West Virginia

A History

Otis K. Rice, Stephen W. Brown

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780813137667
• Edition: 2
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

" An essential resource for scholars, students, and all lovers of the Mountaineer State. From bloody skirmishes with Indians on the early frontier to the Logan County mine war, the story of West Virginia is punctuated with episodes as colorful and rugged as the mountains that dominate its landscape. In this first modern comprehensive history, Otis Rice and Stephen Brown balance these episodes of mountaineer individualism against the complexities of industrial development and the growth of social institutions, analyzing the events and personalities that have shaped the state. To create this history, the authors weave together many strands from the past and present. Included among these are geological and geographical features; the prehistoric inhabitants; exploration and settlement; relations with the Indians; the land systems and patterns of ownership; the Civil War and the formation of the state from the western counties of Virginia; the legacy of Reconstruction; politics and government; industrial development; labor problems and advances; and cultural aspects such as folkways, education, religion, and national and ethnic influences. For this second edition, the authors have added a new chapter, bringing the original material up to date and carrying the West Virginia story through the presidential election of 1992. Otis K. Rice is professor emeritus of history and Stephen W. Brown is professor of history at West Virginia Institute of Technology.

1

Prehistorie Times

A Land of Grandeur. In 1784, nearly two hundred years before a popular song referred to West Virginia as “almost Heaven,” Thomas Jefferson wrote that the contrast between the “placid and delightful” Shenandoah Valley and the “wild and tremendous” mountains at Harpers Ferry, the Potomac gateway to the state, was worth a journey across the Atlantic Ocean.¹ Jefferson might have found equally awesome beauty in Hawks Nest, a crag towering 585 feet above the turbulent New River, spectacular waterfalls in the Kanawha, Little Kanawha, and Blackwater rivers, the serenity of the Canaan Valley, and numerous other natural formations in West Virginia.

Geological Determinants. The striking physiography of West Virginia has sprung from geological activity. For some four hundred million years, the state lay in a long trough, or geosyncline, that extended from New Brunswick to Alabama, where the Appalachian Highlands are today. The trough was actually an arm of the ocean, which left vast deposits of salt, either as brine or rock salt, in the western parts of West Virginia and limestone, from fossils of marine animals, in the eastern sections.

To the east of the trough rose a continent known as Old Appalachia. From it and other highlands, material washed down into the geosyncline, pressing it downward and forcing the surrounding rock upward. This action weakened the geosyncline and gave rise to a disturbance known as the Appalachian Revolution, in which rock strata were repeatedly folded and uplifted. Prior to the final upheaval much of West Virginia was swampland with luscious vegetation, which decomposed and formed vast beds of coal. About seventy million years ago the state and surrounding areas were part of a peneplain, worn almost flat by erosion. Uplift, nevertheless, continued, and at the beginning of the Ice Age, about one million years ago, streams and erosion had sculptured the landscape of West Virginia essentially as it is today. Continued action, however, has since deepened the valleys and sharpened the contours of the land.

During the Ice Age, which ended only about ten thousand years ago, great polar ice sheets crept southward into the present Ohio Valley. The glaciers did not reach West Virginia, but they drastically changed its drainage system. Lake Erie did not exist before the Ice Age, and streams from the Allegheny Plateau flowed in a northwesterly direction into the Erie Basin and then into the ancient Saint Lawrence River. The ice blocked the Monongahela River, which followed roughly its present course toward Pittsburgh before turning into the Erie Basin at Beaver Falls, and impounded its waters in the Monongahela Valley to a depth of about eleven hundred feet. The lake thus formed extended southward to the Little Kanawha Valley and overflowed through a channel approximating modern Fishing Creek. Waters of the lake receded with the formation of the Ohio River, which carved its valley as a marginal glacial stream.

