On the night of August 19th, 1969, Hurricane Camille passed over Nelson County, forever changing the land and the people who lived there. The storm had initially made landfall in Mississippi and weakened as it moved inland, so forecasters did not expect it to turn toward Virginia. With little warning, at least 27 inches of rain fell over Nelson County in a 5-hour span. The resulting flash flooding and mudslides destroyed 100 bridges, tore countless buildings from their foundations, rerouted waterways, and killed more than 100 people, many of whom were taken by surprise as flood waters rose while they slept. Fifty-two people were killed along Davis Creek, twenty-two died in the village of Massies Mill, and more than thirty people were never found. Although Camille had been downgraded to a tropical depression when it arrived in Virginia, it collided over Nelson County with a cold front approaching from the north, producing the heaviest rains ever recorded in Virginia from a tropical cyclone, the worst flooding of the James River in over a century, and mudslides predicted to occur only once every thousand years. The aftermath required an immense search-and-rescue and cleanup effort, led to new emergency preparedness protocols, and forced the Virginia Blue Ridge Railway to rebuild after flood waters carried away bridges and heavily damaged sections of track, repairs whose cost was the first in a series of events that brought about the railway’s downfall.
