Unattended Death and Biohazard Cleanup in Farmville, VA

Farmville is an incorporated town in central Virginia that straddles the Appomattox River, lying in Prince Edward County south of the river and Cumberland County north of it, and it is the county seat of Prince Edward County.

The town of Farmville was formed in 1798 and incorporated in 1912, and the Prince Edward County seat was moved to Farmville from Worsham in 1871.

Farmville had a population of 7,473 in the 2020 census, down from 8,216 in 2010, and Census Bureau survey figures for 2020-2024 put it at about 2,576 households averaging 2.08 persons each.

Farmville developed near the headwaters of the Appomattox River and was a major tobacco-growing and trading center in Virginia for over 100 years.

Farmville is described as one of America's oldest two-college communities and is the largest municipality between Richmond and Lynchburg.

Farmville is home to Longwood University, which was chartered in 1839 as the Farmville Female Seminary and became the first state teacher-training college in Virginia.

Just outside town is Hampden-Sydney College, founded in 1775, the 10th oldest college in America and one of the few remaining all-male colleges, with an enrollment of about 1,200 students.

On April 23, 1951, 16-year-old Barbara Johns led a student walkout at Farmville's Robert Russa Moton High School to protest its overcrowded, unequal facilities, and the resulting lawsuit became the only student-initiated case combined into Brown v. Board of Education.

After courts ordered desegregation, Prince Edward County closed its entire public school system from 1959 to 1964 rather than integrate, leaving students locked out longer than anywhere else in America until the U.S. Supreme Court ordered the schools reopened.

The former Moton High School is now the Robert Russa Moton Museum, a National Historic Landmark that opened as a museum on April 23, 2001, exactly 50 years after the student strike.