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The History of Randolph County, West Virginia: From Its Earliest Settlement...The History of Randolph County, West Virginia. From Its Earliest Settlement to the Presnent. Hu Maxwell. Hardbound, (1898), repr. 2005, Illus., Index, 532 pp.
Randolph County was formed from Harrison in 1787 and included all of the present county of Tucker, all of Barbour east of the river, all of Upshur east of Buckhannon River, and a considerable portion of Pocahontas and Webster. It lost territory in 1821 when Pocahontas was formed; again in 1843 when Barbour came into existence, and in 1851 it gave up some of its territory to Upshur, and five years later 350 square miles were cut off to form Tucker; and in 1860 Webster took a strip; and after all of these losses Randolph still is the largest county in the State. The white man's home on the waters of the Monongahela, within West Virginia, was first planted in Randolph. In this county occurred the first Indian massacre in the State. From that beginning, the county has been an historical center down to the present. Great events have occurred here, and men of wide fame have gone forth from the valleys and mountains of the grand old county, and have made their influence felt from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The writer of this book has attempted to collect, to arrange and preserve traditions, reminiscences, annals, biographies and all kindred elements of history, and save them before too late. At the conclusion of the French and Indian War, when the tide of immigration came over the mountains into the Ohio Valley, it came in three great streams, one by way of Cumberland into the lower Monongahela Valley; another, by way of the Greenbrier, into the Kanawha Valley; while the third-which, for some reason, historians have almost totally ignored- pushed along old Indian trails across the Alleghanies into Randolph County, into the Cheat Valley and into the Buckhannon country. This third avenue of immigration is given, in this book, the prominence, which it deserves. It was of no less importance in working out the destiny of the West than were the great lines of travel to Pittsburg and down the Kanawha. The ancestors of men of international fame came through the wilderness into Tygart's Valley with no guide but obscure Indian trails. The plan of this book embraces three divisions. The first is a carefully prepared, though condensed, history of West Virginia, as a whole; the second is a strictly county history; and part third is biography. The reason why the State history was included is that comparatively few persons possess a history of West Virginia; particularly is this true in the rural districts. The three departments, united in one volume, supply not only the history of the State, but also a local history of the county, and the family records of thousands of persons who have taken part in the county's affairs. MC-M2730 |