The Teays River, the principal prehistoric stream of southern West Virginia, followed the course of the Kanawha, its successor, westward to Scary, about fifteen miles below Charleston, and turned into the present Teays Valley toward Huntington. This ancient riverbed is only about one hundred feet above the level of the Kanawha. The New River, a tributary of the Kanawha, defied the forces of uplift in the Appalachians and continued its westward course from North Carolina and Virginia even after other streams of the Atlantic slope directed their flow toward the ocean.²

Extent and General Location. With an area of 24,282 square miles, West Virginia ranks forty-first among the states. Its greatest distance from east to west is 260 miles and that from north to south is 327 miles. West Virginia has a mean elevation of over 1,500 feet, the highest of any state east of the Mississippi River, but elevations vary from only 247 feet at Harpers Ferry to 4,860 feet at Spruce Knob in Pendleton County.

West Virginia lies within two major physiographic regions of the eastern United States. They are the Valley and Ridge Province and the Allegheny Plateau, both part of the Appalachian Highlands. The two most striking features of the Valley and Ridge section are the Blue Ridge, to the east of the state, and the Appalachian Valley, known locally as the Valley of Virginia, or the Shenandoah Valley. About two hundred miles long, the Valley of Virginia tapers in width from about sixty-five miles on the Maryland border to fifty miles on the North Carolina line. It includes all of Jefferson County and part of Berkeley County, West Virginia, but in some respects most of the upper Potomac River basin is a giant arm of the Valley. Noted for its rich limestone soils and gentle terrain, the Valley is a region of surpassing beauty.

The Allegheny Plateau, separated from the Valley and Ridge section by a bold escarpment known as the Allegheny Front, embraces about five-sixths of West Virginia. The plateau slopes toward the Great Lakes and the Mississippi Valley. One lofty section of Randolph, Pendleton, and Pocahontas counties is the source of numerous streams, including the South Branch of the Potomac, Cheat, Tygart Valley, Elk, and Greenbrier rivers. The central portion is marked by extremely rugged terrain, where rivers have carved deep, canyonlike channels, and forest-clad hills tower above narrow valleys. Toward the Ohio River, the plateau has a mean elevation of about one thousand feet. There its hills seldom rise above a few hundred feet. Rich alluvial soils dominate lowlands along the Ohio and, through its tributaries, reach like long fingers deep into the heart of the plateau.

Rivers and Lakes. In many mountainous regions of the world, rivers have mitigated difficulites in communication and ameliorated tendencies toward particularism. West Virginia rivers form a large part of its boundaries and give it an irregular shape with two panhandles, but, since they and their tributaries flow in all directions, they have given the state very little unity. The Potomac and its tributaries flow into the Chesapeake Bay; the Monongahela, with its West Fork, Tygart Valley, and Cheat influents, northward to the Ohio at Pittsburgh; and the Little Kanawha, Kanawha, Guyandotte, and Big Sandy in more westerly courses to the Ohio. Each of the Ohio tributaries has its own hinterland. The turbulent New prevents close river ties between the Greenbrier and Bluestone with the Kanawha. Since the Ice Age, West Virginia has had no natural lakes, but in recent decades flood control projects on state streams have created several large artificial reservoirs.

The Fist Inhabitants. The historic record forms but a small fragment of the story of human occupation of West Virginia. Archaeological findings show that aboriginal man lived or hunted in the state for at least ten thousand years before the arrival of the first Europeans.

Archaeologists long ago discarded theories that the Indians were descendants of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel or relicts from the submerged continent of Atlantis. They now generally agree that the first Americans crossed the Bering Strait from Asiatic Russia to Alaska and gradually fanned out over the American continents. They theorize that the Indians may have crossed the sea in kayaks, walked over an ice cap during the glacial period, or used a land bridge formed by the receding glacier. Those supporting the idea of a land bridge hold that the Pacific Ocean may have been as much as 250 feet lower than it is now. The Indians began their migrations at least fifteen thousand and possibly as much as forty thousand years ago and continued their intercontinental movement for several thousand years.

Diversity in height, body build, and facial structure indicate that the Indians originated in various parts of Asia. Common characteristics, however, such as shovel-shaped incisors, stamp all of them as clearly of “Old Mongoloid” stock. Old Mongoloid man brought with him to America only a few possessions, chief of which were spears, skins for clothing, and scraping and hide-working tools. In time his way of life gave rise to Paleo-Indian culture.

