The Internet dramatically reduces the importance of physical geography. Blackstone, Virginia is a great place to locate a distribution center for Wal-Mart and Ingram Books. Land is cheap for building a warehouse, and highways are nearby for trucking items all over the East Coast.
Ewing, on the other hand, has US Route 58, now being upgraded into a 4-lane highway across Virginia's southern border. That highway stretches from Cumberland Gap to the Atlantic Ocean... but intersects virtually no population center in-between. The first highway in the region was called the "Wilderness Road" for a reason, and today the interstates are far away across the mountains. (Ewing also has a series of small pipelines to carry oil to market; it's the location of Virginia's only producing oil field.)
The Virginia and Tennessee Railroad connected the region to Tidewater Virginia in the 1850's. That spurred a shift from subsistence agriculture to a cash-crop economy, based on tobacco raised by slaves. Transportation improvements have been concentrated on the eastern edge of the Valley and Ridge portion of Southwest Virginia. Even today, Representative Rick Boucher seeks Federal funding primarily for expanding I-81 and increasing rail connections through Bristol.
The Lenowisco Planning District (composed of Lee County, City of Norton, Wise County, and Scott County) is too far from anywhere (OK, anywhere with raw materials or a consumer market) to justify major transportation investments. Private-sector employers find the region to have few natural resources (other than coal and timber), a small population with a relatively unskilled workforce, and high costs for transporting raw materials and manufactured goods to and from the region.
But the American economy is no longer driven by agriculture or manufacturing. The new economy is based on services, and the fastest growing sector is in services provided via the Internet. If Southwest Virginia could develop jobs in that sector of the economy, it could overcome it's geographical limitations.
Rep. Boucher is co-chair of the Internet Caucus in the House of Representatives, but Southwest Virginia has little success so far with connecting to the Internet economy. Look at the Wise County businesses. Look at the high-tech companies in the different regions of Virginia. In the Matchmaker database designed to connect high-tech companies with each other in Virginia, Far Southwest Virginia has only 1% of the number of companies listed for Northern Virginia.
And the definition of Far Southwest is "Abingdon/Bristol" on the I-81 corridor, excluding the Appalachian Plateau counties completely. Along the Kentucky border are the Virginia counties with coal mining jobs displaced by automation, the home of persistent poverty over the last 40 years. The investments of the Appalachian Regional Commission since the mid-1960's have not created a strong enough regional economy that can provide steady jobs to adults or new jobs for the teenagers graduating from local high schools each year.