Sistersville is a city in Tyler County, West Virginia, United States, along the Ohio River.

The site was called Wells Landing, Wella having previously founded Wellsville and Wellsburg along the Ohio River and having served in the Virginia legislature from Brooke County in 1793.

[7] The Virginia General Assembly created Tyler County in 1814, weeks before Wells' death, and a court session was held at Wells' house in Sistersville ("Welkin") in 1815 (the plat having included lots for a courthouse and lawyers' offices), but in 1816 voters selected Middlebourne, on Middle Island Creek about halfway between Pennsylvania and the Kanawha salt springs (and which incorporated in 1813) as the county seat.

The ferry across the Ohio River which James Jolly had started decades earlier would still be operating in the 21st century.

The Russell Building (built in 1840 as a ferry house) would survive many floods and later serve as a market and the offices of the Oil Review edited by J. Hanford McCoy.

Nonetheless, Confederate sympathizers seized militia equipment at Sistersville, including dozens of rifles and two small cannons, and the Ohio militiamen sent to protect Parkersburg took more than a month to recover them.

On March 26, voters overwhelmingly ratified the new Constitution (28,321 to 572), so President Lincoln soon acknowledged the revision as adequate thus creating the state of West Virginia.

[9] The large Sistersville Oil Field was only confirmed in 1891, with the "Joshua Russell Pole Cat No.

1", successfully drilled by Russell and Edward Paden near Pole Cat creek after they drained salt water for a year.

[12] The find proved one of the more productive wells in the field, still producing oil (some refined as gasoline) in 1925.

A disastrous flood of the Ohio River in 1913 (which crested at 51.5 feet at Wheeling upriver and 69.9 feet downriver at Cincinnati) caused considerable damage in Sistersville,[15] Otherwise, the disasters Sistersville faced usually involved fire, long before a 1970 fire that destroyed a historic downtown block.

A gasoline plant was built at the oil field and in 1911 the Carter Oil company built the world's largest gasoline print south of SIstersville, which had an explosion in 1913 but rebuilt, such that the American Petroleum Institute cited for its gas development work in 1925.

[18] According to the United States Census Bureau, the city has a total area of 0.53 square miles (1.37 km2), all land.