Paleo-lndian Culture. Known also as Early Hunter, Clovis, or Folsum culture, Paleo-Indian life developed on the high plains east of the Rocky Mountains. It centered on the quest for large game such as mammoths, mastodons, or large hairy elephants, giant sloths, horses, camels, and a large variety of buffalo, all of which became extinct about 6000 B.C. Such hunting was best done by small nomadic groups, and it is likely that the Early Hunters were organized into small family units, perhaps with the oldest male as chief.

The most characteristic artifact left by Paleo-Indian culture was a fluted spearpoint, identified by channels from the base to the tip on each flat side, evidently as an aid in securing the point to the shaft. The discovery of fluted points in the Ohio, Kanawha, and Potomac valleys indicates activity by Early Hunters over much of the state. Fluted points have been found in the greatest numbers along the Ohio River between Saint Marys and Parkersburg, particularly around the latter city.

Archaic Cultures. Forced to adapt to new conditions when the large game became extinct, the Early Hunters either succumbed to lack of food or blended into a new Archaic culture. The Archaic foragers apparently arrived from Asia somewhat later than the Paleo-Indian migrants. They were most numerous from about 7000 to about 1000 B.C., particularly in the centuries following the disappearance of Paleo-Indian culture. Archaic man first lived by gathering nuts, berries, roots, and edible plants and by hunting small game animals. Later, he became somewhat more selective in his food gathering, in some cases concentrating on acorns and small shellfish from the rivers.

Archaeological excavations at Saint Albans in the late 1960s revealed one of the oldest radiocarbon-dated sites in the eastern United States. The stratigraphy, which provided only one type of projectile point at each level, indicated that Indians, perhaps in family groups, had frequented the site since about 7000 B.C. probably to gather shellfish from the Kanawha River. Flooding in unusually wet periods evidently caused interruptions in occupation of the site.

West Virginia had several variants of Archaic culture. The Panhandle Archaic, principally in Ohio, Brooke, and Hancock counties, relied heavily upon freshwater clams from the Ohio River for food. Distinctive spearpoint types, grooved adzes, atlatls, and tools of bone have been found in the large refuse heaps, or middens, at Archaic campsites. Excavations of a 4,000-year-old campsite at Globe Hill, Hancock County, revealed that Archaic people continued to hunt game, especially deer and small animals. The Montane Archaic cultures in the eastern parts of the state made use of quartz, quartzite, hematite, sandstones, and other non-flint rocks to make spearheads and tools normally fashioned from flint. The Buffalo Archaic, at Buffalo, on the Kanawha River, with a comparatively recent radiocarbon dating of 1920 B.C., was probably Transitional Archaic. This stage featured the cultivation of some plants, such as the sunflower and perhaps goosefoot and pigweed, the advent of soapstone and some crude pottery vessels, and the beginnings of burial ceremonialism.

Early Woodland Culture. The fusion of the three elements of cultivation of plants, making of pottery, and burial ceremonialism characterized the cultural stage known as Early Woodland. In essence, Early Woodland was the same as Adena culture, which developed and held sway in the middle Ohio Valley between present Louisville and Pittsburgh in the millenium preceding the birth of Christ.

Early Adena culture lasted from about 1000 B.C. to about A.C. 500. It featured circular houses of poles, wickerwork, and bark. Simple burial mounds contained some stemmed projectile points, plain tubular pipes, whetstones, and pottery that was thick, crude, grit-tempered, and cord-marked, with barrel shapes and flat bottoms.

Late Adena blended Early Adena and Hopewellian cultures, which began to develop in the Illinois Valley about 500 B.C. and in time became the most influential culture in the eastern United States. Late Adena artifacts include whetstones, often carved with abstract bird designs, and carved tubular pipes showing Hopewellian characteristics. Pottery often had incised decoration along round, solid lug handles. Remains of both Early and Late Adena cultures include stone and copper gorgets, shell and copper beads, solid copper bracelets, and cones and hemispheres of stone, usually hematite.

