Appalachian Community Histories – Ferguson, Wayne County: Railroads, Farms, Schools, and Life Along Twelvepole Creek
Ferguson is one of those Appalachian communities that can be easy to miss on a modern map but much harder to overlook once the historical record is opened. Tucked into the rugged southern portion of Wayne County, West Virginia, Ferguson developed in Lincoln District among the narrow valleys and steep ridges draining toward the Right Fork of Twelvepole Creek. It never became a large town, yet during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries it possessed several of the institutions that defined a functioning rural community: a post office, a general store, railroad and telegraph connections, a graded school, nearby farms, and residents who provided services to their neighbors.
A 1933 West Virginia place-name compilation placed Ferguson squarely within Wayne County’s Lincoln District alongside Dunlow, Effie, Genoa, Grassy, Quaker, Radnor, Stonecoal, and other small settlements of southern Wayne County. The geography mattered. Lincoln District occupied some of the roughest ground in the county, and communities often developed in creek valleys where roads, rail lines, farms, schools, stores, and houses could be fitted between the surrounding hills.
Ferguson belonged to that landscape. Its story is less one of a single dramatic event than of the everyday institutions that allowed an Appalachian settlement to function. By following newspapers, gazetteers, maps, government reports, and other contemporary records, a surprisingly detailed portrait begins to emerge.
The Lincoln District Landscape
Long before surviving sources began describing Ferguson by name, people were settling the southern end of Wayne County. A retrospective account published by the Wayne County News in December 1919 described Lincoln District as perhaps the most broken and mountainous of Wayne County’s districts. According to the article, the first cabin in the district had been built by a man named Nevins in 1799, followed by settlers including John Wilson, Jacob Noe, John Prinston, Richard Wilson, Hezekiah Wiley, Job Spence, Lazarus Damron, Daniel Cox, John Jarrell, and Henry Hampton.
The same account remembered education as part of the district’s early development, stating that Henry Hampton taught its first school on Mill Creek. Yet the newspaper also acknowledged the disadvantages imposed by geography. In 1919 it argued that better schools, improved farming, and hard-surfaced roads were necessary if Lincoln District was to overcome the limitations that had slowed its development. Beneath the hills lay coal, while the valleys offered timber and agricultural land, but access remained the fundamental problem.
That tension between resources and isolation would shape Ferguson as much as any individual family. Southern Wayne County had been settled early, but an edited county history in the West Virginia Encyclopedia notes that it remained sparsely populated and comparatively slow to develop until improved transportation and the growth of mining and timber industries transformed the region around the turn of the twentieth century.
Ferguson Becomes a Recognized Place
Exactly when residents first began calling the community Ferguson remains uncertain. The surviving evidence establishes the name by the late nineteenth century, but the available records do not yet prove who specifically gave the settlement its name or which member of the prominent Wayne County Ferguson family, if any, inspired it.
A modern index based on an 1895 Rand McNally atlas reports Ferguson with a population of 76 and a post office. Because that figure has not yet been checked against the original atlas page, it is best treated cautiously. More securely, the United States Geological Survey’s Gazetteer of West Virginia, published in 1904, included Ferguson as a “post village in Wayne County.”
A much richer description appeared in R. L. Polk & Company’s West Virginia State Gazetteer and Business Directory for 1904 and 1905. The directory estimated Ferguson’s population at 100 and placed it sixteen miles south of Wayne and twelve miles from Louisa, Kentucky. It identified the community as being on the Norfolk & Western Railway and reported Adams Express and Western Union service. J. C. Ferguson served as postmaster, R. H. Chitwood was listed as the telegraph and railroad agent, and J. C. Ferguson & Brother operated a general store.
For such a small place, that entry says a great deal. Ferguson was not simply a collection of homes given a convenient geographic label. By the opening years of the twentieth century, it functioned as a postal and commercial point connected to regional transportation and communication networks. The combination of a post office, railroad agent, telegraph service, express service, and general store meant that people living in the surrounding hills could use Ferguson as a small gateway to the wider world.
The source material gathered for Ferguson reinforces just how unusually strong the documentary trail is for a community of its size. The 1904 to 1905 gazetteer, contemporary newspapers, highway records, school references, maps, postmaster records, and county documents together make it possible to recover pieces of the community’s daily life that might otherwise have disappeared.
