Construction began in October 1985 at the Thaxton Mountain tower after approval came from Bedford County officials, and the station announced its existence as the first independent in the market. It stated it would launch by the end of 1985, but that date was missed. So too was a target date of February 10, with winter weather being the culprit.
WJPR and WVFT gave the Roanoke–Lynchburg market two independent stations in a short amount of time. Channel 21 had a slow start; some cable systems, notably in Lynchburg itself, balked at carrying the new station, and there were few immediate local advertisers. Neither station was able to find sufficient advertising revenue, and it became clear that the Roanoke-Lynchburg market was not large enough to sustain what were essentially two independent stations. Like most early Fox affiliates, WJPR was still programmed largely as an independent. In November 1988, three months after Paramount Pictures sued the station for a debt of $950,000, Lynchburg–Roanoke Television Partners filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization. It was joined in Chapter 11 status by WVFT in April 1989.
The indictment scrambled the picture for the stations Brumlik sought to buy. At the time of his arrest, he had been approved by bankruptcy courts or the FCC to buy WJPR and WVFT; WKCH-TV in Knoxville, Tennessee; and the then-unbuilt WGNM in Macon, Georgia. With regard to WJPR and WVFT, his arrest and indictment caused him to be unable to fulfill commitments required by the bankruptcy courts. Instead, Henry A. Ash, a Tampa life insurance broker, bid on both stations with the same goal: to combine them. Ash's Roanoke–Lynchburg TV Acquisition Corporation—with WJPR majority owner Thomas Carney as a stockholder—received court approval to buy both stations, paying $2.95 million for WJPR and $1.25 million for WVFT, in February 1990. It then filed with the FCC for a waiver of its rule that prohibited ownership of stations with overlapping signal coverage areas, believing that the market could bear one independent station but not two.
On August 20, 1990, with the purchases pending at the FCC, WVFT began simulcasting WJPR, expanding Fox network coverage to the market's western portions for the first time. FCC approval followed the next month. Key in winning approval was the fact that adding channel 27 to channel 21 provided Fox service to an additional 213,000 people; the commission found it unlikely that the stations could exist separately given their financial problems and local terrain.
On September 15, 1993, WVFT and WJPR were purchased by Grant Communications, owned by Milton Grant. The sale to Grant came after Carney and Ash opted to split their interests in Roanoke–Lynchburg TV Acquisition Corporation. In October 1993, WVFT had its call letters changed to WFXR-TV. Grant also upgraded the station's equipment, and the Fox network itself matured during the first years of Grant ownership.
In March 2015, Joseph McNamara—who was appointed as vice president for the stations three months earlier in December 2014—announced that Nexstar planned to move WFXR/WWCW's operations and staff into a new, larger 14,830-square-foot (1,000 m2) studio facility at the Valleypointe office park in northeastern Roanoke County, near Roanoke–Blacksburg Regional Airport. WFXR and WWCW migrated their operations into the new facility—which cost $3 million to build—during the week of September 14, 2015.
WWCW and WFXR broadcast two shared channels (The CW on 21.1 and 27.2 and Fox on 21.2 and 27.1) and two unique diginets each. Also broadcast on the WWCW multiplex are two subchannels of WZBJ-CD as part of the market's ATSC 3.0 (NextGen TV) hosting arrangement.
Subchannels of WWCW
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