First National Corp

First National Corp

First National Corp was established in 1974 as a bank holding company for First Bank, a community lender that traces its roots to the early 20th century in Strasburg, Virginia. The Wilkins family, led by Chairman James R. Wilkins, Jr. and President John W. B. Wilkins, has guided the firm across multiple generations, embedding the family office within the holding-company structure rather than operating a separate family-office entity. The wealth is interwoven with the bank's balance sheet — a structure common among multigenerational community-bank families where the bank itself functions as the primary investment vehicle. The firm operates through three primary pillars. Its banking subsidiary, First Bank, provides commercial and retail lending concentrated in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley and northern counties, with branches in Strasburg, Winchester, and Front Royal. The real estate portfolio includes bank-owned properties and, based on public record, likely personal or family-held commercial real estate in the region. Hospitality interests, the third leg, are less publicly documented but consistent with the Wilkins family's known involvement in Shenandoah Valley development. The bank's loan book skews toward commercial real estate and small-business lending — asset classes where local knowledge provides a genuine underwriting advantage. Scale is modest by institutional standards. First National Corp reports through SEC filings as a public reporting company, though its shares are thinly traded. The bank subsidiary held approximately $1.4 billion in total assets as of its most recent public filings — a figure that reflects the consolidated banking operations but does not capture the full family-office balance sheet. The firm maintains no additional offices beyond its Virginia footprint and has not disclosed a dedicated investment team separate from bank management. No venture capital, private equity fund commitments, or co-investment club memberships have been publicly identified. The structure blends a regulated bank with an unregistered family holding company — a hybrid that allows the Wilkins family to recycle bank dividends into real estate and hospitality without the disclosure obligations of a stand-alone family office. This architecture is common among second- and third-generation community-bank families: the bank throws off predictable cash flows, and the holding company reinvests those flows into adjacent assets. The regulatory overlay from the Federal Reserve and OCC imposes a conservatism on leverage and risk-taking that most family offices avoid, making the firm more like a permanent-capital vehicle than a traditional allocator.