The Railroad and the Transformation of Southern Wayne County
The arrival of the railroad was part of a much larger transformation occurring throughout Wayne County. The Norfolk & Western Railway completed its main line through the county to Kenova around 1890, opening an important transportation corridor through territory that had previously depended heavily upon rivers, creeks, primitive roads, and mountain paths.
Southern Wayne County grew noticeably around the turn of the century as rail access combined with timbering and mining. Communities from East Lynn toward Crum became increasingly tied to regional markets. Wayne County’s population itself rose dramatically during this period, increasing from 7,852 in 1870 to 23,619 by 1900.
Ferguson’s 1904 gazetteer entry captures the effects of that change at the community level. R. H. Chitwood’s position as both telegraph and railroad agent suggests how transportation and communication were concentrated in a single local point. Residents could send messages, receive freight, conduct business, collect mail, and purchase necessities without traveling all the way to Wayne or across the state line to Louisa.
J. C. Ferguson occupied an equally important position. As postmaster and a partner in the community’s general store, he stood at the intersection of government service and local commerce. A rural store in a place like Ferguson was more than a place to purchase flour, coffee, tools, cloth, or household goods. It could serve as an informal gathering place where news passed between neighbors, transactions were arranged, mail was collected, and information arriving by rail or telegraph spread into the surrounding hollows.
A 1911 Rand McNally map continued to label Ferguson among the recognized settlements of southern Wayne County, placing it in the same network of communities as Genoa, Dunlow, Quaker, Grassy, and Radnor.
Ferguson Branch and the Twelvepole Country
The physical geography of Ferguson was tied closely to Ferguson Branch and the Right Fork of Twelvepole Creek. In August 1925, the Wayne County News published a lengthy description of the Twelvepole watershed based partly upon information from the West Virginia Geological Survey. It identified Ferguson Branch as one of the principal tributaries entering the Right Fork, alongside streams such as Patrick, Trace, Joel’s Branch, Billie’s Branch, Big Branch, Missouri Branch, Moses Creek, Long Branch, and Turkey Creek.
The newspaper’s description of Twelvepole also provides valuable context for the economy that surrounded Ferguson. It praised the creek’s valleys for agricultural land and recalled that enormous quantities of timber had once been floated downstream. Before dependable highways reached the hills, waterways served as both obstacles and transportation corridors. Timber cut from surrounding mountains could be moved toward larger markets by following the drainage system through Twelvepole and eventually toward the Ohio River.
This landscape helps explain the shape of settlement. Houses, farms, schools, stores, and roads clustered where the valley permitted them, while cemeteries and smaller family holdings climbed into the branches and ridges. Ferguson was therefore not necessarily a compact town in the modern sense. Like many Appalachian communities, it was better understood as a named center within a broader network of households stretched through a creek valley.
Farming Along the Tug River Highway
One of the most revealing glimpses of daily life in Ferguson comes from the Wayne County News of May 21, 1925. The newspaper reported that Joseph Merchant of Ferguson was planting one acre each of sweet corn, sweet potatoes, and tomatoes. Merchant lived along the Tug River Highway and was described as one of the men who helped keep the road in good condition.
Merchant and neighboring farmers Thomas J. Preston and William Preston attended a truck growers’ meeting in Wayne. The journey required roughly eighteen miles of driving in each direction, a detail that demonstrates both the isolation of southern Wayne County and the growing importance of automobile transportation. These men were not practicing purely subsistence agriculture. They were participating in organized discussions about truck crops and attempting to connect their farms with larger markets.
Their experience captures Ferguson during a transitional period. The community had already been shaped by the railroad, but the automobile was creating another transportation revolution. Roads now offered farmers greater freedom to haul produce, attend meetings, reach stores, visit the county seat, and travel between communities without depending entirely upon railroad schedules.
The crops themselves are equally revealing. Sweet corn, sweet potatoes, and tomatoes were practical foods for household use, but they could also be sold locally or transported to market. Ferguson’s history was therefore not simply the story of coal or timber. Agriculture remained part of the local economy and of the relationship between mountain households and the narrow bottomlands along the creeks.
The Tug River Highway Changes the Map
By August 1925, the Wayne County News was celebrating completion of much of the Tug River Highway through Wayne County. The road connected the county more effectively with Mingo County and Williamson and allowed automobile traffic to move through Wayne, Dunlow, Crum, and onward toward the coalfields. The newspaper described the route in considerable detail, even publishing an automobile log prepared after a trip by the Huntington Automobile Club.
