Appalachian Community Histories – Sidney, Wayne County: The Railroad, Post Office, and Life Along Twelvepole Creek
Sidney, West Virginia, is one of those Appalachian communities whose history is easier to miss than to find. It never became an incorporated town or a major industrial center, and today a traveler could pass through this section of Wayne County without realizing how closely the place was once tied to the railroad, postal system, local stores, and the network of small settlements scattered along Twelvepole Creek.
The surviving documentary record, however, gives Sidney a history far richer than its size might suggest. Federal officials recognized it as a post village. A statewide business directory placed it directly on the Norfolk & Western Railway. Newspapers recorded merchants, families, illnesses, funerals, and residents traveling between Sidney and larger towns. State records show local men participating in county politics and later serving in wartime. A government historic-property study even preserves the report that an old railroad depot from Sidney survived after being moved to nearby Genoa and converted into a residence.
Sidney’s history is therefore not the story of an isolated mountain settlement. It is the story of a community that emerged during one of the most important transportation changes in Wayne County history, survived the disappearance of the railroad that helped define it, and remained on the map long after its independent post office disappeared.
Before Sidney Became a Railroad Community
Wayne County was created from Cabell County in 1842, but settlement along its creeks and valleys was already well established by that time. In the mountainous interior of the county, families depended heavily upon the narrow bottomlands beside waterways such as Twelvepole Creek. Farms, mills, stores, wagon roads, and small clusters of homes developed wherever the terrain allowed.
A West Virginia Division of Highways historical investigation of the Twelvepole corridor describes early Wayne County settlers primarily as farmers. As population increased, gristmills, blacksmith shops, general stores, and other small businesses appeared. Timber and coal later became increasingly important, but before the railroad arrived, moving heavy products through the mountains remained difficult.
That changed dramatically at the end of the nineteenth century.
The Norfolk & Western Railroad had already become one of the great transportation systems associated with the development of southern West Virginia’s coalfields. After surveys made during the 1880s, the company chose a route for its Ohio Extension that followed the Tug Fork before turning through the Twelvepole Creek country on its way toward the Ohio River.
Construction began in December 1890. By December 1891, trains were running regularly between Kenova and Dunlow, and the larger route was reportedly opened to traffic in 1892, although construction continued into the following year. The engineering challenge was considerable. The Twelvepole portion alone required repeated creek crossings because the railroad had to follow a winding Appalachian valley rather than a straight path across open country.
The railroad did more than pass through Wayne County. It changed the geography of community life.
Places such as Genoa, Coleman, Echo, Radnor, Dunlow, Quaker, and Sidney gained new importance because the railroad connected them with Wayne, Kenova, Huntington, and the wider national economy.
Sidney Becomes a Post Village
The precise moment when Sidney began to be used regularly as the community’s name deserves additional research in Wayne County land and postal records. Historical postal research based on federal postmaster records places the establishment of the Sidney post office in 1894 and its discontinuance in 1953. Those dates fit the larger documentary record, although the original federal appointment registers should be consulted before treating every administrative date as final.
By 1904, there is no doubt that Sidney existed as a recognized postal community.
Henry Gannett’s A Gazetteer of West Virginia, published as United States Geological Survey Bulletin 233, identified Sidney as a post village in Wayne County. The importance of that brief federal entry should not be overlooked. A place did not need incorporation, a courthouse, or hundreds of residents to possess a recognizable community identity. A post office could serve as the institution around which a rural locality became known beyond its immediate families and hollows.
The 1904-1905 West Virginia State Gazetteer and Business Directory gives an even clearer picture. Its Sidney entry placed the community on the Norfolk & Western Railway, eight miles south of Wayne, and stated that mail arrived daily.
Those few lines tell much of Sidney’s early twentieth-century story.
The post office connected residents with newspapers, government correspondence, catalogs, relatives, businesses, and markets far beyond Wayne County. The railroad provided the physical transportation network that made such communication faster and more dependable. Together, rail and mail tied a small Twelvepole community to the larger world.
Sidney, Coleman, and a Complicated Geography
One of the most interesting problems in Sidney’s history is its relationship with nearby Coleman.
