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Biennial Report of the Department of Archives and History Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2013 http://archive.org/details/biennialreportofOOwest_0 COUNTY PUBLIC LIBRARY >J ALLEN 3 1833 02404 4239 Gc 975.4 W52e 1904-06 West Virginia. Deft, of Archives and History. Biennial rerort of the Department of Archives ! First Biennial Report Of the Department of ARCHIVES AND HISTORY of the State of West Virginia. VIRGIL A. LEWIS, M. A., State Historian and Archivist. -x> ?7S. / / ?o Y- G<£ Out of monuments, names, wordes, proverbes, traditions, private recordes, fragments of stories, passages of bookes, and the like, we doe save and recover somewhat from the deluge of time.' 1 Bacon. L : Allen County Public Libraiy 900 Webster Street PO Box 2270 Fort Wayne rtN 46801-2270 <un i o fT[ JTa b?l\ ffy^ CHARLESTON The Tribune Printing Company, 1900. .' WASHINGTON HALL. THE BIRTH-PLACE OF WEST VIRGINIA. This building stood on the northeast corner of Market and Monroe streets— now Market and Twelfth streets—"Wheeling. Within it. on the second floor. theOonven- tions of 1MH, which reorganized the Government of Virginia and provided for the formation of West Virginia, held their sessions. It was e rev ted in 1851 by a corpor- ation known as the Washington Hall Association, at a cost of S'46.000. It was first opened on January 1. 18i>3. when the citizens of Wheeling gave a banquet ill honor of the President of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, together with his guests from the City of Baltimore and the States of Virginia and Maryland, who arrived at the City of Wheeling on thatdate, having been carried thither by the first through train from the Atlantic Ocean to the Ohio River. It was totally destroyed by lire November 30. 1878. 1 1628509 LETTER OF TRANSMITTAL. State of West Virginia, Department of Archives and History, Charleston, October 1, 1906. To His Excellency, Honorable W. M. O. Dawson, Governor of West Virginia. Dear Sir: In compliance with the requirement of Section Three of Chap- ter LXIV of the Acts of the Legislature, Session of 1905, I have the honor to transmit to you herewith the First Biennial Report of this Department, containing, as it does, the First and Second Annual Reports for the fiscal years ending respectively Septem- ber 30, 1905, and September 30, 1900. With a just appreciation of the interest you have manifested in the work of the Department, I am, yours With great respect, Virgil A. Lewis, Xtate Historian and Archivist. I- BIENNIAL REPORT OF THE STATE HISTORIAN AND ARCHIVIST. INTRODUCTORY. WEST VIRGINIA IS A VAST MUSEUM OF HISTORY. Before entering upon the details which this Report is presumed to contain, it may be well to offer by way of explanation a brief review of the conditions and steps which led to the creation and installation of the State Department of Archives and History which the Act of the Legislature establishing it declares shall be a Department of the State Government. West Virginia is, indeed, an historic land. The history of Wes- tern Virginia from its earliest discovery and exploration by white men down to 1863—a period extending over more than two cen- turies—has become the history of West Virginia, and a rich in- heritance it is. No other section of our Country is richer in his- toric story than this Trans-Allegheny Region of which West Vir- ginia embraces so great a part. Centuries ago, daring adventur- ers and hardy explorers beheld it as an unknown land ; some of them traversed its illimitable wilderness and blazed pathways which other frontiersmen afterward trod in search of homes. In 10G9, John Lederer from the summit of the Blue Ridge nor far from Harper's Ferry looked down upon the Lower Shenandoah Valley and westward to the mountains beyond. The same year La Salle the greatest French explorer of the Xew World, found the Ohio River, descending which he saw—the first time that white men beheld them—the hills and valley? of the western part, of West Virginia. In 1071. Captain Thomas Batts and party crossed the mountains and reached the Falls of the Great Ka- nawha where they took possession of the Valley in the name of the King. In 1742, John Peter Salley, with John Howard and three other persons, came to the New River, descended it to Rich- mond Falls, crossed the mountains to Coal River, down which they journeyed and then continued their voyage to the Ohio. In Archives and History. [W. Va. 1T.")