History of West Virginia

During the late 19th and early 20th century West Virginia saw its population grow, due in large part to the economic job opportunities provided by the coal and logging industries.

The artifacts uncovered in these give evidence of a village society having a tribal trade system culture that practiced the cold working of copper to a limited extent.

Historically recorded names of tribes with regards to what is now West Virginia include Calicua, Mohetan, Moneton, Monecaga, Monahan, Tomahitan, Kanawha, Shattara, Shenandoah, Lenape, Ouabano, Guyan, Guyandotte, Little Mingo, Tionontatecaga & Shawnee.

The placement of this tribe on maps overlaps the Kanawha River and places the Guyandotte frequented, who were also an Iroquoian people known in the area after the Beaver Wars and are often confused with the Wyandot of northern Ohio.

Afterwards predicting that this would lead to another forced removal, the eastern Lenape chief, Tamaqua (King Beaver), decided to voluntarily begin relocating his people West in the 1740s-50s.

And later, other small splintered clans were attracted to, among others, James Le Tort, Charles Poke and John Van Metre trading houses within the state.

This historic period changed the way of living extends from a little before the 18th century Virginia and Pennsylvania region North American fur trade beginning on the Eastern Panhandle of the state.

On July 13, 1709, Louis Michel, George Ritter, and Baron Christoph von Graffenried petitioned the King of England for a land grant in the Harpers Ferry, Shepherdstown area, Jefferson County, to establish a Swiss colony.

The Iroquois were on the point of threatening all-out war against the Virginia Colony over the "Cohongoruton lands", which would have been destructive and devastating, when Governor Gooch bought out their claim for 400 pounds at the Treaty of Lancaster (1744).

By 1739 Thomas Shepherd had constructed a flour mill powered by water from the Town Run or the Falling Springs Branch of the Potomac River in present-day Shepherdstown.

In October 1748 the Virginia General Assembly passed an act establishing a ferry across the Potomac River from the landing of Evan Watkin near the mouth of Conococheague Creek in present-day Berkeley County to the property of Edmund Wade in Maryland.

The 1744 Treaty of Lancaster had left ambiguous whether the Iroquois had sold only as far as the Alleghenies, or all their claim south of the Ohio, including the rest of modern West Virginia.

The Proclamation of 1763 again confirmed all land beyond the Alleghenies as Indian Territory, but the Iroquois finally relinquished their claims south of the Ohio to Britain at the Treaty of Fort Stanwix in 1768.

The rugged nature of the country made slavery unprofitable, and time only increased the social, political, economic, and cultural differences (see Tuckahoes and Cohees) between the two sections of Virginia.

[11] However, western reforms were rejected by leaders from east of the Alleghenies who "clung to political power in an effort to preserve their plantation lifestyles dependent on enslaving blacks.

This was made acceptable to the west by a provision that required the General Assembly to reapportion representation on the basis of white population in 1865, or else put the matter to a public referendum.

[14] For the western areas, problems included the distance from the state seat of government in Richmond and the difference of common economic interests resultant from the tobacco and food crops farming, fishing, and coastal shipping to the east of the Eastern Continental Divide (waters which drain to the Atlantic Ocean) along the Allegheny Mountains, and the interests of the western portion which drained to the Ohio and Mississippi rivers and the Gulf of Mexico.

Major crises in the Virginia state government over these differences were averted on more than one occasion during the period before the American Civil War, but the underlying problems were fundamental and never well resolved.

In addition to differences over the abolition of slavery, he and allies felt the Virginia government ignored and refused to spend funds on needed internal improvements in the west, such as turnpikes and railroads.

On December 31, 1862, an enabling act was approved by President Lincoln, admitting West Virginia on the condition that a provision for the gradual abolition of slavery be inserted in the Constitution.

Meanwhile, officers for the new state were chosen, and Governor Pierpont moved the Restored Government to Alexandria from which he asserted jurisdiction over the counties of Virginia within the federal lines.

Granville Parker, originally from Massachusetts and a member of the convention, described the scene – "I discovered on that occasion as I never had before, the mysterious and over-powering influence 'the peculiar institution' had on men otherwise sane and reliable.

Battelle's resolution a policy of "Negro exclusion" for the new state was adopted to keep any new slaves, or freemen, from taking up residence, in the hope that this would satisfy abolitionist sentiment in Congress.

Among the numerous investors were Charles Pratt and New York City mayor Abram S. Hewitt, whose father-in-law, Peter Cooper, had been a key man in earlier development of the anthracite coal regions centered in eastern Pennsylvania and northwestern New Jersey.

As those mines were playing out by the end of the 19th century, these men were among investors and industrialists who focused new interest on the largely untapped coal resources of West Virginia.

They acquired large tracts of land in the area, and Page began the Deepwater Railway, a short-line railroad which was chartered to stretch between the C&O at its line along the Kanawha River and the N&W at Matoaka, a distance of about 80 miles (130 km).

One of the silent partner investors Page had enlisted was millionaire industrialist Henry Huttleston Rogers, a principal in John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil Trust and an old hand at developing natural resources, transportation.

Instead of giving up, Page (and Rogers) secretly planned and had surveyed a route to provide a new, third major railroad, all the way to new coal pier facilities at Sewell's Point on the harbor of Hampton Roads, fully 440 miles (710 km) away from the railhead on the Kanawha River.

The West Virginia Equal Suffrage Association under the leadership of President Mrs. John L. Ruhl and WVESA Ratification Committee chair Lenna Lowe Yost created a "living petition" of suffragists who greeted and personally lobbied each legislator as they prepared to vote.

However, repeatedly John L. Lewis called his United Mine Workers union out on strike, defying the government, outraging public opinion, and strengthening the hand of anti-union Congressmen.