Later references sometimes blur the two names, and historical maps do not make the question entirely simple. A 1911 map of Wayne County places the names so closely together that the label can be read as associating Coleman with Sidney Post Office. Other government research concerning the Twelvepole railroad corridor, however, lists Genoa, Sidney, Coleman, Echo, and Wayne as separate localities possessing railroad stations and/or post offices during the railroad era.
The safest interpretation is that Sidney and Coleman were closely connected rural localities whose names could overlap depending on whether a source was describing a postal district, railroad stop, neighborhood, or broader settlement.
That kind of ambiguity was common in Appalachia. Community boundaries were rarely surveyed like municipal limits. A family could receive mail under one name, live near a railroad stop carrying another, attend church in a neighboring settlement, and still describe its home according to a creek, branch, or family locality.
For Sidney, it is better to preserve that uncertainty than to force every historical reference into a single modern boundary.
The Thompson Family and Sidney’s Commercial Life
Newspapers begin to give the community something that maps and directories cannot: people.
Among the most prominent names connected with Sidney is Thompson.
In 1921, the official West Virginia Blue Book listed F. W. Thompson of Sidney as a member of the Democratic County Executive Committee representing Butler District. The entry helps establish Sidney’s governmental geography while also showing that one of its residents participated actively in Wayne County political affairs.
Five years later, another Thompson appeared in one of the most striking surviving Sidney newspaper stories.
The Wayne County News reported in May 1926 that seventy-nine-year-old Edmund Thompson of Sidney had undergone surgery in Huntington after losing his sight to cataracts. The operation restored enough vision for Thompson to recognize his son, Bascom. What makes the story especially valuable for Sidney history is the newspaper’s description of Edmund as a widely known merchant of the community.
That description confirms something important that the short statewide gazetteer entry leaves out.
Sidney had commercial life.
A merchant in a rural community such as Sidney could occupy a central position in everyday affairs. Stores were places where residents purchased manufactured goods, exchanged news, obtained supplies, discussed politics, and sometimes collected or sent mail. The railroad made it possible for such businesses to receive products that previously would have required difficult wagon transportation through the mountains.
Other Thompson records repeatedly connect the family with Sidney, Coleman, and the surrounding Butler District. The overlapping references may eventually help historians determine more precisely where the Sidney post office, commercial center, and railroad facilities stood.
Life Along the Twelvepole Corridor
The newspaper record also reveals how interconnected these communities were.
In June 1927, the Wayne County News published local items from Coleman concerning visits between residents and Huntington, illnesses, church services at Twelve Pole Valley Church, and the everyday movement of families through the area. The column mentioned the Wilson, Workman, Jackson, Rutherford, and Mullens families, among others.
Although the column carried the Coleman heading, its value for understanding Sidney is considerable because the historical evidence shows how closely the two localities were connected. People did not organize their lives according to the boundaries modern researchers sometimes try to impose upon old place names.
They traveled along the same creek valley, used the same transportation routes, married into neighboring families, attended nearby churches, and went to Wayne or Huntington for business and employment.
This was the world in which Sidney functioned.
The Railroad Begins to Lose Its Importance
The railroad that helped create this transportation landscape did not remain equally important forever.
Almost from the beginning, the old Twelvepole route presented difficulties. The winding creek valley required numerous curves and bridges. As Norfolk & Western coal traffic increased, the company wanted a route better suited to heavy freight.
The answer was the Big Sandy Low Grade Line.
Completed in 1904, the new route between Naugatuck and Kenova offered better conditions for heavy traffic. Passenger trains and major westbound freight increasingly used the Big Sandy alignment, while the old Twelvepole Line remained useful for local service, empty coal cars, and as an alternate route when problems affected the newer line.
For communities such as Sidney, the railroad did not disappear immediately. Trains continued passing through the valley for decades.
Yet the old route had lost the strategic importance it once held.
When a second track was completed along the Big Sandy route in 1925, the need for the Twelvepole Line declined even further. By the depths of the Great Depression, Norfolk & Western sought federal permission to abandon approximately fifty-four miles of the old route between Lenore and Wayne.
