The history of the Greater Parkersburg area is as rich and varied as that of any part of the United States. It stretches back to almost 9,000 BC when its first human inhabitants, Indians, are known to have lived, worked and played here. By the late 1600s, French explorers and traders had penetrated the region, soon followed by the English. But white settlement did not come until the 1760s when squatters illegally took possession of the Indians' land. The United States Army drove the Indians out in 1785, the same year permanent settlers arrived.
What they found was a fertile valley covered by a dark, lush, jungle-like perfumed forest of monstrous trees filled with wild animals including buffalo and multi-colored parrots. Through the valley flowed the Ohio River, a great liquid highway that carried a vast and varied panorama of thousands of travelers into the heart of North America. In summer the river often dried to the size of a creek becoming a series of riffles and pools formed by innumerable sand and gravel bars. In many places the river was shallow enough to be walked across. At other times it became a raging torrent that quickly overflowed its banks.
After surviving a bloody Indian War (1791-1795), the area entered an era of gradual expansion and development. Population growth was very slow, however, and life very Southern in its customs. Many local settlers, originally from eastern Virginia, owned slaves and used them to carve out plantations. Barbecues and horse races helped pass the time in the people's sleepy existence that was isolated to the extreme.
In 1811 the outside world started to break in when the Ohio River's first steamboat went down the river and stopped at Parkersburg to refuel. The Northwestern Turnpike, connecting Winchester, Virginia and Parkersburg (paralleling present-day US Route 50), was completed in 1838. Nine years later, the Staunton-Parkersburg Turnpike (following modern-day WV Route 47) was finished. But Parkersburg's greatest economic and population expansion came only after the railroad embraced it in her steel web. A branch of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad reached Parkersburg in 1857, for the first time giving the town easy access to the East Coast and Cincinnati.
What would soon become one of the largest producing oil fields in the world was discovered in 1860 at Burning Springs, 40 miles up the Little Kanawha River. Parkersburg became the refining and shipping point for what seemed like an ocean of oil and communities with names like Volcano and Petroleum sprung up almost overnight with those hoping to make their fortune or just a living. Just like the oil itself, money flowed freely, and the area experienced an era of great wealth and prosperity.
The Civil War provided another vital impetus to the town's growth. Because of its strategic geographical location on the B & O Railroad (exactly half way between Baltimore and St. Louis), Parkersburg became a major troop transfer and supply center for the Union Army. Following the Civil War, the area kept hold on its economic luck when, in the 1880s, deep depth drilling produced another oil boom almost simultaneously accompanied by a gas well boom. These brought a new wave of prosperity for the entire region, aiding the growth of local industry and ushering in the modern era.
Today the Greater Parkersburg area has a diversified economy. High tech producers including chemicals, plastics and laboratory equipment balance its conventional manufacturers such as glass and ferrous metals and recent additions such as mail order distribution and vehicle assembly. In a little over two hundred years, the area has grown from being an outpost on the edge of civilization to its own prominent role in the heartland of industrialized America.
WOOD COUNTY, WV
Organized on August 12, 1799 at the home of Hugh Phelps on the south side of the Little Kanawha River near Neal's Station, after the Virginia legislature had refused several previous petitions, Wood County was named in honor of Virginia's tenth governor, James Wood (1741-1813) who held office from 1796 to 1799. Formation of the new county immediately unleashed a bitter controversy for the control of political power. This struggle centered on the location of the county seat: Newport (soon to be renamed Parkersburg), Vienna, Williamstown and Monroe (located where the present day East Street bridge reaches south Parkersburg) all wanted it. Newport finally won the fray when the court accepted John Stokely's offer of two acres near The Point on the north side of the Little Kanawha River. A two-story, hewn-log courthouse was built at the corner of what is now First and Juliana Street where the county's business could be transacted.
Encompassing a gigantic 1,233 square miles when created, Wood County eventually began to shrink as newer counties were formed either wholly or partially from it. These included Jackson (1831), Ritchie (1843), Wirt (1848) and Pleasants (1851). Through the creation of these four, Wood County lost more than 70% of its original size and was reduced to its present-day 377 square miles.
Parkersburg
Besides being Wood County's most populous city and seat of government, Parkersburg is also its oldest settlement. It was founded sometime in the fall of 1785 by a western Pennsylvanian and retired Revolutionary War officer named Captain James Neal. His little settlement -- a cluster of log cabins around a blockhouse -- was called "Neal's Station" and less frequently "Kanawha Station." It was located on the southern bank of the Little Kanawha River near where the East Street Bridge now crosses the river.
