Appalachian Community Histories – Ardel and Herbert, Wayne County: Railroad Station, Post Office, and Life Along Twelvepole Creek
Along Twelvepole Creek in Wayne County, between the county seat of Wayne and the communities farther north toward Lavalette and Kenova, sits a place whose history can be difficult to follow for one simple reason. For much of its early documented history, it had more than one name.
Ardel appears in railroad records, maps, newspapers, and local memory. Herbert appears in postal records, federal gazetteers, and many of the same sources. At first glance, they can look like two separate places. The surviving evidence, however, shows that the names overlapped so closely that understanding one requires understanding the other.
In the early twentieth century, the United States Geological Survey recorded a benchmark along the Norfolk & Western Railway at “Ardel (Herbert)” and then described another at the Herbert post office across Twelvepole Creek from a Methodist Episcopal parsonage. A contemporary West Virginia business directory was even more direct. It described Ardel as a station on the Norfolk & Western Railway about five miles north of Wayne and identified Herbert as the post-office name. The West Virginia State Archives later preserved the same distinction, listing Herbert in Wayne County and noting that its railroad name was Ardel.
Ardel, in other words, was not simply a forgotten name on an old map. It was part of a small Appalachian community shaped by the creek, the railroad, nearby farms, churches, roads, and the transportation corridor that tied rural Wayne County to a much larger industrial world.
Before the Railroad
Long before trains stopped at Ardel, Twelvepole Creek determined where people traveled, farmed, and settled. The narrow valley offered some of the most practical routes through Wayne County, while branches and hollows led back into the surrounding ridges. An 1873 atlas of Cabell, Wayne, Lincoln, and Logan counties shows the region before Ardel had emerged as a documented railroad station, making it possible to see the landscape that existed before the Norfolk & Western transformed the valley.
There may even have been an older local name associated with the area. In 1941, the Wayne County News published material from an unidentified nineteenth-century history that had lost its title and index pages. According to the newspaper writer, the greatest acreage of cane in early Wayne County had once been grown around Ardel, which the old account supposedly knew as “the Falls.” The same article portrayed the early county as a place rich in cane, ginseng, and wild game.
The claim is intriguing, but it should be treated cautiously. Because the 1941 writer could not identify the original book or its author, there is not yet enough evidence to say with certainty that “the Falls” was a formal earlier name for Ardel. It is better understood as a promising fragment of local history that still needs corroboration from land deeds, maps, family papers, or another copy of the source the newspaper was quoting.
What is certain is that the landscape changed dramatically when the railroad came through the Twelvepole Valley.
The Norfolk & Western Comes to Twelvepole Creek
The railroad that would define Ardel was part of one of the great transportation projects to reshape southern West Virginia during the late nineteenth century.
In 1890, Norfolk & Western documents described plans for an Ohio Extension that would reach the headwaters of Twelvepole Creek and follow the valley for approximately seventy-one miles before crossing the Ohio River. West Virginia historic preservation documentation dates construction of the Old Twelvepole Line to about 1890, while the route became the Norfolk & Western’s main connection through this portion of Wayne County during the early 1890s. The larger railroad system was driven heavily by the movement of coal from southern West Virginia toward markets and connections farther west.
The railroad did more than carry coal. For communities along the line, it changed the meaning of distance. Farmers could reach outside markets more easily. Residents could travel farther with greater speed. Mail, manufactured goods, newspapers, workers, and information moved through the valley differently than they had in the wagon-road era.
Ardel developed within that new transportation landscape.
A 1931 historical article in the Wayne County News provides one of the best surviving clues to the actual location of the station. In discussing James M. Corns, the newspaper explained that Corns had purchased a farm roughly five miles below Wayne before the Civil War. Decades later, according to the article, the Norfolk & Western station at Ardel stood on that farm, with part of the Corns home still standing near the place where trains stopped.
That detail anchors Ardel to something more tangible than a railroad timetable. The station occupied an older agricultural landscape. The Corns property had existed before the railroad, and the coming of the tracks layered a new industrial geography over farms that had already been occupied for generations.
Herbert, Ardel, and the Post Office
The railroad did not completely erase the older community landscape, and that may help explain Ardel’s unusual double identity.
Henry Gannett’s 1904 Gazetteer of West Virginia, published by the United States Geological Survey, identified Herbert as a post village in Wayne County. Yet the West Virginia state gazetteer and business directory described Ardel as the Norfolk & Western station and Herbert as the name of its post office.
Federal surveyors made the connection unmistakable. Traveling south along the Norfolk & Western from Shoals toward Wayne, they recorded Lavalette, Dickson, and then “Ardel (Herbert).” Their next benchmark was at the Herbert post office across Twelvepole Creek, opposite the Methodist Episcopal parsonage and west of the public highway.