Mounds and Earthworks. The most distinctive Adena legacy in West Virginia and the Ohio Valley consists of hundreds of earthen mounds. The Adena people and their Hopewellian and Mississippian successors built mounds over the remains of chiefs, shamans, priests, and other honored dead or as temples and houses for chiefs. They exposed the bodies of common folk after death, and, once they were denuded of flesh, burned the bones. They then buried the remains in small log tombs on the surface of the ground. The forces of Nature and the cultivation of the soil by European settlers later removed nearly every trace of these burials.

The most striking prehistoric earthwork in West Virginia is the Grave Creek Mound at Moundsville. The largest of its kind in the United States, it originally measured 69 feet high, 295 feet in diameter at its base, and 60 feet in diameter at its flat top. Joseph Tomlinson, the first owner of the site of the mound, refused all proposals to open it. In 1838 a descendant, Jesse Tomlinson, believing that it might hold treasures, consented to its exploration. Excavations revealed that it had been built in two stages on a low natural eminence. A vault, or log tomb, about twelve feet long and eight feet wide, in the center of the original mound contained skeletons of a man and a woman, about 650 circular bone and disc beads, and an atlatl. A timber-covered passageway from the north side of the mound indicated that access to the vault remained for some time after the burials. Thirty-four feet above that tomb, another was found to contain a skeleton, ivory and shell beads, a gorget, copper bracelets, and many pieces of perforated mica. A small, grayish sandstone tablet, about one and one-half by two inches in size and covered with mysterious markings, was allegedly found in the upper vault, but reputable authorities consider the stone a hoax.

Adena mounds were numerous in the South Charleston-Dunbar area of the Kanawha Valley. A mound 35 feet high and 175 feet in diameter at the base, yet standing at South Charleston, was opened in 1883-84 under the direction of the Smithsonian Institution. Excavators found a vault with five skeletons, one in the middle and the other four surrounding it in such positions as to suggest that they may have been live burials. The center skeleton was seven and one-half feet long. With it were bracelets, spearheads of black flint, hematite celts, mica plates, and large quantities of shells and beads. Nearby, another mound held a skeleton surrounded by ten others, extended horizontally with their feet pointed toward the central figure.

Scarcely less interesting are walls and other earthworks of Indian origin. Those at Bens Run, Tyler County, are the most extensive of their kind in the United States. Two parallel circular walls about 120 feet apart enclose some four hundred acres of land, within which are two small mounds, a cross wall running the entire length of the enclosure, and inner walls parallel to but not touching the outer ones. On a nearby hilltop are mounds and other evidences of ancient burial grounds. In another direction two large stone platforms or roadways extend for 192 and 100 feet. Between them is a large earth mound covered with stones in such a manner as to suggest that the area was used for religious ceremonies, possibly some form of sun worship.

Earthworks on top of a mountain overlooking the village of Mount Carbon on the upper Kanawha have baffled archaeologists. Stone walls around the mountain crests partially enclosed rock cairns, flint quarries, and work areas. In the absence of any other acceptable explanation, it must be presumed that they had a religious purpose. Strip mining has virtually destroyed the walls, and a housing development has all but obliterated village remains.

Middle Woodland Mound Builders. The identity of the builders of the earthworks at Mount Carbon and others at Pratt remains uncertain, but they were very likely Armstrong or Buck Garden people, who dominated the Kanawha Valley from about A.C. 1 to 500. The Armstrong culture was a variant of the Hopewellian, or Middle Woodland, culture, which reached its zenith in Ohio about that time. Artifacts from the Murad Mound in Saint Albans and other mounds in the South Charleston area suggest that Hopewellian people moved into the state and mingled peacefully with Adena residents. Many of the latter, however, apparently moved away, possibly to Pennsylvania, Maryland, and New York, or even to Tennessee and Alabama.

