Blood, Trauma, and Biohazard Cleanup in Union Level, VA

Union Level is a tiny unincorporated census-designated place in Mecklenburg County in Virginia's Southside region, about six miles west of the town of South Hill.

Union Level was first established in the mid-nineteenth century — local histories date its founding to the 1840s as a way station for wagons and stagecoaches — and in the 1860s it had more businesses than nearby South Hill.

The community's heyday followed the arrival of the Atlantic & Danville Railroad, when a small commercial downtown grew up around its depot and post office in the first decades of the twentieth century.

By 1920 Union Level housed more than 20 businesses, including four general stores, a bank, a pharmacy, a boarding house and a dance hall, serving a surrounding farming area whose chief money crop was tobacco.

Virginia's Department of Historic Resources today describes Union Level as a former town, its railroad-era commercial core having largely faded after the trains stopped coming.

Union Level was first listed as a census-designated place in the 2010 census, which counted 188 residents living in 74 occupied homes.

Its population fell about 14 percent over the following decade, to 161 in the 2020 census.

The community sits at an elevation of only about 127 feet in Mecklenburg County, a rural Southside county of 30,319 people in 2020 whose county seat is Boydton.