After nearly 100 years since its construction, the former Paw Paw Black School continues to convey its historic association with the Town of Paw Paw's education and social history. For more than 25 years the building served to educate Black students, and as a place of social gathering for the small number of Black families in Paw Paw who lived in the vicinity of the school. The building remains largely unchanged since that time. The important role the school played in Black education and the Black community led to the building being listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2024.
When Elizabeth Dye Walker lived in the Old Stone House of Mineral County in the beginning of the twentieth century, getting around employed a diversity of methods. It could mean a horseback ride, a horse-drawn buggy, or taking the Twin Mountain & Potomac Railroad. Where the railroad once ran, across the Northwestern Turnpike from the Stone House, now lies a trucking facility. Elizabeth Dye Walker’s childhood in the Stone House was colored by these various modes for motion, the resilient horse-drawn buggy and sled, a fruitless fruit-filled train, and a peculiar horseless carriage.
If you’re driving down Route 50 through Mineral County, blink and you might miss a curious stone structure on the side of the road. If you were a stagecoach passenger peering out from your horse-drawn carriage this L-shaped building would be a cause for celebration. In the age of horse-drawn wagons and carriages, travel was no small feat and the people who relied on Traveller’s Rest viewed the process of getting around fundamentally different from today. For them, the landscape of the Appalachian Forest could be wild and unpredictable and the journey itself was always far from mundane.
John Robert (J.R.) Clifford was a trailblazing African American lawyer, educator, and activist whose work continues to inspire the fight for justice. Clifford's landmark legal battles, including the landmark ruling on November 16, 1898 in Williams v. Board of Education of Fairfax District, highlight his profound impact on civil rights and democracy.
The history of bison in the AFNHA unfolds like a windy trail that aligns with a stream of human change. Their presence and proliferation in the region was first blazed by indigenous tribes who brought a fire regime to the Appalachian forest, creating and maintaining the savannah and meadows that invited, hosted, and fed migrating buffalo. When European colonists came to West Virginia, they found much needed salt by way of the bison. Yet the settlers' domineering conception of the New World broke the balance between humanity and bison leading to their abrupt extermination in West Virginia. The cars and locomotives that now traverse these paths of least resistance owe a great debt to the herd-minded engineers they now succeed.
Following the Battle of Blair Mountain, a U.S. Army Air Service Martin NBS-MB-1*—Bomber No. 5—crashed near Drennen, Nicholas County, West Virginia. Its role in suppression of the largest armed uprising since the Civil War was thereby etched into the hills of West Virginia and into the labor history of our Nation.
Laura Jackson Arnold was the younger sister of Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, famed Confederate general, who forged her own path to support the Union in the divided community of Beverly, western Virginia. During the Civil War she served a nurse to help soldiers on both sides, and she later became active in veterans’ organizations and was celebrated as “Mother of the Regiment.”
J.R. Clifford was a lawyer, teacher, newspaper editor, and soldier. He was the first black lawyer to practice law before the West Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals. In the case Carrie Williams v. The Board of Education Fairfax District, he successfully argued that "discrimination against people because of color alone as to privileges, immunities and equal protection of the law is unconstitutional" more than 50 years before Brown v. Board of Education.
