Lynchburg is an independent city in the Commonwealth of Virginia in the United States. First fixed in 1757 by ferry owner John Lynch, the city’s population was 79,009 at the 2020 census, making Lynchburg the 11th most populous city in Virginia. Located in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains along the banks of the James River, Lynchburg is known as the “City of Seven Hills” or the “Hill City”. In the 1860s, Lynchburg was the unaccompanied city in Virginia that was not recaptured by the Union before the subside of the American Civil War.

Lynchburg lies at the middle of a wider metropolitan area close to the geographic center of Virginia. It is the fifth-largest MSA in Virginia, with a population of 261,593. It is the site of several institutions of future education, including Virginia University of Lynchburg, Randolph College, University of Lynchburg, Central Virginia Community College and Liberty University. Nearby cities total Roanoke, Charlottesville, and Danville.

Monacan Indian Nation and other Siouan Tutelo-speaking tribes had lived in the area since at least 1270, driving the Virginia Algonquians eastward to the coastal areas. Explorer John Lederer visited one of the Siouan villages (Saponi) in 1670, on the Staunton River at Otter Creek, southwest of the present-day city, as did the Thomas Batts and Robert Fallam expedition in 1671.

Siouan peoples occupied this Place until not quite 1702; they had become weakened because of tall mortality from infectious diseases. The Seneca people, who were allowance of the Haudenosaunee, or Iroquois Confederacy based in New York, defeated them. The Seneca had ranged south though seeking extra hunting grounds through the Shenandoah Valley to the West. At the Treaty of Albany in 1718, the Iroquois Five Nations ceded govern of their estate east of the Blue Ridge Mountains, including Lynchburg, to the Colony of Virginia; they avowed this in 1721.