Radford, VA

Radford is a compact independent city on the New River in Virginia's mountain southwest — and the river is the resident paradox: despite its name, the New is reckoned among the oldest rivers on earth, older than the mountains it cuts through, flowing northward across the grain of the Appalachians as it did before they rose. The city grew as a railroad division point where the line crossed the river, and the water still defines it: Bisset Park's riverside mile, anglers midstream at dusk, and the New River Trail running toward the gorges.

The city's life is Radford University, founded in 1910 as a teachers' college for women and now a university of some nine thousand students whose campus fills the bluff above the river. Its performing-arts calendar — the concerts, opera tours and visiting companies that reached this valley, including the stage recorded in this archive as Preston Auditorium, the auditorium of the university's historic Preston Hall — has long made the campus the concert room of the New River Valley, in partnership with the arts life of the larger university town of Blacksburg over the ridge. Appalachian heritage keeps its own calendar here too, from old-time fiddlers to the Selu Conservancy's living-history farm. A small city, an ancient river, and a stage between them.