The Armstrong people took their name from a creek that flows into the Kanawha River at Mount Carbon, where excavations first identified theirs as a distinct culture. Their villages consisted of scattered circular-shaped houses constructed of poles and woven materials. Cultivation of plants, limited to sunflowers and a few others, had not advanced beyond that of the Adena period. The Armstrong people continued to build small earthen mounds, but they also practiced cremation on a considerable scale. Their pottery, one of the most distinctive features of their culture, was thin, tempered with particles of clay, and fired so that surfaces were oxidized, leaving an orange-yellow color.

The Wilhelm culture, prominent in the Northern Panhandle and adjacent parts of Pennsylvania, coincided with the Armstrong culture on the Kanawha. An excavation in Brooke County first drew attention to the distinctive practice of the Wilhelm people of building small mounds over individual stone-lined graves and then fusing several graves together into a single large mound.

Later Hopewellian variants included the Buck Garden and Watson Farm stone mound builders, who succeeded the Armstrong and Wilhelm cultures, respectively. The change from Armstrong to Buck Garden, first identified at a rock shelter at Buck Garden Creek, Nicholas County, was gradual and under way about A.C.500. Buck Garden folk probably built many of the stone mounds of central West Virginia, but they also buried their dead under overhanging rock formations. Greater attention to agriculture, into which they introduced the cultivation of corn, beans, and squash, combined with defense needs to foster a more compact village life. Excavations at Mount Carbon have shown that the Buck Garden people were driven from the Kanawha Valley, but they probably continued to live in the hills on both sides of the river for some time. By about A.C.1200 their culture had all but disappeared.

Watson Farm people dominated the Northern Panhandle and adjacent regions from about A.C. 500 to about 1000. Like their Buck Garden contemporaries, they lived in compact villages and cultivated corn, squash, and beans. They evidently abandoned the use of individual cists and included many burials in one mound. The Watson Farm Mound in Hancock County and the Fairchance Mound near Moundsville have yielded much information regarding their modes of life.

Hopewellian influence among mound builders of mountainous areas of West Virginia is somewhat obscure. Artifacts from mounds at Romney and in the Tygart Valley, in Randolph County, show characteristics indicating that a distinct Hopewellian culture prevailed contemporaneously with the Buck Garden and Watson Farm variants. Nevertheless, the frequent and widespread contacts among earlier Hopewellian peoples began to diminish about A.C. 500. All of the related cultures began to place less emphasis upon moundbuilding and to give greater attention to the living. Warfare became common and gave rise to special concern for defense.

Late Prehistoric Village Farmers. Mississippian culture, which developed around Saint Louis between A.C. 800 and 900, spread eastward and dominated the eastern United States at the time of the arrival of Europeans. In West Virginia, Mississippian influences were strongest in the Ohio and Kanawha valleys. Middle Woodland traits persisted in mountainous areas. The new culture was marked by city-state political organizations, priest-temple cults, compact towns serving as centers for outlying villages, large flat-topped pyram...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• 1. Prehistoric Times
• 2. Exploration and Early Settlements
• 3. At the Vortex of Imperial Conflict
• 4. Advance Across the Alleghenies
• 5. The Revolutionary Era
• 6. Adapting to a New Nation
• 7. The Quality of Mountain Life
• 8. Educational and Cultural Foundations
• 9. Antebellum Economic Life
• 10. Conflict with Eastern Virginia
• 11. Politics and Slavery
• 12. Secession and Reorganized Government
• 13. The Agony of War
• 14. The Thirty-fifth State
• 15. Tensions of Reconstruction
• 16. The Bourbon Ascendancy
• 17. Agriculture and Rural Life
• 18. The Industrial Age
• 19. Progressivism and Reaction
• 20. Labor Problems and Advances
• 21. The Transformation of Education
• 22. Literary Endeavors
• 23. Twentieth Century Politics: Kump to Marland
• 24. Twentieth Century Politics: Underwood to Rockefeller
• 25. Old Problems and New Dilemmas
• Selected Bibliography and Suggested Readings
• Index