Emergency Crime Scene and Biohazard Cleanup in Schuyler, VA

Schuyler (pronounced SKY-lur) is a small unincorporated census-designated place in Nelson County, Virginia, near the Rockfish River in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

The community was originally called Walker's Mill and was renamed Schuyler in 1882 for Schuyler George Walker, a local mill operator and the area's first postmaster.

Schuyler sits on the Albemarle-Nelson Belt, a massive soapstone deposit said to contain a greater percentage of workable soapstone than any other known deposit in the world.

The Virginia Soapstone Company opened a quarry and mill in Schuyler in 1893, and the village grew into a thriving company town built around the soapstone industry.

In the 1920s the Schuyler-based Alberene Soapstone Company operated America's largest soapstone processing plants — one of the three largest soapstone operations in the world — and employed more than 1,800 people.

In its heyday the small village of Schuyler boasted more than 50 active soapstone quarries, and old worked-out quarry pits are now the centerpiece of the Quarry Gardens at Schuyler, a native plant garden open to visitors.

A record flood in September 1944 devastated the Schuyler soapstone plant, but the quarries reopened and prospered again during the 1950s, and soapstone is still quarried at Schuyler today.

Schuyler was the birthplace and early home of screenwriter Earl Hamner Jr. (1923–2016), creator of the long-running CBS television series The Waltons.

Hamner based The Waltons and his novel Spencer's Mountain on his experiences growing up in Schuyler as the eldest child of a large rural family during the Great Depression, making the village the real-life Walton's Mountain.

The Walton's Mountain Museum opened in Schuyler in 1992 in the old brick school building that Hamner himself attended as a child, just a short walk from his boyhood home.