(), Dr. Thomas Walker traversed the Greenbrier Valley; in 1751, Christopher Gist was on the Blue Stone and New rivers and the next year journeyed back and forth through the region between the Monongahela and Great Kanawha rivers. In 1720, the hist white man found a home in West Virginia: twelve years later the Fairfax Stone was planted at the -Foun- tain Spring" of the North Branch of the Potomac, and in 1747, th" boy surveyor. George Washington, surveyed for Lord Fairfax, ' Patterson's Creek, and in the valleys of the South Branch of the Potomac and the Great and Little Cacapon rivers the first farms in West Virginia. Four- years later. Andrew Lewis, an- other general officer of the Revolution, surveyor for the Green- brier Land Company, laid out the first farms on the Greenbrier River. Thus pioneer settlers found homes and formed a West Virginia frontier of civilization. MILITARY ANNALS. With the Virginians at Braddock's defeat, on the Monongahela in 1755, were numbers of West Virginians whose cabin homes were in the Lower Shenandoah Valley, and along the South Branch of the Potomac, Patterson's Creek, and Cacapon rivers. For years these valleys, having become a veritable seat of war, were defended against the French and Indians by these •pioneer settlers who fought with the pertinacity of veterans. In 1758, they furnished wagons and whole companies marched with Gen- eral Forbes in the expedition against Fort Du Quesne, on the ruins of which they assisted in building Fort Pitt. In the Revolution. Captain Hugh Stephenson's Company of West Virginians from Berkeley County was with Washington at Boston, this Company being the first from the south side of the Potomac to join him there. Captain Jacob Westfall's Company of Tygart's Valley men were in the Jersey campaign. Other West Virginians were with Stephen and Lee at Monmouth; with Ma- thews at Germantown with Gates at Camden and Springs ;. ; Eutaw with Morgan at the Gowpens and Yorktown. while a company of Greenbrier men were with George Rogers Clark in Illinois. West Virginians furnished wagons and the teams for the Colonial ser- vice, and Hampshire, Berkeley, Greenbrier and other West Vir- ginia counties made clothing for the soldiers in the field. In point of service in the Revolution West Virginia ranks as the four- teenth State— first after the Original Thirteen—and more soldiers J 1 190C] Early Military Anxals. of the War for Independence are buried within its borders than in any State other than the original ones. Here, too, Avas waged with relentless fury, a war between white and Bed men who struggled for the mastery for full forty years. If a line be extended from Pittsburg centrally through West Virginia to the Tennessee River, it will mark the axis of a zone in which was prosecuted the contest between barbarism and civilization. Here, too, they acted a full hundred forts, stockades and block-houses, and around them were enacted the horrid tragedies and dramas of the wilderness. Greenbrier volunteers under Captain Hugh Caperton, Lieutenant Moses Mann and other officers served for years in the Great Kanawha Valley, and with the companies of Captain William Clendenin and John and William Morris of Ka- nawha County, the whole under the direction of Colonel George Clendenin, beat back the savage horde. Captain Cornelius Bo- gart and his Randolph County men were long in the service at Xeel's Station at the mouth of the Little Kanawha River. Colonel John Evans, of Monongalia County, Colonel Benjamin Wilson and Colonel John P. Duvall, of Harrison County, and Colonel Jacob Westfall of Randolph County with their subordinates, among them Captain James Westfall, Captain William Lowther, Lieutenant Lewis Morgan. Ensign Morgan, and others, leaders of as brave men as ever dared the perils of the wilderness, defeated the savage power in the Monongahela Valley. Colonel David Shepherd. Major Silas Hedges with Captain William MeMechen, Captain John McCulloch, and Lieutenants Benjamin and Joseph Biggs, at the head of the Ohio County Pioneers, all brave warriors, stayed the tide of Indian hostilities and policed the Ohio River from Pittsburg to the mouth of the Litrle Kanawha. Famous soldiers were these companies of ''Rangers'' from Greenbrier, Ka- nawha, Randolph, Harrison, Monongalia and Ohio counties. At- tached to these were men called scouts, who well knew the county, and for years ranged all the western part of West Virginia in search of the barbarian foe. Among these were such men as Joel Stodgill, James Haynes, Veach Dickinson, Asa Luddington of Greenbrier County, Isaac Van Bibber. Flemming Cobb, John Mor- ris, and Luman Gibbs, of Kanawha County; Ellis Hughes, Robert Lowther, David Carpenter. Jonathan Cobun, John Hall, Thomas Herbert, Watson Clark, and William Haymond. of Harrison County; Obediah Davison, Valentine Stalnaker. Charles Parsons, and George Westfall, of Randolph County ; John Jackson, William JL Archives and History. [W. Va. Gibson, William Westfall, Thomas Carney, Edward Pindall, and Morgan Morgan, of Monongalia County; and Samuel Brady, Lewis Wetzel, and Samuel McCnlloch, of Ohio County—names never to be forgotten in the history of the border wars of West Virginia. West Virginians from the Greenbrier Valley under Stuart.
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