted 30,638 people in town, more than three times the 9,384 of 1970, the biggest jump between any two censuses on record. The number of homes nearly tripled too, from 3,531 to 9,785. More of the homes standing in Blacksburg today were built in the 1970s than in any other decade.

Building moved outward. HHHunt began in Blacksburg in 1966, building housing at Virginia Tech, and in 1971 started Hethwood, its first master-planned community. University Mall opened in 1975 and pulled development beyond the town’s traditional boundaries. Real estate companies laid out subdivisions outside the historic core. New Town’s longtime residents gradually moved away, and Virginia Tech later led the neighborhood’s redevelopment into a retail center.

The Virginia Tech Corporate Research Center has housed companies since 1985 and now spans 230 acres and 40 buildings.

The town also set out to keep its past. The Blacksburg Historic District and the Miller-Southside Residential Historic District were listed on the Virginia Landmarks Register in 1989 and on the National Register of Historic Places in 1991. In 2005 St. Luke’s and Odd Fellows Hall, a New Town landmark, was listed on the National Register, and it reopened to the public in 2009.

The 2020 Census counted 44,826 people in Blacksburg. Virginia Tech enrolled nearly 39,000 students in fall 2025, and its main campus here covers 2,600 acres.

How the town was platted, sold and built, and what homes have cost along the way, is its own story: a history of real estate in Blacksburg.