Crime Scene & Biohazard Cleanup Near West Dendron Dendron, VA

Dendron is a small incorporated town in Surry County, in Virginia's Tidewater region south of the James River.

Dendron had a population of just 251 at the 2020 census, a fraction of its size a century earlier.

Dendron began as a company mill town built and run by the Surry Lumber Company to house its sawmill employees, on land once known as Mussel Fork Village.

The settlement was renamed Dendron in 1896, taking its name from the Greek word for trees, and the town received its charter in 1906.

The Surry Lumber Company began operating here in the 1880s and grew into one of the largest lumber plants of its kind in the South, at its height said to be the largest sawmill complex east of the Mississippi River.

By 1906 Dendron had 1,513 people, 298 dwellings, two hotels, eighteen company stores and five churches, and by 1928 its population had reached nearly 3,000.

The company ran its own narrow-gauge railroad, the Surry, Sussex and Southampton Railway, hauling logs to the Dendron sawmills and finished lumber to a wharf on the James River.

Lumber production peaked in 1920, the surrounding old-growth timber was exhausted by the mid-1920s, and the Surry Lumber Company shut down its Dendron sawmills on October 27, 1927.

From 1928 the company dismantled and sold off much of the town it owned, leaving Dendron without its railroad, water system or electricity, and a February 1931 fire destroyed 21 buildings along Main Street.

The Dendron Historical Society & Museum, run by local volunteers, preserves the town's lumber and railroad history, including a restored boxcar from the company's railway.