Today the main industry centers around lime which is found in large quantities close by.
Middletown
As an early village this was known as Senseny Town, in honor of the doctor by that name who owned the land. In 1795 it was called Middletown. Long ago it was a manufacturing town and was noted for the fine clocks and watches which were splendid time-keepers for the punctual and thrifty Valley folk. In fact, the demands for them came from far and near. The old wooden wheels were first used, then brass was introduced and the watch-makers learned to make the eight-day clocks—the last word in time-keepers until the advent of the modern electric clocks. The manufacturers of the watches and clocks soon made instruments for surveyors as well as the much needed compasses.
The first successful effort to produce a machine to take the place of the flail and threshing floor for threshing wheat from the straw had its start in this same town. The machines were a marvel in their day and the villagers talked for months at the time when the machine beat out one hundred bushels of grain in one day!
The Story Teller of the Valley—Samuel Kercheval
PIONEER LIFE
Samuel Kercheval as a boy saw many of the pioneer men and women who had cut their homes out of the wilderness. He never tired hearing of how they had left Germany, and later had come down from Pennsylvania into the Valley. He himself could remember many of the "Newcomers" who were themselves pioneers. He loved the stories of the forts, the Indian raids and the customs of the Germans and Scotch-Irish. He later began to write down many of these stories and after he was older he rode up and down the Valley gathering more and more stories and reading wills and old records. Nothing was of too little value for him to record, even accounts of the freaks of nature, like a six-legged calf, snakes and other animals.
When Kercheval's friends insisted that he write a book about the Valley, he objected until they told him how much the children of the country would enjoy stories of their grandparents. His own children (there had been fourteen of them in all), like all children, loved stories. Now he began to get his notes in shape and about one hundred years after the first settlers came into the Valley, Samuel Kercheval's History of the Valley of Virginia was ready for the publishers.