Unattended Death and Biohazard Cleanup in Dante, VA

Dante is a census-designated place in Russell County, Virginia, that also extends west into Dickenson County to include the settlement of West Dante.

Dante sits in the valley of Lick Creek, which flows south to the Clinch River at St. Paul, making it part of the Tennessee River watershed, and it lies 7.5 miles north of St. Paul via Virginia State Route 63.

Dante was originally called Turkeyfoot because of the confluence of hollows there, and it was settled by western frontiersmen in the late 1700s and early 1800s.

The name Dante is pronounced to rhyme with paint — sometimes with pant — but never as the name of the Italian poet Dante Alighieri.

Local history accounts say coal industrialist George L. Carter began building the town in 1903 and renamed it for his business associate William Joseph Dante.

Explosive growth came in the early 1900s with the mining of bituminous coal seams, when George L. Carter made Dante the northern terminus of the Clinchfield Railroad and the headquarters of the Clinchfield Coal Company, which mined mainly Bear Wallow and Straight Hollow.

In its coal-era prime Dante was for many years the largest community in Russell County, was home to Russell County's first electrical power plant, and had a company hotel, company store, hospital, theatre, schools and churches.

Immigrants from Germany, Hungary, Greece, Poland and other central European countries flocked to Dante during its coal boom.

Construction of the Sandy Ridge Tunnel just north of Dante in 1912 allowed the Clinchfield Railroad to extend all the way to Elkhorn City, Kentucky.

The coal seams around Dante were largely exhausted by the mid-1960s and were closed in favor of new mines such as Moss #3 in Duty, Virginia, and Dante's population fell from 2,405 in the 1950 census to 649 in 2010 and 572 in the 2020 census.