Opposition came from West Virginia, the state Public Service Commission, counties, districts, and residents who understood what losing the railroad could mean for communities that had grown around it. Nevertheless, federal approval was granted.
The last day of operation came on September 1, 1933.
During October and November, rails were removed from the old alignment.
For Sidney, more than forty years of railroad history had come to an end.
What Happened to Sidney’s Depot?
One particularly intriguing piece of Sidney history appears in the West Virginia Division of Highways investigation of the abandoned route.
The report states that after the railroad closed, many station buildings were sold to local residents for conversion into homes or stores. It then records a report that an old depot building standing in Genoa had originally been moved there from Sidney and converted into a residence.
That story deserves further investigation.
If documentation, photographs, railroad plans, deeds, or oral histories can confirm the building’s Sidney origin, the structure could represent an unusually tangible survivor from the community’s railroad period.
Even without that final confirmation, the account fits what happened throughout the Twelvepole Valley after 1933. Railroad buildings were reused. Bridges remained. Sections of right-of-way became roads.
The railroad disappeared without completely leaving the landscape.
From Railroad Tracks to Automobile Roads
The abandonment of the Twelvepole Line did not make its route useless.
Over time, portions of the former railroad right-of-way were adapted for automobile travel. State historic preservation research found that sections became parts of roads including old U.S. 52, later West Virginia Route 152, and several county routes. Railroad bridges and portions of the original alignment continued serving travelers long after locomotives stopped using them.
This transformation was especially important for small communities.
Sidney had first gained wider connections because a railroad penetrated the valley. After the railroad vanished, automobiles inherited much of the transportation corridor it had created.
The technology changed, but the route remained.
Electricity and a Changing Rural Community
Sidney and its neighboring communities continued modernizing after the railroad era.
In 1938, the Wayne County News reported plans by Appalachian Electric Power Company to extend electrical service to more families in the Echo, Genoa, Joel’s Branch, Coleman, and surrounding area. The list of residents and properties seeking service included stores, residences, a gas station, Coleman School, and Wilson Church. F. W. Thompson appears among the names with both a store and residence listed.
The story captures another transition in the history of the Twelvepole Valley.
The railroad had represented modernity in the 1890s. By the late 1930s, electricity, automobiles, improved roads, gasoline stations, and new forms of communication were changing rural life again.
Sidney survived both transformations.
Sidney and the Second World War
The community also appears in the documentary record of World War II.
Only days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the Wayne County News published the names of Wayne County men believed to be serving in areas attacked by Japanese forces. Among them was William R. Wilson, identified as the son of Wilbur Wilson of Sidney.
Another wartime connection remains visible in the modern landscape.
In 2016, the West Virginia Legislature considered a resolution concerning a bridge over the West Fork of Twelvepole Creek in Sidney. The bridge had been known as the Sidney Beam Span. Legislators requested that it be named the Trautwein Family Bridge in honor of Fred and Ora Trautwein’s five children, Harold, Roy, Charles, Robert, and Doris, all of whom served in the United States military during World War II.
The resolution is a reminder that Sidney did not simply disappear when the railroad and post office were gone.
The place remained a community.
The End of Sidney’s Independent Post Office
The post office outlasted the railroad by roughly two decades.
A postal-history dataset based upon federal records places Sidney’s post office closure in 1953. A 1955 United States Post Office Department directory provides additional evidence that Sidney’s independent postal era had ended by the middle of that decade, with mail associated with the discontinued office being handled through Genoa according to the source research assembled for this article. Pasted markdown
The sequence is revealing.
Sidney first emerged clearly in the documentary record during the railroad boom of the 1890s. The railroad disappeared in 1933. The post office survived longer, carrying the community name into the early 1950s.
Then that institution disappeared as well.
Still, Sidney remained.
Why Sidney Matters
Sidney was never one of West Virginia’s great coal towns. It never possessed the population of Huntington, the county institutions of Wayne, or the national fame of places such as Matewan.
That does not make its history less important.
