Salem West Virginia 1776 ~ 1976

Foreword

Every town has its stories, and Salem, West Virginia, has more than its share. For many years, Dorothy Belle Davis, a local educator, author and newspaper columnist, researched the history of Salem and wrote articles about its most interesting stories. The articles were published in The Salem Herald from 1976 to 1977.

Mrs. Davis enjoyed giving her time to many projects in Salem. She volunteered at Fort New Salem and she was a member of the Salem Garden Club. Mrs. Davis was the local historian, a devoted and respected high school English teacher, and the school librarian and was an advisor to many of her students at Salem High School.

This talented lady died in 2004, but she left behind one final gift to her community: her stories. Before her passing, she gave all of her newspaper articles that detailed the rich history of Salem to my sister-in-law, Joan Carder Stine, with the suggestion, You can do something with these someday.

Joan involved me in the project, and we decided these stories were too important to be lost. They covered not only the history of a small Appalachian town, but the hopes, dreams and legends of a community of people. They were written to be shared, to be passed along to others who want a glimpse into the lifeblood of a town. They needed to be in a book.

Unfortunately, Joan passed away before we could bring this book to life. I am privileged to complete this work in her memory.

All proceeds from the sale of this book will be used to benefit the community, such as the restoration of the Salem Depot and/or Fort New Salem.

As you turn these pages, we hope you enjoy your voyage into the past two centuries.

Patricia J. Carder, Editor

Contents

Foreword

Thanks To…

Teaser and Website Information

January 6, 1976

January 13, 1976

January 20, 1976

January 27, 1976

February 3, 1976

February 10, 1976

February 17, 1976

February 24, 1976

March 2, 1976

March 9, 1976

March 16, 1976

March 23, 1976

March 30, 1976

April 6, 1976

April 13, 1976

April 20, 1976

April 27, 1976

May 4, 1976

May 11, 1976

May 18, 1976

May 25, 1976

June 1, 1976

June 8, 1976

June 15, 1976

June 22, 1976

June 29, 1976

November 9, 1976

November 16, 1976

November 23, 1976

November 30, 1976

Fee Bill For Salem Physicians

Adopted November 1, 1917

December 14, 1976

December 21, 1976

January 4, 1977

Dorothy Belle Davis

1914 ~ 2004

Mrs. Davis graduated from Victory High School in 1931 and was a graduate of West Virginia University in 1934 with a major in English and a minor in French. She worked on her master’s degree at the University of Illinois, and then finished it at West Virginia University. She had an honorary doctorate degree from Salem-Teikyo University. Teaching primarily at Salem High School, Mrs. Davis taught English in Harrison County Schools for 37 years. She directed more than 50 class plays during her teaching career and wrote pageants for the state FHA, one of which was presented at the National Convention of the FHA. She wrote Out of the Whirlwind, the Harrison County West Virginia Centennial Pageant which ran for a week in May 1963 at the Nathan Goff National Guard Armory. Between 1968 and 1997, she wrote more than 50 historical sketches for the newsletters of the Harrison County Historical Society. She had also written many articles for the Clarksburg Publishing Company.

Mrs. Davis was a member of the Salem Business and Professional Women’s Club and the Harrison County and West Virginia Historical Societies.

Mrs. Davis wrote The History of Harrison County and John George Jackson.

Mrs. Davis gives a fascinating account of the early settlement of Salem, WV. Her detail of names and dates present a clear picture of the development of education, mail routes, churches and systems of government. Further accounts of the establishment of those people who lived and prospered in Salem is a joyful walk back in time.

Ruth Lawlis

Dorothy Belle Davis has such a warm, folksy manner of telling the story of Salem so that anyone who knows any small town can relate to its inhabitants and development as their own. It’s a wonderful document to the development of small town America.

Judy Mattson Reed

The little town of Salem was settled in 1790 by Seventh Day Baptists from Shrewsbury, New Jersey. Early settlers existed by farming, growing corn and livestock. They hunted the plentiful wildlife. Its History has included ebbs and flows of success. The Northwestern Turnpike, the oil boom, the hand-blown glass factories, and the train brought businesses to support the construction, the workers, and the travelers. Students at Salem College, opened in 1888, rode the train to get to school. But the oil played out, the glass factories closed and the train stopped running through town. In 1901, much of the town burned. But the town has survived. Dorothy Davis has shared with us vignettes of the ebb and flow of Salem, the little town with a big heart.

Phyllis D. Freedman, PhD

Dean of Library Services

Benedum Library

Salem International University

Thanks To…

Pamela Matthey Howell was the glue that kept this endeavor going. Both Pamela and I were novices at book publishing. However, we were dedicated to making Mrs. Davis’ treasured writings a piece of history that could be enjoyed by everyone. The added bonus was working with two of my cousins. After researching and strategizing we began this journey together. Tom Thomas provided the first step by transcribing the newspaper articles. Pamela accomplished the second step by spending many hours editing. Her patience with details and most of all her humor kept this project moving along smoothly.

A book requires a great cover; and for that I thank my son-in-law, Randy Davis, for his photography, Judy Mattson Reed for her help with the cover design, and Pam’s husband, Curtis, for his computer skills. Judy’s friendship and support have been invaluable throughout this process. Ed Davis, Mrs. Davis’ son, was gracious with his encouragement for this book to be completed. My deep gratitude goes to all my family for their love and assistance with all my projects.

Patricia J. Carder

In memory of…

Joan Carder Stine

Teaser and Website Information

SALEM, WEST VIRGINIA

A small town with a big spirit.

