African American communities in Montgomery County built churches, schools, businesses, neighborhoods, military traditions, and gathering places across generations. Wake Forest was a self-sufficient community settled by descendants of more than one hundred enslaved people who had labored on Kentland Plantation, and the Fears-Jones-Eaves Coal Company was the area’s only Black-owned coal mine. African Americans in Radford and surrounding counties served in the American military from the Spanish American War through the World Wars, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War, and Albert Hunter served in one of only two all-Black combat units in World War I. Christiansburg Industrial Institute, the region’s only secondary school for African Americans, educated generations of students on its one hundred eighty-five-acre farm campus from 1866 to 1966. Black entrepreneurs including the Campbell family and brothers S.B. and Burrell Morgan operated successful businesses and built homes, lodges, and churches in the Depot Street neighborhood. Schaffer Memorial Church was founded in 1867, and next door the brick Hill School building replaced a log school founded in 1866. Mount Airy United Methodist Church began by 1870 along with a school later known as Piney Woods, which was replaced in the early twentieth century by a Rosenwald School. Near Pilot, a community of formerly enslaved people established High Rock school and church in 1869, and its cemetery predated Emancipation with burials from at least 1855. New Town was home to about twenty families until the early 1970s. Saint Luke and Odd Fellows Hall, built in the 1870s, served for more than sixty years as a public gathering place and center of social life. Saint Paul African Methodist Episcopal Church began in Blacksburg in 1857 and later became an important hub in the local Civil Rights movement. After Emancipation, Gordon and Nellie Mills purchased a farm where they also offered refreshments and tours of the cave on the property, and when the dirt road through it was paved against the family’s wishes, it was named Nellie’s Cave Road. In the Brake Branch area of Elliston, the community worshipped at Big Spring Baptist Church, gathered at an Odd Fellows hall, and sent children to the local grade school. Yellow Sulphur Springs resort, closed in 1923, was reopened in 1926 by African American businessmen and, billed as America’s Greatest Colored Resort, saw some success before closing in 1929. Many African American men in Shawsville worked for the railroad, and the community there was served by First Baptist Church and a Rosenwald School. Another community was established near Alleghany Springs Hotel around 1870, where Christiansburg Industrial Institute graduate Charles B. Williams, noted as an exceptional giant, led the community’s one-room school.