In many ways, communities such as Sidney are more representative of Appalachian life than the famous industrial centers.
Most people in the mountains did not live in enormous company towns. They lived in smaller places where farms, stores, churches, schools, post offices, railroads, family networks, and country roads created a community from what might otherwise appear on a map as little more than scattered houses beside a creek.
Sidney’s surviving records allow that world to emerge again.
A federal gazetteer called it a post village. A statewide directory placed it eight miles south of Wayne on the Norfolk & Western Railway with daily mail. County records placed it in Butler District. Newspapers preserved the story of Edmund Thompson, the widely known Sidney merchant who regained his sight in 1926. Political records identified F. W. Thompson as a county committee member. Railroad history records the rise and abandonment of the Twelvepole Line. A government study preserves the possibility that Sidney’s depot survived by being moved and converted into a home. Later records document electricity, wartime service, highways, and a bridge still officially described as standing in Sidney.
The railroad left.
The post office closed.
The old transportation corridor became a road.
Yet the name Sidney endured beside Twelvepole Creek.
That is why its story deserves to be preserved. Sidney represents the thousands of small Appalachian communities that changed with the arrival of railroads, adapted when those railroads disappeared, and continued living long after the institutions that first placed their names on national maps had vanished.
Sources & Further Reading
Bakic, Tracy D. Fleming Deck Girder Bridge Repair: West Virginia Historic Property Form. West Virginia Division of Highways, December 5, 2013. Revised April 4, 2014. https://www.highwaysthroughhistory.com/Content/bridges/FlemingDeck/docs/hpi.pdf.
Dickinson, Kay Stamper, and Jack L. Dickinson. Last Train to Dunlow: History from the Hollows of Wayne County, West Virginia and the Coming of the N&W Railroad, 1870–1940. 2005. https://books.google.com/books/about/Last_Train_to_Dunlow.html?id=RlyrvgEACAAJ.
Gannett, Henry. A Gazetteer of West Virginia. U.S. Geological Survey Bulletin 233. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1904. https://pubs.usgs.gov/bul/0233/report.pdf.
Gannett, S. S., and D. H. Baldwin. Results of Spirit Leveling in West Virginia, 1896–1908. U.S. Geological Survey Bulletin 399. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1909. https://pubs.usgs.gov/bul/0399/report.pdf.
Interstate Commerce Commission. “Norfolk & Western Ry. Abandonment.” Interstate Commerce Commission Reports 193 (1933–34): 363–69. https://www.google.com/books/edition/Interstate_Commerce_Commission_Reports/.
Krebs, C. E., and D. D. Teets Jr. Cabell, Wayne and Lincoln Counties. West Virginia Geological Survey County Report 4. Morgantown: West Virginia Geological Survey, 1913. https://ngmdb.usgs.gov/Prodesc/proddesc_10497.htm.
Marshall University Special Collections. Cabell-Wayne Historical Society Collection, 1880–1973. Huntington, WV: Marshall University. https://mds.marshall.edu/cabell_wayne_hist_soc_collection/.
Marshall University Special Collections. Jim Taylor Photograph Collection, 1880s–1910s. Huntington, WV: Marshall University. https://mds.marshall.edu/james_photo_collection/.
National Archives and Records Administration. Record of Appointment of Postmasters, 1832–September 30, 1971. Microfilm Publication M841. Washington, DC: National Archives and Records Administration. https://www.archives.gov/research/post-offices/postmasters-1832-1971.html.
National Archives and Records Administration. Post Office Department Reports of Site Locations, 1837–1950. Microfilm Publication M1126. Washington, DC: National Archives and Records Administration. https://www.archives.gov/research/post-offices/locations-1837-1950.html.
Norfolk & Western Railroad Company. Eleventh Annual Report of the Board of Directors of the Norfolk & Western Railroad Company for the Year Ending December 31, 1891. Philadelphia: Norfolk & Western Railroad Company, 1892. https://archive.org/search?query=%22Norfolk+and+Western%22+%22annual+report%22+1891.
