Restaurants within 2 miles of Midlothian, Virginia

Listing 54 restaurants in and around Midlothian.

Before the arrival of Europeans in the 17th century, the area was populated by Native Americans. Manakintown was located nearby. French "Huguenot" settlers came to the area to escape religious persecution in Europe. The location above the head of navigation on the James River at Richmond offered some desired isolation for them. With the coming of the Europeans, although there was some farming, the terrain was hilly and largely wooded, and shipping of farm products such as tobacco crops was not easy. However, there was a greater natural resource than farmland as Midlothian history became largely one of coal mining and railroads. Coal mining in the Midlothian area of Chesterfield County began early in the 18th century. The Village area of today's Midlothian started as a settlement of coal miners in the 1700s. In 1709, Midlothian produced the first commercially-mined coal in the United States. Some of the first coal mines were controlled by the wealthy Wooldridge family. About 1745, two Wooldridge brothers came to Virginia from Scotland. They built their home nearby. The brothers came from separate mining villages, one from East Lothian, the other from West Lothian. They compromised on the name, thus calling it "Mid-Lothian". The name was also given to the mines the family owned, and later to the unincorporated town which grew around the property. Somewhere along the way, the name became one unhyphenated word: "Midlothian." During the American Revolution, coal produced in the Midlothian coal pits supplied the cannon factory on the James River at Westham, upstream from Richmond, where it was used to produce shot and shells for the Continental Army. By the end of the Revolutionary War, coal mined in Chesterfield County was being shipped to Philadelphia, New York and Boston. Thomas Jefferson noted the mines in operation in his "Notes on Virginia" and said the coal produced there was of "excellent quality". He also ordered coal from the Black Heath Mine in Midlothian for use in the White House in Washington DC. By 1835, there were seven or eight major mines in the Midlothian area. Coal was the basis of the Midlothian area until the late 1800s when mining ended. Later attempts to reopen the mines were unsuccessful, but thanks to rail access to Richmond, the village became a commuter town. Early roads, first turnpike, and railroads In 1804, a toll road, then called Buckingham, or Manchester, Road, was built from Falling Creek to Manchester to ease traffic on what is now Old Buckingham Road. It was paved in 1808, making it Virginia's first paved road. That road's descendant is known as Midlothian Turnpike. By 1824, an estimated 70 to 100 wagons, each of which was loaded with four or five tons of coal, made a daily trip on the turnpike, transporting to the docks at the river near Manchester the million or more bushels (30,000 metric tons) of coal that were produced in Chesterfield County each year. The heavily-loaded coal wagons tended to cut deep ruts in the turnpike between the mines at Midlothian and the docks at Manchester, raising clouds of dust in summer and churning the road into mud in the rainy season. As there were few options for shunpiking, citizens whose faster buggies dawdled along behind the lumbering wagons kept urging the state legislature to do something about its canal, a better road, but something. The result was the Chesterfield Railroad, a 13 mile (21 km) mule- and gravity-powered line that connected the Midlothian coal mines with wharves that were located at Manchester, directly across from Richmond. Partially funded by the Virginia Board of Public Works, it began operating in 1831, was Virginia's first railroad, and was the second commercial railroad to be built in the United States. By 1850, though, the newer, steam-driven Richmond and Danville Railroad began operation to Coalfield Station, later renamed Midlothian, and the slower Chesterfield Railroad was quickly supplanted. According to the 1895 Virginia atlas, the population of Midlothian was 375. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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