The significance for Ferguson becomes clearer when the highway report is read together with the Joseph Merchant story. Merchant was already living along the Tug River Highway and helping maintain it. Ferguson was therefore directly participating in the transformation described elsewhere in the newspaper.
The road did not instantly eliminate the difficulties of mountain travel. The 1925 report still described earth roads, detours, railroad crossings, unfinished bridges, and stretches that became difficult in poor weather. Nevertheless, the highway represented something Lincoln District residents had been calling for only a few years earlier: a reliable road system capable of breaking down the isolation created by steep ridges and narrow valleys.
The railroad had helped connect Ferguson to distant markets around the turn of the century. The highway increasingly connected individual households and farms to neighboring communities during the 1920s.
Ferguson Graded School
Education provides another direct window into Ferguson’s identity as a community. On May 20, 1926, the Wayne County News published the Lincoln District Board of Education’s teacher appointments for the upcoming school year. Among dozens of schools scattered throughout the district was “Ferguson Graded,” with H. W. Vanhoose listed as assistant.
That short entry is historically important. It establishes that Ferguson possessed a graded school recognized within Lincoln District’s public education system.
The larger list demonstrates the extraordinary decentralization once required by mountain geography. Dunlow, Genoa, Effie, Radnor, Crum, Stonecoal, Marcum, Webb, Grassy, and numerous branches and ridges maintained their own schools or graded schools. Children could not simply be transported long distances over modern paved roads. Schools had to exist close to the communities they served.
Ferguson Graded therefore represented more than a building. It was one of the institutions around which community identity formed. Generations of rural West Virginians encountered their neighbors at school programs, examinations, public gatherings, and other events associated with these small local schools. Although more research is needed to identify the building’s exact location and operating years, the 1926 record firmly places formal education within Ferguson itself.
Sallie Smith and Rural Health Care
Another remarkable record appears in October 1927, when the Wayne County News published a list of twenty-eight licensed midwives practicing in Wayne County. Among them was Mrs. Sallie Smith of Ferguson.
The article explained that licensed midwives were particularly important in rural communities where medical services were difficult to obtain. Under a state law passed in 1925, their licenses had to be renewed, giving the newspaper a reason to publish the names of those legally permitted to practice.
Smith’s presence tells us something that business directories and maps cannot. Ferguson was home not only to farmers, merchants, teachers, and transportation workers, but also to people responsible for some of the most personal and essential tasks in community life.
In an era when reaching a physician could require a lengthy trip over mountain roads, a local midwife could be critically important during childbirth. The record of Sallie Smith places Ferguson inside a broader system of rural health care that depended heavily upon trusted local practitioners.
Cemeteries and the Families of Ferguson Branch
The landscape surrounding Ferguson retains another form of historical evidence in its cemeteries. The Wayne County Genealogical and Historical Society identifies the Sam Damron Cemetery at the head of Ferguson Branch, tying the Damron name to the upper reaches of the watershed.
A field transcription of Robinson Cemetery near Ferguson recorded sixty-one graves. Other cemetery indexes identify additional burial grounds associated with the Ferguson area and Ferguson Branch. Such sites can preserve family connections and settlement patterns that are difficult to reconstruct from newspapers alone.
For a community spread along creeks and ridges, these family burial grounds effectively create another kind of map. They show where households remained long enough to establish permanent places for their dead and where networks of kinship endured across generations.
They also remind us that the boundaries of a place like Ferguson were never as simple as the boundaries of an incorporated town. People might identify with Ferguson even while living miles up a branch, on a ridge, or near a neighboring settlement. The post office, school, store, road, railroad facilities, cemeteries, and creek system together formed the community.
The Ferguson Name and an Unanswered Question
Wayne County has a long and prominent Ferguson family history. The West Virginia Encyclopedia even preserves an old county saying that Wayne was “owned by the Frys, run by the Fergusons, and populated by the Adkinses,” reflecting the political and economic prominence associated with several large local families.
That prominence makes it tempting to assume that the community of Ferguson was named directly for one of those family members. The 1904 business directory certainly shows J. C. Ferguson as both postmaster and partner in the local general store. Yet the surviving evidence examined here does not establish that he founded the settlement, named it, or was the individual for whom it was named.