What is now modern-day Parkersburg was purchased in 1785 by Captain Alexander Parker, another Pennsylvania Revolutionary War officer, who paid the princely sum of $50 for 1,400 acres from Robert Thornton in 1783. Captain Parker died at his home in Carlisle in 1791 at the age of 38 without having actually ever lived in what is today Parkersburg. In 1792, the State of Virginia constructed a blockhouse at "The Point" (the north bank of the Little Kanawha River where it flows into the Ohio River) for protection against Indians and stationed a small number of soldiers there. By the late 1790s the village had grown to a few log cabins, a store and a tavern, and John Stokley, who named it Newport laid out a town.
By 1800 the county seat was permanently fixed at the Point. In 1807, according to the count made by a passing river traveler, there were 12 buildings at the Point. After having gone through a variety of names - including "Newport," "The Point," "Kanawha," "Kanawha Point" and “Wood Court House" - the site was surveyed in 1810 and officially and finally named "Parkersburg" in honor of the deceased Captain Parker. Parkersburg was incorporated as a town in 1811 (although the charter was not received until 1820) and as a city in 1863.
The town's first real boom came with the drilling of West Virginia's first oil wells along the Hughes and Little Kanawha Rivers. By 1863, Parkersburg had a population of 3,000, mainly employed in trade with the oil fields and the refining of crude oil. After the Civil War, Parkersburg became headquarters for such operations as Camden Refinery, Standard Oil and other refineries. The city continued to develop as an industrial center after the 1880s when the gas fields to the east were tapped and industrial plants began using natural gas instead of coal as a manufacturing fuel. After 1900, the oil fever abated, and by 1936 the last oil refinery in Parkersburg had closed, although the manufacture of oil well equipment continues even today.
Vienna
What is now one of the most rapidly growing cities in the Ohio Valley was, for most of its corporate history, large stretches of farmland -- the end result of a New England doctor's broken dream. Vienna was founded in 1794 by Dr. Joseph Spencer, a Connecticut-born physician who had been given for his services in the American Revolution a 5,000-acre tract of land eight miles above the mouth of the Little Kanawha River. He brought his family to the area and settled at what is now 28th Street and River Road. In what is now the central part of the city, he laid out lots of 100 acres for a town he named "Vienna" probably -- though it is not certain -- after the town of Vienna, New Jersey. During his war career he had taken part in a battle there. Toward the end of the 1800s Vienna's future brightened when in 1888 its first post office was opened, and in 1902 when tracks for a streetcar line -- officially called "The Parkersburg, Marietta and Interurban Railway Company - were laid through the area. When the track was completed to Marietta the following year, the real urbanization of Vienna began. It was aided, too, in 1902 by being chosen as the site of the Parkersburg Country Club. This prompted a number of Parkersburg's well-to-do families to build expensive summer homes in the club's vicinity.
Industry soon appeared, led by the Meyercord-Carter Glass Company which opened its doors in 1908. It was nicknamed the "Vitrolite Plant" for the rather exotic building material called "Vitrolite" it produced, "a flint-like substance resembling marble, used for store fronts, interior walls and decorations, table tops and ornamental bric-a-brac." Gradually as its reputation as a desirable residential area grew, Vienna's population expanded necessitating incorporation in 1935. Its original charter had been "forfeited because of disuse" long before. Today, Vienna exudes an air of confidence. Vienna is one of the valley's most thriving business centers, primarily a result of the Grand Central Mall -- West Virginia's first covered shopping mall -- a complex comprising more than 100 stores and shops.
Williamstown
When Isaac and Rebecca Tomlinson Martin Williams founded in 1787 what is the city of Williamstown, they were already seasoned veterans of the Ohio Valley Indian Wars. He was born in 1737 in Pennsylvania but grew up near Winchester, Virginia. She was a native of Maryland but had moved near Wheeling on the Ohio River when an adolescent. The 400 acres of land on which they settled in 1787 belonged to her. It was a gift from her brothers who had claimed it earlier by marking trees as a boundary, clearing enough of the forest to plant a field of corn and then living on the site in a crude log cabin until the crop was harvested.
In its earliest years, Isaac and Rebecca's little settlement was called "Williams Station" and "Fort Liberty." By the early 1800s it had taken the name "Williamsport" which its citizens in the mid-century changed to the present Williamstown. Although primarily a residential community, Williamstown today is home to a number of small businesses, as well as the world‑famous Fenton Art Glass Company, the city's largest employer.