“Road Commission Negotiations for Rail Land Advance.” Huntington Advertiser, September 1, 1933, 5. https://www.highwaysthroughhistory.com/Content/bridges/FlemingDeck/docs/hpi.pdf.
R. L. Polk & Co. West Virginia State Gazetteer and Business Directory, 1904–1905. Detroit: R. L. Polk & Co., 1904. https://ldsgenealogy.com/WV/books/West-Virginia-state-gazetteer-and-business-directory-pt-2-part-23.htm.
Rand McNally and Company. Map of Wayne County, West Virginia. Chicago: Rand McNally and Company, 1911. https://www.mygenealogyhound.com/maps/West-Virginia-County-Maps/WV-Wayne-County-West-Virginia-1911-map-Rand-McNally-Kenova-Ceredo-Prichard.html.
“The Last of the ‘Twelve Pole’ Line.” Norfolk and Western Magazine 11, no. 11 (November 1933): 408–10. https://www.highwaysthroughhistory.com/Content/bridges/FlemingDeck/docs/hpi.pdf.
“To Abandon Line to Mingo County.” Charleston Daily Mail, August 11, 1933, 15. https://www.highwaysthroughhistory.com/Content/bridges/FlemingDeck/docs/hpi.pdf.
U.S. Geological Survey. Wayne, West Virginia Quadrangle. Washington, DC: U.S. Geological Survey, 1909. https://pastmaps.com/map/wayne-wayne-county-wv-usgs-topo-1909.
United States Post Office Department. Directory of Post Offices. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, May 1955. https://www.mmpe.net/blueridge/postoffice/DirectoryOfPostOffices-1955-May.pdf.
West Virginia Archives and History. “Edmund Thompson Is Now Able To See After Remarkable Operation.” Wayne County News, May 27, 1926. https://archive.wvculture.org/History/wcn/wcn260527.html.
West Virginia Archives and History. “Place Names in West Virginia.” West Virginia Department of Arts, Culture and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/archives/placenames/placnams.html.
West Virginia Archives and History. “Wayne County News Transcriptions.” West Virginia Department of Arts, Culture and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/History/wcn/wcntoc.html.
West Virginia Archives and History. “West Virginia County Records on Microfilm: Wayne County.” West Virginia Department of Arts, Culture and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/archives/bluenote.html.
West Virginia Legislature. West Virginia Blue Book, 1921. Charleston, WV: State of West Virginia, 1921. https://www.wvlegislature.gov/legisdocs/publications/bluebook/WVS_Bluebook_1921.pdf.
West Virginia Legislature. “Senate Concurrent Resolution 22: Trautwein Family Bridge.” 2016 Regular Session. Charleston, WV: West Virginia Legislature, 2016. https://www.wvlegislature.gov/bulletin_board/senate_journal.cfm?headtype=jour&houseorig=s&sdj=sdj2016-02-04-23.htm&ses_year=2016&sesstype=rs.
West Virginia Public Service Commission. Twenty-First Annual Report of the Public Service Commission of West Virginia, July 1, 1933 to June 30, 1934. Charleston, WV: Public Service Commission, 1934. https://www.highwaysthroughhistory.com/Content/bridges/FlemingDeck/docs/hpi.pdf.
West Virginia University Libraries, West Virginia and Regional History Center. Post Office Site Location Reports, 1837–1950. A&M 3058. Morgantown, WV. https://archives.lib.wvu.edu/repositories/2/resources/1240.
West Virginia University Libraries, West Virginia and Regional History Center. West Virginia Postmasters Appointment Records, 1857–1971. A&M 3026. Morgantown, WV. https://ip-150-68.dynamic.wvu.edu/repositories/2/resources/1217.
West Virginia University Libraries, West Virginia and Regional History Center. “West Virginia Newspapers on Microfilm.” Morgantown, WV. https://wvrhc.lib.wvu.edu/collections/newspapers/microfilm.
Author Note: Sidney’s history shows how a small Appalachian community could grow around a railroad and post office without ever becoming a large town. I wanted to preserve the story of the families, merchants, trains, and changing transportation routes that kept Sidney connected to the wider Twelvepole Valley.