Appalachian Community Histories – Winslow, Wayne County: Sawmills, Stores, Schools, and the Lost Name of Poppa
Today Winslow is easy to pass without realizing how much history once gathered along this portion of Beech Fork in Wayne County, West Virginia. There is no incorporated town center and no great industrial ruin announcing what the community once was. Much of its story survives instead in an old photograph, government survey notes, business directories, school reports, county road projects, cemeteries, and the memories attached to a name that was not always Winslow.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, this community was still remembered as Poppa.
A photograph taken in October 1900 shows a working sawmill at Poppa, with men, oxen, wagons, piles of lumber, and mill owner H. W. Walker gathered together while timber was being cut for railroad construction. Only a few years later, a West Virginia business directory announced that Poppa had become Winslow and described the new community as a village of about 400 people with stores, mills, a stave factory, a blacksmith, daily mail, and stage service to Huntington. Federal surveyors preserved the transition even more clearly when they recorded a benchmark at a place they called “Poppa (Winslow).”
Those fragments allow the history of Winslow to be reconstructed more clearly than might be expected for a small rural Appalachian community.
Before There Was a Place Called Winslow
The history of Winslow begins long before either Winslow or Poppa appeared on a map.
The valleys surrounding Beech Fork and Twelvepole Creek were among the areas settled during the early development of what later became Wayne County. A history of Union District published in the Wayne County News in 1919 looked back toward the first years of settlement and named Hezekiah Adkins among the pioneers who followed Jesse Spurlock, Samuel Ferguson, and David France into the district during the first decade of the nineteenth century. Because that newspaper account was written more than a century after the earliest settlement, its exact chronology should be treated with some caution, but the connection between the Adkins family and the Beech Fork country is well established.
Hezekiah Adkins left an especially strong mark on the area that later became Winslow. A historical marker near the intersection of Beech Fork Road and Grassy Lick Road commemorates him as a Revolutionary War veteran and records that he settled near Bowens Creek around 1810. His wife, Mary Levon Adkins, is buried nearby. The Wayne County Genealogical and Historical Society places his migration into the region during the early nineteenth century and connects him with religious activity in both the Mud River and Beech Fork areas.
When Adkins arrived, Wayne County did not yet exist. The territory became part of Wayne County when the Virginia General Assembly created the county from Cabell County in 1842. West Virginia itself would not become a state until 1863.
Families spreading into Beech Fork and its branches built farms, cleared bottom land, raised livestock, established churches and cemeteries, and gradually created the network of rural neighborhoods that would later appear in postal records and business directories. There was no single moment when Winslow was founded. Like many Appalachian communities, it grew from a landscape that had already been occupied for generations before anyone attached a recognizable town name to it.
When Winslow Was Poppa
One of the most important surviving pieces of Winslow history is not a government document or newspaper article.
It is a photograph.
Marshall University Archives and Special Collections preserves a remarkable image labeled “Sawmill operation at Poppa, Wayne County, W.Va., Oct. 1900.” Written information preserved with the photograph identifies H. W. Walker as the mill’s owner and manager and records the names and occupations of many of the men standing around the operation.
The picture is unusually valuable because the notes tell us what the men were doing there.
Walker’s mill stood on the waters of Beech Fork Creek and was sawing timber during 1900 and 1901 for railroad work connected with the Guyan Valley Railroad along the Guyandotte River. The lumber included enormous pieces measuring nine by sixteen inches and twelve by twelve inches, some twenty-eight feet long. According to the information preserved with the photograph, the timbers were used in railroad trestles around Tylers Creek and Lovell Creek below Salt Rock.
The photograph also preserves the names of workers who otherwise might have disappeared from the written history of the community. Ramon Dial appears with an ox wagon. W. G. Hensley is identified as a teamster. David Wroten worked with slabs. Zona Riggs, Alpha Childers, and George Ferguson handled logs. Leslie W. Self measured lumber, while John Crossen of Kenova was among the sawyers. Tobe Riggs and Roll Chadwick were also identified with the operation, and four yoke of oxen appear as part of the working scene.
