glacial advance... to Pittsburgh, but not into modern-day Virginia
Source: National Atlas
Perhaps you remember from high school Earth Science classes that Virginia was not covered by glaciers in the latest Ice Age. The continental ice sheets stopped at roughly the location of the Ohio River and the Pennsylvania Turnpike.
That doesn't mean Virginia was unaffected by those glaciers, however. At
one time, when sea level was as much as 120 meters lower because so-o-o-o much water was
trapped in the glaciers, the eastern coastline of Virginia was far to the east. When the glaciers
melted during periods warmer than today, sea level was as much as 35 meters higher1 and the Virginia coastline was
close to the current route of Interstate 95...
Scratches on the bedrock of Mount Mitchell in North Carolina may be "glacial striations," etched when a small mountaintop glacier flowed (albeit slowly) across the bedrock. Rocks trapped in the ice at the bottom of the glacier left a trail, just like a cat claws scraping across fine furniture can leave marks. Virginia is further north than Mount Mitchell, but apparently the mountains in Virginia were too low to be glaciated. However, we can still see the effects of the last Ice Age on the Blue Ridge.
"Block fields" are still visible on the western slope of Massanutten Mountain. During the last glacial period, cold winds blew across the mountains and little vegetation could grow there. Cracks in the sandstone bedrock widened as the moisture in them froze and and then the ice melted repeatedly. Blocks of stone cracked loose from the bedrock, slid downhill, and created piles of boulders in a talus slope below the quartzite bedrock.
When the climate warmed, the hillsides stabilized and the forests returned. Trees grew below the talus pile and above their eroding bedrock source, but not on the barren boulders themselves. The freezing and thawing cycle was less intense, however, and few new rocks were added to the talus in the last 10,000 or so years. The pile of talus rock slid downhill under the force of gravity, but new talus was no longer added regularly on the uphill edge of the talus pile. Over centuries, a gap developed between the source bedrock and the talus pile, and trees grew in that gap. The isolated block fields - below the trees and now separated from the layer of sandstone that eroded to form the original talus pile - stand out against the forested mountainsides today, remnants of an ancient climate.
The Ice Age climate (as well as earthquakes) may have also been a factor in creating the largest known landslides in eastern North America. "The ancient giant landslides extend for more than 20 miles along the eastern slope of Sinking Creek Mountain," as described in the The Mountains that Moved - Ancient Giant Landslides pamphlet.