Every town has its stories, and Salem is no exception. When Salem was still in the state of Virginia, Preston Randolph, a renowned educator and pillar of the community, campaigned for Abraham Lincoln. Within these pages you will learn about the person who manufactured Salem’s first electricity; the first man to sell oil that was produced and marketed in Harrison County; where in 1976 a well still existed that had been used to supply water for the stockade, where the brewery was located and Salem’s great fire of 1901.

This collection of historical stories of life in Salem, West Virginia---and many more---paint a vivid picture of this small town and the people who made it prosper for over 200 years. Written by Dorothy Belle Davis, a locally well-known educator, author, and newspaper columnist, these stories have been lovingly preserved and reproduced for your enjoyment.

Mrs. Davis is the author of HISTORY OF HARRISON COUNTY and JOHN GEORGE JACKSON.

January 6, 1976

Chartered in 1794 reads the highway marker which stands in the American Legion Park on West Main Street in Salem. The town was founded four years earlier by forty families of members of the Shrewsbury, New Jersey, church of the Seventh Day Baptist denomination and was formally established by the Virginia Assembly in 1794.

The Virginia Assembly began consideration of land laws soon after Virginia ceased to be a Crown Colony in 1776 in answer of the cries of men in the West: who had not secured deeds to the acres they had claimed because the British had not wanted settlers west of the Allegheny Mountains. The liberals in the Virginia legislature won the battle that ensued when the land laws passed in 1779 allowed anyone who had raised a crop of corn on a piece of land to be awarded four hundred acres of the land free of charge.

Joseph Swearingen registered four hundred acres, part of which is the town of Salem, with the legislature-appointed commissioners who sat in October 1781 in Samuel Lewellyn’s house in Clarksburg. Nicholas Carpenter, who lived in Clarksburg, registered four acres west of Swearingen’s acres where Carpenter had a hunting camp on the spot behind the site of the present Harbert’s Funeral Home. The place where the hunting camp stood still in 1976 is called Carpenter’s Hollow.

Swearingen must have died and his widow Catherine Swearingen must have gone to live near the Pennsylvania border, where the name Swearingen still in the twentieth century is frequently found. Wanting to be rid of her land, she sold it--perhaps, as others are known to have done, for as little as 25¢ an acre--to Samuel Fitz Randolph who lived in southwestern Pennsylvania. Randolph had a deed to a pig in a poke and members of the Shrewsbury Church who had recently migrated to White Day Creek in Monongalia County, Virginia, had itchy feet. Randolph suggested that the forty families move on to his newly purchased land. They did. They arrived on a fork of Tenmile Creek in the summer of 1790.

The [sic] built log cabins and a stockade on the south side of the site on East Main Street which Salemites for generations have called Suicide Curve.

The stockade, no doubt, was built to satisfy the nervous Nellies in the group because the danger of attack by Indians was past. By 1790 the only Indians that men on Tenmile saw were traders who might wander into a settlement. And occasionally a few young braves bent on mischief stole horses if they found the animals unattended. Had the settlers arrived between 1774 and 1783 when the Indian wars raged, they could not have stayed on the site they settled because an Indian trail which was a main artery for traffic lay along the watershed two miles west of the stockade they built in 1790.

The town of approximately forty cabins which Fitz Randolph found on his land were [sic} he migrated with his family in 1792 was larger than it would again be until after the 1860’s, when only twelve houses stood in the hamlet. Soon Salem people formed the habit of using geographic labels to designate individuals with identical names. The William Davis who purchased the bottom land in present Bristol was Bottom Billy; the William Davis who moved to Greenbrier Creek was Greenbrier Billy.

Last names, if Davis, through out the history of the town have been useless. Citizens have used first names to differentiate the Davises. The writer of this column was completely confused when, as a stranger to the town in 1936, she heard one woman referred to as Wilse’s Bessie and another, as Adrian’s Bessie. If you, the reader, want proof that the early settlers had problems with names and proof of the statement the more we change the more we stay the same, open your telephone directory and count the number of entries under Davis.

The town was chartered as New Salem, a name that continued to be used until the 1870’s. Since then, with West Virginia a state, the Salem in Virginia was not a deterrent to dropping the New. A hamlet in the southern part of West Virginia was. So the post office department dropped the S making the rival for the one-word title Alem. New Salem, West Virginia, and officially changed to Salem, West Virginia.

January 13, 1976

In the decades before the settlement by whites of land west of the Allegheny Mountains in the l770’s, the Indians did not object to hunters and traders from the East roaming through the forests. But when they saw men with surveyor’s chains, the Indians flew into a rage, for they knew from experience that log cabins and farms which would follow the surveyors would end the abundance of game in the woods.

Isaac Fitz Randolph, who wrote late in the nineteenth century that his father soon after the settlement of Salem built a two-story hewed log house on the east bank of Jacob’s Run just south of the alley that now leads to the Baptist Church, recorded his reminiscences of life when the woods were full of game:

Wild game, such as deer, bear, turkey. etc., was very plentiful in those early days. Bears were so numerous and so fond of pork, that hogs could not be raised. The bears would go into the pens and kill them. But the people retaliated and took bear meat in place of pork.

My father and two other neighbors, being good hunters and having good dogs, made it a practice for a number of years to kill each fall sixty bears, twenty to a family. When the game became scarce around Salem the hunters would camp out some distance from home. The hides of the game were dried, made into large rolls and carried on horseback over east of the mountains and there traded for salt, potmetal, tinware, etc. The people were healthy then living as they did on cornbread and bear meat, with rye coffee and sassafras and dittany tea. At the time, the hide of a deer was worth in Winchester one dollar; that is, one buck.

The game