Biohazard and Crime Scene Remediation in Baywood, VA

Baywood is an unincorporated community and census-designated place (CDP) in Grayson County, in the Blue Ridge highlands of southwestern Virginia.

Baywood was first listed as a census-designated place in the 2020 census, which counted a population of 414.

The Baywood area was settled in the late 18th century by several families holding land grants from the Revolutionary War, and it grew into a hub community embracing the country from Meadow Creek toward the Little River and New River.

The community was known as Hampton Crossroads until a post office was established there in 1903, when postmaster Arch Moore renamed it Baywood after a bay tree growing in the area because mail kept getting mixed up with mail for Hampton Roads.

After 1937 the Baywood post office closed and mail service for the community was transferred to the post office in nearby Galax.

Baywood's first school, a wooden building with four classrooms on the first floor and an auditorium on the second, opened in the fall of 1913 and was replaced by the community's current school in 1953.

The community got its first board-and-telephone system in 1909, a service that was transferred to Inter-Mountain Telephone in 1957.

The singers of Baywood's Cross Roads Primitive Baptist Church are featured on the 1978 LP 'Children of the Heav'nly King,' recorded for the Blue Ridge Parkway Folklife Project by the American Folklife Center.

Old-time banjo player Haywood Blevins was recorded at Baywood in 1961 and banjo player James Spencer Caudill was recorded at his Baywood home in 1974, with both recordings preserved in the Library of Congress's Archive of Folk Culture.

Until the independent city of Galax was established in 1905, the nearest town to Baywood was Fries; today Baywood lies in Grayson County, whose seat is Independence and which counted 15,333 residents in the 2020 census.