A 1911 Rand McNally map preserved both identities visually. Ardel and Herbert P.O. appear immediately beside one another in the Twelvepole corridor, reinforcing the idea that railroad travelers and postal users could describe essentially the same small locality differently.
The West Virginia State Archives captures the arrangement in only a few words. Its place-name compilation lists Herbert in Wayne County with the notation that its railroad name was Ardel.
This kind of naming was not unusual in railroad Appalachia. A station name chosen or used by a railroad could coexist with a postal name, a creek name, an older settlement name, or the name of a prominent family. Over time, one identity might become dominant while the others faded. At Ardel, the railroad name ultimately proved remarkably durable.
A Methodist Parsonage Across Twelvepole
The federal survey record also preserves a glimpse of community life beyond the tracks.
When surveyors described the Herbert post-office benchmark, they located it opposite a Methodist Episcopal parsonage across Twelvepole Creek. That seemingly technical description gains greater significance when compared with a first-person recollection published in the Wayne County News in December 1923.
Rev. J. B. Bloss told readers that he had been born on October 30, 1884, in a Methodist parsonage located just across Twelvepole from Ardel. His grandfather, Rev. Beckley, was serving as pastor of the circuit at the time.
The recollection is particularly valuable because it places a religious institution in the Ardel landscape before the railroad station became prominent in surviving twentieth-century records. It suggests that the community surrounding Herbert and Ardel was not created from nothing when trains arrived. Families, churches, farms, and roads were already stitched into the valley.
The railroad added another layer to that landscape, but Twelvepole Creek continued to divide and connect its different pieces.
Ardel as a Working Railroad Station
By 1920, Ardel was clearly more than a name painted on a station sign.
On January 1 of that year, the Wayne County News reported that increased freight traffic had prompted the Norfolk & Western to place telegraph operators at Lavalette, Ardel, and Radnor. The newspaper identified all three as stations on the railroad’s Old Line Division and reported that their depots would be remodeled and equipped for telegraph service. The work was intended to relieve freight congestion between Wayne and Kenova.
That report offers one of the clearest snapshots of Ardel during its railroad years. Telegraph service meant the station participated in the operating network that controlled trains and communicated information along the line. Depot improvements also suggest that Ardel remained useful to the Norfolk & Western even after the company had shifted much of its through traffic to the more efficient Big Sandy route.
Ardel also continued to function as a recognizable community name. When prominent Wayne County physician Dr. G. R. Burgess died in 1922, his obituary identified his brother John B. Burgess as being “of Ardel.” The reference shows that local residents could use Ardel as a place of residence, not merely as the formal name of a railroad stop.
The same pattern appears in national records. A 1920 Rand McNally banking directory included Ardel among West Virginia communities without banks and directed its residents toward Wayne as the accessible banking point. It also marked Ardel as having railroad-related services.
By then, the name had become part of everyday geography.
Spring Branch and One of Wayne County’s “Seven Wonders”
Railroad history is only part of Ardel’s story. The surrounding landscape also attracted local attention.
In December 1923, J. Floyd Harrison wrote about what he called “Wayne’s Seven Wonders” for the Wayne County News. One of those wonders was a small natural bridge on Spring Branch near Ardel.
Harrison noted that the formation stood less than five miles from Wayne and less than two miles from the Huntington-Wayne road. He marveled at how such a small stream, draining fewer than five hundred acres, had managed to cut a passage through solid sandstone.
The article places Ardel within a broader tradition of Appalachian attachment to distinctive landscapes. Spring Branch was not the Natural Bridge of Virginia, and Harrison openly acknowledged the difference in scale, but his point was that Wayne County residents did not have to leave home to find unusual natural features.
That natural bridge also helps expand the historical picture of Ardel. The community was not simply a depot beside tracks. It was the surrounding farms, creek bottoms, branches, roads, churches, cemeteries, and sandstone hills that residents recognized as part of their local world.
The Ardel Dam and Depression-Era Public Works
During the Great Depression, Twelvepole Creek became the focus of another ambitious project.
In 1935 the Wayne County News reported that Emergency Relief Administration workers were constructing recreational dams along Twelvepole Creek. Approximately sixty men had been assigned that month to a masonry dam near Wayne, and similar projects were intended to provide opportunities for boating, fishing, skating, and other recreation.
The article added that work on an Ardel dam was expected to begin around the first of August.
The surviving newspaper report documents the plan, although the available evidence does not yet establish exactly when the Ardel structure was completed, how long it survived, or what remains of it today. Those questions may be answerable through state relief-agency records, federal New Deal files, engineering plans, or historic aerial photographs.
