ABOUT
Bluemont is an unincorporated community village in Loudoun County, Virginia located at the base ofSnickers Gap in the Blue Ridge Mountain. As of 2010, the Bluemont postal area had a population of 2,834.
History
The settlement of the area that is now Bluemont began in the 1770s when a connection was made between the old Winchester Pike, which led from Loudoun to Winchester via Keyes' (Vestals) Gap, and the Colchester Road which ran from the port of Colchester to Winchester via Snickers Gap (named after Edward Snickers, who operated a ferry across the nearby Shenandoah River).The new connector road greatly reduced the distance one had to travel to get to Winchester from points east along the Winchester Pike and quickly became widely used. At the intersection of these two roads (present day Clayton Hall Road and Snickersville Turnpike) a small village began to develop, centered around the home of William Clayton, Clayton Hall, and the dependencies he built for his farm at the gap. The village was christened Snickers' Gap in 1807 when a post office was established there.17 years later, in 1826, the town was incorporated by the General Assembly as Snickersville, though it would take another six years for the post office there to change its name. The completion of the Leesburg and Snickers Gap Turnpike in 1832 (present day Virginia State Highway 7) brought new prosperity and prestige to the village, and the last major growth it would see for the next half-century. By 1900, the success of the resorts in the vicinity of Snickersville, including Jules DeMonet's Blue Ridge Inn at Bear's Den, prompted the Southern Railway (which had acquired the Washington & Ohio's route) to extend its tracks to the town, which became the final western terminus of line. The extension permitted the steam railroad's passengers to travel to the base of the Blue Ridge from a terminal in Washington, D.C.To promote the resort nature of the town, the railroad petitioned the United States Postal Service to change the name of the town to Bluemont.