It is difficult to find a better snapshot of rural industrial life in Wayne County at the turn of the century.
Poppa was not a coal camp or a large railroad town. Its economy was tied to the forest, the creek valleys, farms, mills, and the growing transportation system around Huntington and the Guyandotte Valley. Timber cut along Beech Fork could become part of a trestle miles away, connecting a small rural settlement to the larger industrial transformation taking place throughout southern West Virginia.
The picture also settles one important question.
In October 1900, the place was still being called Poppa.
From Poppa to Winslow
Sometime around the beginning of the twentieth century, Poppa became Winslow.
The exact reason for the name Winslow remains uncertain.
That is an important distinction because surviving records make the change itself remarkably clear without telling us why it happened. The 1904 to 1905 West Virginia State Gazetteer and Business Directory includes a short entry under Poppa stating simply that the Wayne County name had been changed to Winslow. The directory then gives Winslow its own full entry and explicitly describes the village as “formerly known as Poppa.”
Federal survey records provide another strong connection.
In Spirit Leveling in West Virginia, 1896 to 1908, United States Geological Survey surveyors described a benchmark as being at “Poppa (Winslow),” west of the road and almost opposite the post office. The aluminum tablet was set into a large boulder and had a recorded elevation of 609.584 feet. The same report used a survey route heading labeled “Poppa, South to Near Bartram.”
Here, in a federal government record, both identities survive together.
That makes Winslow unusual among small communities whose earlier names can sometimes be supported only by oral tradition. Poppa appears in the 1900 sawmill photograph. A federal survey joins Poppa and Winslow together. Then the state business directory states outright that Poppa had been renamed Winslow.
What has not yet been established with the same certainty is whom the new name honored or why local residents or postal officials selected it. Until a postal appointment record, post office site report, family document, or contemporary newspaper explains the change, attaching Winslow to a particular person would be speculation.
The surviving evidence tells us when the old identity was disappearing much more clearly than it tells us why the new one was chosen.
A Village of Four Hundred
By the time the 1904 to 1905 state gazetteer appeared, Winslow was described as a village with an estimated population of 400.
That figure suggests a community considerably busier than the modern place name might imply.
The directory placed Winslow thirteen miles northeast of Wayne and fifteen miles from Huntington, which served as its banking and shipping point. Mail arrived daily. A stage connected Winslow with Huntington for a fare of fifty cents. J. A. Morrison served as postmaster.
The list of businesses reveals what daily life in the community required.
J. Adkins operated a general store. Adkins & Johnson and Childers & Adkins were also listed as general merchants. Adkins & Stevens operated a grist mill. D. G. Courtney had a stave factory. J. R. Robinson operated a flour mill, while Daniel Smith worked as a blacksmith. J. A. Morrison & Company ran another general store.
Those establishments tell us almost as much as a narrative history could.
Farm families needed grain ground into flour and meal. Horses, wagons, tools, and farm equipment created work for a blacksmith. General stores brought manufactured goods into the valley and provided a place where neighbors exchanged information along with money. A stave factory connected the surrounding timberlands to markets requiring wooden barrels and similar products. The post office linked families to relatives, newspapers, catalogs, banks, government agencies, and businesses beyond Wayne County.
Winslow was rural, but it was not isolated from the larger economy.
The fifty-cent stage to Huntington is especially revealing. Huntington was only fifteen miles away according to the directory, yet the presence of regular stage transportation shows how significant that distance could be before automobiles and improved highways reshaped travel. A trip that modern residents might measure in minutes represented a meaningful journey from the Beech Fork countryside into one of West Virginia’s growing industrial cities.
The Morrison Family and the Winslow Post Office
The Morrison name appears repeatedly in Winslow’s surviving history.
James A. Morrison was the postmaster listed in the 1904 to 1905 gazetteer and operated a general store under the name J. A. Morrison & Company. More than four decades later, a West Virginia Court of Claims case provides an unusually detailed description of James and Oneida Morrison and the land on which they lived.