Even as an unfinished research question, the project illustrates how Ardel’s location on Twelvepole continued to shape its history. The same creek that had guided settlement and the railroad was now being modified for employment and recreation during one of the most difficult economic periods in American history.
From Main Line to Wayne Branch
The railroad through Ardel survived major changes elsewhere on the old Twelvepole route.
The original Twelvepole Line had lost much of its importance after Norfolk & Western opened a more efficient route along the Big Sandy River. In 1933, the railroad received approval to abandon the Twelvepole route between Lenore and Wayne. The tracks south of Wayne were removed later that year. The northern portion from Wayne toward Kenova remained in service and, together with the East Lynn connection, became part of what was known as the Wayne Branch.
Because Ardel stood north of Wayne, its railroad corridor survived that abandonment.
A modern rail-trail feasibility study describes the remaining line as passing through Ardel on its way through the Twelvepole Valley. The same study traces the Wayne Branch’s later history through the coal operations at East Lynn and reports that the final shipment on the branch occurred in 2015 after the closure of the Camp Creek mining operation.
That gives Ardel an unusually long connection to railroad history. The community developed beside a route created during the great Norfolk & Western expansion of the late nineteenth century, witnessed the decline of the original Twelvepole main line, remained beside the surviving Wayne Branch, and then saw regular freight traffic disappear more than a century after the tracks first transformed the valley.
What Remains of Historic Ardel
Ardel never grew into a large incorporated town, but its historic landscape has not vanished completely.
A 2017 West Virginia historic resource survey documented two properties at Ardel along WV 152. One at 5910 WV 152 was estimated to date from around 1900, while another at 5920 WV 152 was dated to approximately 1920. Neither was recommended for individual National Register eligibility, but their documentation demonstrates that buildings from Ardel’s railroad-era landscape survived into the twenty-first century.
Historic and modern topographic maps likewise continue to preserve the community name. The surrounding geography still carries names such as Spring Branch, Big Creek, Ardel Road, Twelvepole Creek, and Mount Vernon Cemetery. The 1957 USGS mapping of the area recorded Herbert in the same general landscape, while later maps returned to Ardel, another reminder of the place’s complicated naming history.
The railroad corridor itself may also take on another purpose. A 2024 professional feasibility study examined converting the Wayne Branch corridor into a rail trail and specifically described the alignment as passing through the hamlet of Ardel. The report also documented surviving railroad infrastructure along the route, including a Twelvepole Creek bridge constructed in 1911.
If that corridor is eventually repurposed, Ardel would enter another phase in a transportation history that began more than a century ago.
Remembering Ardel and Herbert
The history of Ardel is the history of a place that could easily disappear between the lines of larger Appalachian stories.
It was never a major coal town, county seat, or industrial center. Its importance came from something more typical of rural Appalachia. A farm became the site of a railroad stop. A postal community known as Herbert existed beside a station called Ardel. A Methodist parsonage stood across the creek. Telegraph operators helped regulate freight traffic through the valley. Residents used the name Ardel when describing where they lived. Spring Branch held a natural formation impressive enough to be counted among Wayne County’s local wonders, while Depression-era planners looked to the creek again when they proposed a recreational dam.
The documentation also demonstrates why the histories of small communities must often be reconstructed from many kinds of records. A federal benchmark provides one piece. A business directory provides another. A newspaper obituary establishes a resident. A minister’s recollection identifies a parsonage. A railroad improvement notice proves the station’s operational importance. A decades-later newspaper history places the stop on the Corns farm. Historic maps preserve both Ardel and Herbert even when one name begins to fade.
Taken together, those fragments reveal a community that was more substantial than the small type used to mark it on a map.
Ardel remains along Twelvepole Creek today, but Herbert has largely retreated into historical records. For several decades, however, both names described overlapping parts of the same Wayne County landscape. One belonged especially to the railroad and the other to the post office, while the people living around them simply made a home along the creek.
That unusual double identity may be the most important part of Ardel’s story. It captures a moment in Appalachian history when the older geography of farms, churches, creeks, and postal communities met the new geography of rails, depots, telegraph wires, and industrial transportation. In that meeting, a small place five miles north of Wayne became Ardel, Herbert, and, for a time, both at once.