That distinction matters. Local history often becomes distorted when a reasonable assumption is repeated until it hardens into supposed fact. The evidence gathered so far leaves the exact origin of the community’s name unresolved, with early deeds, survey books, nineteenth-century postmaster appointment records, and the earliest references to Ferguson Branch offering the best prospects for eventually answering the question.
Until such evidence appears, the safest conclusion is simply that Ferguson was established as a recognized place by the late nineteenth century and had clearly developed into a functioning postal and commercial settlement by the opening years of the twentieth.
The Name Survives
Communities do not always disappear simply because their stores close, their schools consolidate, or their post offices vanish from modern directories. Sometimes the name becomes attached permanently to the landscape.
Ferguson Branch remained one such landmark. In a 1977 West Virginia Court of Claims case, state records described property fronting approximately 2,000 feet along Ferguson Branch Road, officially designated Local Service Road 52/21. The case discussed the road, drainage structures, nearby homes, and the physical conditions of the property, showing that the Ferguson Branch name remained firmly embedded in local geography long after the community’s early twentieth-century period.
The continuity is important. Historical Ferguson can still be followed through the creek, the road, cemeteries, maps, and surviving property records even when many of the institutions listed in the 1904 gazetteer are no longer present in the same form.
For historians, this is often how forgotten Appalachian communities are rediscovered. A name survives on a road sign or creek while the railroad agency, post office, schoolhouse, and country store fade from living memory. Archival records then supply the missing pieces.
Why Ferguson Matters
Ferguson never needed to become a city for its history to matter. Its importance lies partly in how ordinary it was. Communities like Ferguson were the framework upon which rural Appalachian life rested.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, Ferguson had around one hundred residents according to Polk’s directory, a postmaster, a general store, a railroad and telegraph agent, express service, and direct connections to the Norfolk & Western Railway. Two decades later, farmers from Ferguson were driving the Tug River Highway to agricultural meetings, children were attending Ferguson Graded School, and Sallie Smith was serving as a licensed midwife in a region where professional medical care could be difficult to reach.
Taken individually, each reference seems small. Together, they reconstruct a community.
They show Ferguson as a place where railroad technology met mountain geography, where truck farming existed alongside timber and coal country, where a general store and post office connected scattered households, where a graded school served local children, and where residents depended upon one another for services that larger towns could take for granted.
The history of Appalachia is filled with places like Ferguson. They rarely dominate state histories, and many never produced famous politicians, massive industries, or nationally remembered disasters. Their significance comes instead from the thousands of people who built lives in them.
Ferguson deserves to be remembered for precisely that reason. Its story preserves the history of the small rural communities that connected the farms, branches, ridges, railroads, and roads of southern Wayne County and helped make the Appalachian landscape a lived community rather than merely a place on a map.
Sources & Further Reading
R. L. Polk & Co. West Virginia State Gazetteer and Business Directory, 1904–1905. Entry for Ferguson, Wayne County, West Virginia. https://ldsgenealogy.com/WV/books/West-Virginia-state-gazetteer-and-business-directory-pt-1-part-35.htm
Gannett, Henry. A Gazetteer of West Virginia. Bulletin 233. Washington, DC: United States Geological Survey, 1904. https://pubs.usgs.gov/bul/0233/report.pdf
Wayne County News. “News Briefs.” May 21, 1925. West Virginia Archives and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/History/wcn/wcn250521.html. This is one of the strongest direct sources for Ferguson because it identifies Joseph Merchant of Ferguson, his farming, the Tug River Highway, and his trips to Wayne. West Virginia Culture Archive
Wayne County News. “What Do You Know About Twelve Pole?” August 27, 1925. West Virginia Archives and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/History/wcn/wcn250827.html
Wayne County News. “Teachers Are Employed for Lincoln District.” May 20, 1926. West Virginia Archives and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/History/wcn/wcn260520.html. The school list specifically identifies “Ferguson Graded” and H. W. Vanhoose. West Virginia Culture Archive
