Franklin County Barn

The area known as Burnt Chimney got its name from a store built in 1885 that burned down roughly a decade later, leaving only its charred chimney standing as a landmark for travelers. For over a decade after that, the 15-foot blackened spire served as the region’s most reliable navigation point; folks heading to Roanoke simply turned left “at the burnt chimney.” Today, barns still dot the landscape where farming has dominated for more than a century, silent witnesses to Franklin County’s tobacco heritage.

The chimney did such reliable work as a landmark that the region never quite got around to inventing a better one. Even after the original finally came down around 1910, the name stuck so firmly to the crossroads that decades later, in the 1960s, someone built an entirely unrelated chimney on the wrong corner and locals had to sort out the confusion in print, complete with a newspaper photo captioned, with admirable bluntness, “This Is Wrong Chimney.” The real landmark had by then been gone for half a century. The directions kept working anyway.