Study finished at proposed industrial park

By JIM TALBERT\Staff
TAZEWELL - Development of the Bluestone Technology Park could soon be back on schedule.
Work at the 688 acre development was halted last year when the Department of Historic Resources requested further evaluation of four sites with potential for listing on the National Register of Historic Places. The county contracted Coastal Carolina Research to evaluate those sites and determine if they were eligible.
Rick Chitwood of Thompson and Litton Inc. told the Industrial Development Authority at its May 28 meeting that the survey is complete. Chitwood said two of the four sites have been deemed eligible for the register.
He said the options for those sites were to leave them undisturbed or excavate them. 
He gave the board copies of a letter from Coastal Carolina with information on the two sites. The first one is in a part of the park the plans said could be used as a golf course. The letter describes the site as a pre-contact site with an intact, cultural horizon dating to the middle to late woodland period.
It recommends the site for inclusion on the NRHP because it “could yield additional information and aid in defining less well understood aspects of settlement patterns and lifeways in southwest Virginia.’
Chitwood said that site would not have any major impact on development of the technology park. He said the architects had redesigned the water and sewer line routes to go around it.
The other site is the old farm house on the property. The report calls it the Shannon Farmstead and says it dates to the late 18th or early 19th century. “It represents one of the very few earliest known domestic sites in Tazewell County.
Due to the potential for intact deposits dating to the 18th century and a lack of investigated sites dating to this period in the area, it is likely to yield important information concerning historic occupations in southwestern Virginia.
Chitwood said that site is not in the first phase of work planned at the park. He said the president of Coastal Carolina Research has written the Department of Historic Resources recommending that work be resumed in areas of the park other than the two sites.
He said further evaluation of those two sites would be needed. He said Coastal had not yet given his firm a price for that work.