When the court considered Morrison v. State Road Commission in 1948, it stated that James A. Morrison and his wife had lived at Winslow for more than fifty years. Their home stood on approximately one acre on the east side of Grassy Lick Branch and the west side of State Route 13. They also owned bottom land bordering Grassy Lick, which the court described as a tributary of Beech Fork Creek.
The case arose because repeated high water had flooded the Morrison property. Their complaint described damage to the house foundation and problems with their well, cellar house, landscaping, and surrounding land. Engineers and judges examined the relationship between the property, the highway bridge over Grassy Lick, the branch itself, and nearby Beech Fork.
For local history, those legal details are invaluable.
The case places an early Winslow merchant and postmaster within a specific landscape of road, branch, bottom land, hillside, bridge, and creek. It also demonstrates remarkable continuity. The Morrisons had been living there since the nineteenth century, remained connected with Winslow when the community entered the twentieth century under a new name, and were still there when the court inspected their property after World War II.
Seventy Children at the Winslow School
Businesses and post offices provide one picture of a community.
Schools provide another.
On November 6, 1919, the Wayne County News published a countywide report on local schools written by J. Floyd Harrison, principal of Wayne Junior High School. His short report from Winslow contains some of the best evidence for community life there after the Poppa name had disappeared from ordinary use.
R. M. Hale headed the Winslow school, where enrollment had reached seventy pupils. More strikingly, Harrison reported that there had been no school at Winslow during the previous year. Hale therefore faced the challenge of making up lost work. Local residents had already organized through a Parent Teachers Association, and Harrison expressed hope that Winslow would have a graded school the following year.
Seventy children represented a substantial school population for a rural Appalachian community.
The report also shows residents attempting to improve local education rather than simply accepting the interruption of the previous year. The Parent Teachers Association connected homes to the school and placed Winslow within a countywide movement toward stronger graded schools, better attendance, and greater community participation in education.
By 1919, Winslow was therefore more than a postal name on Beech Fork.
It had families numerous enough to fill a school with seventy children and residents organized around improving it.
The Bowen-Winslow Road
Transportation gradually changed the way communities such as Winslow related to one another.
In September 1926, the Wayne County News reported that the Wayne County Court had accepted Allen Adkins’s road construction contract on the Bowen-Winslow road. The notice was brief, but its wording is significant. Both Bowen and Winslow were established enough as community names to define a public road project.
Road building was becoming one of the most important forces transforming rural Wayne County.
Older movement had followed creeks, paths, wagon roads, and whatever routes the terrain permitted. Better county and state roads gradually shortened the practical distance between scattered communities, Huntington, Wayne, schools, doctors, markets, and railroad stations.
For Winslow, the greatest Depression era improvement came less than a decade later.
The WPA Comes Through Winslow
On November 7, 1935, the Wayne County News announced that construction had begun on a Works Progress Administration project along the Beech Fork road.
The first section stretched from Lavalette through Bowen and Winslow to the mouth of Bowen’s Creek, covering approximately ten miles. Crews were to widen and drain the road, lay a stone base, surface it with creek gravel, and construct steel beam bridges on stone abutments. The State Road Commission supervised the work, while labor came through the WPA.
The project was part of a much larger plan.
Officials intended eventually to continue the road toward East Lynn through Nestlow and Girard, creating a route of approximately thirty-five miles from Lavalette to East Lynn at an estimated cost of $197,328. The newspaper described these WPA improvements as “farm-to-market roads.”
That phrase explains their importance better than almost anything else.
Winslow remained a farming and rural residential community. Improving the road meant more than giving residents a smoother ride. It meant easier movement of farm products, supplies, mail, schoolchildren, workers, doctors, merchants, and families. It connected a string of Beech Fork communities to one another and made Huntington and other commercial centers increasingly accessible.
The road also brought federal New Deal labor directly into the local landscape.
Men using trucks, tractors, shovels, and other equipment reshaped routes that earlier generations had traveled by wagon, horseback, or stage. The transportation system that had once required a fifty-cent stage fare from Winslow to Huntington was giving way to the automobile age.