Wayne County News. “28 Practicing Wayne Midwives to Renew License This Month.” October 27, 1927. West Virginia Archives and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/History/wcn/wcn271208.html. The list identifies Mrs. Sallie Smith of Ferguson. West Virginia Culture Archive
Wayne County News. “Squibs from Early History of Districts in This County: Lincoln District.” December 18, 1919. West Virginia Archives and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/History/wcn/wcn191218.html
West Virginia Archives and History. “Districts and Place Names in West Virginia.” Based on the New Descriptive Atlas of West Virginia, 1933. https://archive.wvculture.org/hiStory/communities/districtplacenames.html
Krebs, Charles E., and D. D. Teets Jr. County Reports and Maps: Cabell, Wayne and Lincoln Counties. Wheeling, WV: West Virginia Geological Survey, 1913. https://books.google.com/books?id=9MgbAAAAMAAJ. This 483-page government report includes Wayne County geology, natural resources, timber, roads, soils, and well records. Google Books
West Virginia Geological Survey. County Reports and Maps: Cabell, Wayne and Lincoln Counties. Maps. 1913. https://books.google.com/books?id=bCcs5fJRZ9sC
West Virginia and Regional History Center. West Virginia Postmasters Appointment Records, 1857–1971. A&M 3026. West Virginia University Libraries, Morgantown. https://archives.lib.wvu.edu/repositories/2/resources/1217. The collection records post-office establishment and discontinuance dates, postmasters, name changes, and changes in office location, making it especially valuable for further Ferguson research. West Virginia University Archives
State Road Commission of West Virginia. Wayne County Highway Map. 1937. A&M 4479, West Virginia and Regional History Center, West Virginia University Libraries. https://archives.lib.wvu.edu/repositories/2/resources/6604
Hardesty, H. H. Hardesty’s Historical and Geographical Encyclopedia Illustrated: Maps and Histories of Wayne, Lincoln and Cabell Counties, West Virginia. Chicago and Toledo: H. H. Hardesty & Co., 1884. https://books.google.com/books/about/Hardesty_s_Historical_and_Geographical_E.html?id=s7kM0gEACAAJ. Google Books
Library of Congress. Ceredo Advance. Ceredo, WV, 1885–1939. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. https://www.loc.gov/item/sn86092392/. The Library of Congress collection provides more than a thousand digitized issues useful for searching Ferguson, nearby communities, transportation, and Wayne County residents. The Library of Congress
West Virginia State Archives. “Wayne County Court Records.” County Records on Microfilm. West Virginia Archives and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/archives/bluenote.html
West Virginia Archives and History. “Vital Research Records.” West Virginia Division of Culture and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/vrr/
Wayne County Genealogical and Historical Society. “Wayne County Cemeteries.” https://wcghswv.org/
“Robinson Cemetery, Ferguson, Wayne County, West Virginia.” Interment.net. Tombstone transcription conducted in 2003. https://www.interment.net/data/us/wv/wayne/robinson/index.htm
West Virginia Court of Claims. Maynard v. Department of Highways. 1977. In West Virginia Court of Claims Reports, vol. 12. https://www.wvlegislature.gov/joint/court/reports/archive/COC_Volume12.pdf
West Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals. Mahone v. State Road Commission, 99 W. Va. 397, 129 S.E. 320 (1925). https://www.casemine.com/judgement/us/5914a7c6add7b049346f1b65
Massey, Tim R. “Wayne County.” e-WV: The West Virginia Encyclopedia. https://wvencyclopedia.org/entries/897
Massie, Evelyn Booth. Ferguson Family Genealogical History of Wayne County, West Virginia (Early Cabell and Kanawha Virginia): Mainly Samuel and Mary (Jameson) Ferguson (1744–1825) and Descendants. 1985. WorldCat. https://search.worldcat.org/title/12909359
West Virginia and Regional History Center. Frederick B. Lambert Papers. A&M 1244. West Virginia University Libraries, Morgantown. https://archives.lib.wvu.edu/
West Virginia and Regional History Center. J. B. F. Yoak Jr. Papers. A&M 1759. West Virginia University Libraries, Morgantown. https://archives.lib.wvu.edu/
West Virginia and Regional History Center. Paul Salstrom Oral Histories. A&M 3551. West Virginia University Libraries, Morgantown. https://archives.lib.wvu.edu/
Author Note: Ferguson is the kind of Appalachian community whose history survives in scattered newspapers, maps, school records, cemeteries, and government documents rather than in a single written history. I hope this article helps preserve what can currently be documented while leaving room for additional records and local knowledge to expand the story.