Sources & Further Reading
Gannett, Samuel Stinson, and David Henry Baldwin. Results of Spirit Leveling in West Virginia, 1896 to 1908, Inclusive. U.S. Geological Survey Bulletin 399. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1909. USGS Bulletin 399
Marshall, Robert Bradford. Spirit Leveling in West Virginia, 1896 to 1915, Inclusive. U.S. Geological Survey Bulletin 632. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1916. USGS Bulletin 632
Gannett, Henry. A Gazetteer of West Virginia. U.S. Geological Survey Bulletin 233. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1904. USGS Bulletin 233
R. L. Polk & Co. West Virginia State Gazetteer and Business Directory. Detroit: R. L. Polk & Co., early twentieth century. Ardel entry identifying the community as a Norfolk & Western Railway station and Herbert as its post-office name. Digitized directory
Wayne County News. “N. & W. Plans Improvement.” January 1, 1920. Transcribed by the Wayne County Genealogical & Historical Society. 1920 Wayne County News archive
Wayne County News. “Death Takes Dr. G. R. Burgess.” October 12, 1922. West Virginia Archives and History. October 12, 1922 issue
Bloss, J. B. “He Roamed with the U. S. Army Until He Became a Preacher.” Wayne County News, December 20, 1923. Transcribed by the Wayne County Genealogical & Historical Society. 1923 Wayne County News archive
Harrison, J. Floyd. “Wayne’s Seven Wonders.” Wayne County News, December 23, 1923. West Virginia Archives and History. Wayne’s Seven Wonders
Wayne County News. Historical account of James M. Corns and the location of Ardel station on the Corns farm. 1931. Transcribed by the Wayne County Genealogical & Historical Society. 1931 Wayne County News archive
Wayne County News. Report on Emergency Relief Administration recreational dam construction, including the proposed Ardel dam. 1935. Transcribed by the Wayne County Genealogical & Historical Society. 1935 Wayne County News archive
Wayne County News. Historical discussion of early Wayne County agriculture and the reported earlier name “the Falls” for the Ardel vicinity. 1941. Transcribed by the Wayne County Genealogical & Historical Society. 1941 Wayne County News archive
West Virginia Archives and History. “Herbert.” In Place Names in West Virginia. Charleston: West Virginia Department of Arts, Culture and History. Accessed October 3, 2026. West Virginia Place Names database
West Virginia Archives and History. “Wayne County Court Records.” County Court Records Microfilm Holdings. Charleston: West Virginia Department of Arts, Culture and History. Accessed October 3, 2026. Wayne County court holdings
West Virginia Archives and History. West Virginia Vital Research Records. Charleston: West Virginia Department of Arts, Culture and History. Accessed October 3, 2026. Vital Research Records
West Virginia University Libraries, West Virginia and Regional History Center. West Virginia Postmasters Appointment Records. A&M 3026, 1857–1971. Morgantown: West Virginia University Libraries. A&M 3026 finding aid
National Archives and Records Administration. Post Office Department Reports of Site Locations, 1837–1950. Record Group 28, Microfilm Publication M1126. Washington, DC: National Archives and Records Administration. Post Office site-location records
Norfolk & Western Historical Society. James N. Gillum Archives. Roanoke, VA: Norfolk & Western Historical Society. Accessed October 3, 2026. James N. Gillum Archives
West Virginia State Historic Preservation Office. Reconnaissance Historic Resource Survey for Pleasants, Lincoln, Jackson, Mason and Wayne Counties, West Virginia. Charleston: West Virginia Division of Culture and History, 2017. 2017 Historic Resource Survey
KYOVA Interstate Planning Commission. Wayne Branch Rail-Trail Feasibility Study. Prepared with Michael Baker International. Huntington, WV: KYOVA Interstate Planning Commission, December 2024. Wayne Branch Rail-Trail Feasibility Study
White, M. Wood. White’s Topographical, County & District Atlas of West Virginia: Counties of Cabell, Wayne, Lincoln, Logan. Philadelphia, 1873. David Rumsey Map Collection. 1873 atlas map
U.S. Geological Survey. Huntington Quadrangle, West Virginia. Surveyed 1892, published 1895. Washington, DC: U.S. Geological Survey. Historical Huntington quadrangle
U.S. Geological Survey. Lavalette Quadrangle, West Virginia. 1:24,000 series. 1957. Reston, VA: U.S. Geological Survey. Historical Lavalette map
Dickinson, Kay Stamper, and Jack L. Dickinson. Last Train to Dunlow: History from the Hollows of Wayne County, West Virginia and Coming of the N and W Railroad, 1870–1940. 2005. Book record
Kirby, Wesley D. A Brief History of Wayne Community. 1926. West Virginia Archives and History. A Brief History of Wayne Community
Author Note: Ardel is a reminder that many Appalachian communities carried more than one name depending on whether someone was reading a railroad timetable, addressing a letter, or simply describing home. Reconstructing its story through federal surveys, local newspapers, maps, and railroad records helps preserve a Wayne County place whose history could otherwise disappear beside Twelvepole Creek.