An Old Community Hidden Inside a Modern Place Name
Winslow never became a large town.
That may be one reason its earlier history has been so easy to overlook.
There was no courthouse, major railroad station, sprawling mine complex, or downtown business block to anchor the community in public memory. Its history belonged instead to the pattern found across much of rural Appalachia. Families settled along streams and branches. Mills followed water and grain. Timber created work. Stores gathered at useful crossroads. A post office gave the settlement an official identity. Schools and churches connected widely scattered households. Roads improved, automobiles reduced distances, businesses disappeared or moved elsewhere, and a place that once supported several stores and mills gradually became quieter.
Yet Winslow left an unusually revealing paper trail.
We can see men and ox teams at the Poppa sawmill in 1900, preparing giant timbers for railroad trestles. We can watch the old name give way as government surveyors wrote “Poppa (Winslow)” into their notes. We can open a 1904 to 1905 directory and find a village of 400 with daily mail, several general stores, two mills, a stave factory, a blacksmith, and a stage to Huntington. We can find seventy children attending school in 1919. We can follow county officials building the Bowen-Winslow road in 1926 and WPA workers improving the Beech Fork route during the Depression. We can even stand, through the language of a 1948 court decision, beside James and Oneida Morrison’s home where Grassy Lick crossed the old Winslow landscape.
And farther back, before Poppa or Winslow existed, the grave and marker of Hezekiah Adkins connect this same Beech Fork country with the first decades of nineteenth-century settlement.
Why Winslow Matters
Small Appalachian communities are sometimes described as though they had no history because they never grew into towns.
Winslow demonstrates the opposite.
Its history is the history of settlement, timber, transportation, local trade, education, roads, and families adapting to a changing region. There was enough industry at Poppa in 1900 to send great timbers toward railroad construction. There were enough people by the early twentieth century for a directory to estimate a population of 400. There were enough children in 1919 to place seventy pupils in the local school. There was enough traffic through the valley for county and federal authorities to spend decades improving its roads.
Most importantly, the surviving records preserve a transformation that could easily have vanished.
Poppa became Winslow.
The sawmill photograph remembers one name. The federal survey remembers both. The business directory announces the change. Later newspapers, roads, schools, legal records, cemeteries, and maps carry Winslow forward.
The reason the new name was chosen may still be waiting in an unexamined postal file, deed, family letter, or newspaper column. Until that evidence appears, the mystery should remain a mystery.
What is not mysterious is that there was once a busy rural community here.
Along Beech Fork, behind the modern name Winslow, the older community of Poppa is still visible in the records, its mill workers standing beside their oxen, its merchants waiting behind store counters, its children gathering for school, and its families traveling a road that tied their small corner of Wayne County to the wider Appalachian world.
