Editing Blacksburg, Virginia (section)

===Information age (1993–present)===

[[File:Market Square Park, Blacksburg.jpg|thumb|right|200px|Market Square Park, home of the Blacksburg Farmers Market since 2009]]

Blacksburg is the site of the [[Blacksburg Electronic Village]] or BEV, conceived as a computer networking project of [[Virginia Tech]] in 1991 and officially born in 1993 as a way to link the town together using the [[Internet]]. This project quickly ushered the town into what is being called the [[Information Age]].

In 1994, Montgomery County Public Schools completed construction of Kipps Elementary School at 2801 Prices Fork Road.<ref name="timeline"/> By this time, Blacksburg had five elementary schools, a middle school, and a high school.<ref name="educate"/> A newly renovated Blacksburg branch library was opened in 1996.<ref name="timeline"/>

In the aftermath of railroad restructuring, many rail lines were abandoned. After 24 years of abandonment and six years of planning and construction, the first phase of the [[Huckleberry Trail]] built on the old Huckleberry railbed opened in 1996. The second phase of construction was completed in 1998.<ref name="timeline"/> In 2019, the Blacksburg Rotary Mountain Bike Skills Park opened with funding from Blacksburg Parks and Recreation and donations.

On July 8, 1997, ground was broken for the experimental "[[Virginia Smart Road|Smart Road]]" project. The second phase of construction was completed in 2002.<ref name="smrtrd">{{cite web |url=http://www.virginiadot.org/projects/constsal-smartrdhistory.asp |title=History of the Smart Road |publisher=Virginiadot.org |access-date=January 2, 2013 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20121229053354/http://www.virginiadot.org/projects/constsal-smartrdhistory.asp |archive-date=December 29, 2012 |url-status=dead }}</ref> The road is currently closed to the public and used as a research test bed for the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute. A National Weather Service office is located in Blacksburg and serves most of southwestern Virginia, southeast West Virginia, and northwest North Carolina.

In 2003, the new building for Blacksburg Middle School students opened on Prices Fork Road adjacent to the property housing Kipps Elementary School.

On April 16, 2007, [[Seung-Hui Cho]] shot 32 people dead and injured an additional 17 in the [[Virginia Tech shooting]] before committing suicide. The massacre is the deadliest [[mass shooting]] on a college campus since the [[University of Texas tower shooting]] in 1966.

On January 21, 2009, [[Zhu Haiyang]] decapitated Yang Xin at [[Virginia Tech]] in the first campus murder since the Virginia Tech shooting.<ref name="decapitates">{{Cite web |title=Killer decapitates Va. Tech student, police say - CNN.com |url=https://www.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/01/22/virginia.tech.death/index.html |access-date=January 29, 2023 |website=www.cnn.com}}</ref>

On February 13, 2010, following a snowstorm that dropped two feet of snow on the area, the gymnasium roof on the previously occupied Blacksburg High School suffered a catastrophic structural failure and collapsed, causing structural damage to other areas of the school. The school building was condemned and students attended night school on a split schedule with the Blacksburg Middle School students at their school for the remainder of the year. It was determined that repair costs would exceed $18 million and would not be feasible given the age of the school; it was decided not to repair the building. Before the school year of 2013-14 Blacksburg High School was operating on a normal schedule out of the Blacksburg Middle School building on 3109 Prices Fork Road, and the middle schoolers were going to school in the old Christiansburg Middle School. The original [[Blacksburg High School]] building was vacant until it was demolished in the Summer of 2011. The newly constructed school building of [[Blacksburg High School]] which opened for the 2013 fall semester is located at 3401 Bruin Lane, behind the current Blacksburg Middle School and Bill Brown Football Stadium.<ref name="HSdedication">{{cite web |url=http://www.wsls.com/story/23622019/blacksburg-high-school-dedication |title=Blacksburg High School Dedication |publisher=WSLS10 |date=October 6, 2013 |access-date=November 9, 2013 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20131109023301/http://www.wsls.com/story/23622019/blacksburg-high-school-dedication |archive-date=November 9, 2013 |url-status=dead  }}</ref>