Crime Scene and Trauma Cleanup in Goshen, VA

Goshen is an incorporated town in Rockbridge County, Virginia, in the upper Shenandoah Valley region at the confluence of Mill Creek and the Great Calfpasture River.

As of the 2020 census, Goshen had a population of 338 people, down from 361 residents in the 2010 census.

The town covers about 1.7 square miles, all land, making it the smaller of Rockbridge County's two incorporated towns alongside Glasgow.

Before European settlement the Goshen area was inhabited by Native American tribes including the Cherokee and Shawnee, and in the 18th century settler Alexander Dunlop and his wife Anna MacFarlane moved to the Calfpasture valley.

The first Goshen council in 1744 was headed by James Patton and John Lewis, two of the most prominent frontier leaders in colonial Virginia.

Goshen grew up on farming, mainly corn, and in the 1800s the Goshen Pass and Panther's Gap community bustled with a school, a hotel, a post office, and iron foundries.

The Victoria Iron Furnace, built near Goshen in 1881, was an engineering marvel that briefly claimed to be the world's most advanced facility of its kind, but it was outdated by the early 1900s and all operations at the site had ceased by the early 1920s.

During the boom period of 1890 the Goshen Improvement Company selected Goshen station on the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad main line as the site for laying out a new city and built the Alleghany Hotel, but the boom faded and Goshen lost a third of its population between 1900 and 1910.

The Goshen Land Company Bridge was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1978.

The Calfpasture River flows through Goshen just before joining the Little Calfpasture River to form the Maury River, and the town lies within sight of the upper entrance to scenic Goshen Pass.