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. https://pubs.usgs.gov/publication/b399
Harrison, J. Floyd. “Breezy School News from All Over County.” Wayne County News, November 6, 1919. Transcribed by the Wayne County Genealogical and Historical Society. https://waynewv.com/wcghs/oldsite/Old%20Newspapers/Newspapers%201919.htm
Kenny, Hamill. West Virginia Place Names: Their Origin and Meaning, Including the Nomenclature of the Streams and Mountains. Piedmont, WV: Place Name Press, 1945. https://openlibrary.org/books/OL6496287M/West_Virginia_place_names
Krebs, Charles E. Cabell, Wayne, and Lincoln Counties. County Geologic Report 4. Morgantown: West Virginia Geological Survey, 1913. https://ngmdb.usgs.gov/Prodesc/proddesc_10497.htm
Marshall University Archives and Special Collections. Cabell-Wayne Historical Society Collection, 1880–1973. Accession 1975/06.0099. Huntington, WV: Marshall University. https://mds.marshall.edu/cabell_wayne_hist_soc_collection/
Marshall University Archives and Special Collections. “Sawmill Operation at Poppa, Wayne County, W.Va., Oct. 1900.” In Leslie W. Self Papers, 1900–1908. Huntington, WV: Marshall University. https://mds.marshall.edu/leslie_self_self_papers/2/
National Archives and Records Administration. “Census Records and Online Resources.” Washington, DC: National Archives and Records Administration. https://www.archives.gov/research/census/online-resources
National Archives and Records Administration. “Post Office Records.” Washington, DC: National Archives and Records Administration. https://www.archives.gov/research/post-offices
R. L. Polk & Co. West Virginia State Gazetteer and Business Directory, 1904–1905. Wheeling, WV: R. L. Polk & Co., 1904. https://ldsgenealogy.com/WV/books/West-Virginia-state-gazetteer-and-business-directory-pt-2-part-41.htm
United States Post Office Department. Post Office Department Reports of Site Locations, 1837–1950. Record Group 28. National Archives Microfilm Publication M1126. Washington, DC: National Archives and Records Administration. https://www.archives.gov/research/post-offices/locations-1837-1950.html
United States Post Office Department. Records of Appointment of Postmasters, 1832–September 30, 1971. Record Group 28. National Archives Microfilm Publication M841. Washington, DC: National Archives and Records Administration. https://www.archives.gov/research/post-offices
United States Geological Survey. “topoView: Historical Topographic Map Collection.” National Geologic Map Database. https://ngmdb.usgs.gov/topoview/viewer/
Wayne County Genealogical and Historical Society. “Hezekiah Adkins Marker.” Wayne County, West Virginia. https://waynewv.com/wcghs/hezekiah_adkins_marker.php?thisPage=ha_marker
Wayne County News. “Beech Fork Road Project Started Tuesday by WPA.” November 7, 1935. Transcribed by the Wayne County Genealogical and Historical Society. https://waynewv.com/wcghs/oldsite/Old%20Newspapers/Newspapers%201935.htm
Wayne County News. “County Court News.” September 16, 1926. West Virginia Archives and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/History/wcn/wcn260916.html
Wayne County News. “Pioneer District History.” December 25, 1919. West Virginia Archives and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/History/wcn/wcn191225.html
West Virginia and Regional History Center. West Virginia Postmasters Appointment Records. A&M 3026. Morgantown: West Virginia University Libraries. https://archives.lib.wvu.edu/repositories/2/resources/1217
West Virginia Archives and History. “Hezekiah Adkins.” Historical marker, Winslow, Wayne County, West Virginia. Historical Marker Database. https://www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=178252
West Virginia Archives and History. “Place Names in West Virginia.” Charleston: West Virginia Department of Arts, Culture and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/archives/placenames/placnamw.html
West Virginia Archives and History. “Vital Research Records.” Charleston: West Virginia Department of Arts, Culture and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/vrr/va_select.aspx/
West Virginia Court of Claims. “James A. Morrison and Oneida Morrison v. State Road Commission.” Opinion filed May 4, 1948. In Reports of the Court of Claims of the State of West Virginia, vol. 4. Charleston, WV: State of West Virginia, 1948. https://www.wvlegislature.gov/joint/court/ReportsbyVolumes/VOLUME%2004%201946_1948.htm
West Virginia State Archives. “Wayne County Court Records.” Charleston: West Virginia Department of Arts, Culture and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/archives/bluenote.html
West Virginia University Libraries, West Virginia and Regional History Center. “West Virginia State Gazetteer and Business Directory, 1904–1905.” Archival catalog record. Morgantown, WV. https://archives.lib.wvu.edu/repositories/2/archival_objects/127444
West Virginia University Libraries, West Virginia and Regional History Center. “Maps, Atlases, and Gazetteers.” Morgantown, WV. https://wvrhc.lib.wvu.edu/collections/maps-atlases-and-gazetteers
Author Note: Winslow’s story shows how much history can survive in a place that today seems quiet, from the old Poppa sawmill to schools, stores, roads, and generations of local families. I hope this article helps preserve the memory of the people who built their lives along Beech Fork and carried the community from Poppa into Winslow.