Appalachian Community Histories – Booton, Wayne County: The Booton Family, the County Line, and Beech Fork Lake
In the wooded hills north of Wayne, West Virginia, Booton is the kind of place that can disappear on a modern map unless someone knows where to look. It never became a large town, never developed a downtown of brick storefronts, and never grew around a major railroad station or industrial complex. Its history instead follows the streams, farms, family names, country roads, cemeteries, and postal routes that defined much of rural Wayne County.
Yet Booton has an unusually strong documentary trail for a community of its size. The name appears in federal surveys, old gazetteers, county newspapers, topographic maps, and state records. More importantly, the Booton family was established in this part of western Virginia before Wayne County even existed. When Virginia lawmakers created the county in 1842, they deliberately described the new boundary in a way that placed the home and farm of Asa Booton inside it.
That single line in the law gives Booton a connection to the creation of Wayne County itself.
Before There Was a Wayne County
The country around Booton belonged to Cabell County, Virginia, during the early nineteenth century. Settlement followed the narrow bottoms beside Twelvepole Creek, Beech Fork, Millers Fork, and the smaller branches running between the ridges. Families cleared farms wherever the terrain allowed, while paths through the hollows connected scattered households to mills, churches, stores, and eventually the county seat.
A history published in the Wayne County News in December 1919 identified Reuben Booton among the people who established homes in what later became Union District around the time of the War of 1812. The article placed him alongside early families such as the Bowens, Adkinses, Crocketts, Spurlocks, Blankenships, and Lamberts. Because the account was written roughly a century after the settlement period, it should be read as an important piece of local historical memory rather than as a firsthand account from the 1810s. Still, it establishes that Wayne County residents of the early twentieth century regarded the Bootons as one of the area’s pioneer families.
Another county history published in 1919 included Booton among the surnames of early settlers who had entered the region during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. That article was primarily concerned with the development of Wayne County schools, but its description of the pioneer generation preserved the Booton name beside many of the families that continued to shape the county for generations.
The land itself helps explain why family names became geographic names. In an Appalachian landscape where roads often followed streams and property lines followed ridges, a family could give its name to a branch, hollow, cemetery, school, or settlement. Booton would eventually become all of these things in one form or another.
Asa Booton and the Creation of Wayne County
The most remarkable Booton document dates to January 18, 1842.
On that day the Virginia General Assembly passed Chapter 60 of the Acts of 1841-1842, creating Wayne County from the western part of Cabell County. The act began at the mouth of Fourpole Creek on the Ohio River and described the new county line through a series of streams, ridges, and landmarks.
One portion of the boundary was specifically drawn “so as to include the house and farm of Asa Booton within the new county.”
For a rural family farm to appear in the legal description establishing an entire county is significant. Asa Booton’s property was not merely somewhere inside the new jurisdiction. It was sufficiently recognizable that legislators and surveyors could use it when describing where Wayne County should begin and Cabell County should end.
The act continued south through the watersheds dividing Beech Fork and the Guyandotte River, reached the old Logan County boundary, followed the Tug Fork of the Big Sandy River, and eventually returned north by way of the Big Sandy and Ohio rivers. The new county was named in honor of Revolutionary War general Anthony Wayne, while its courts were ordered to meet near the lands of Abraham Trout on Twelvepole River, the place that developed into the present town of Wayne.
For the Booton family, the change meant that property which had previously appeared in Cabell County tax books, deeds, court minutes, and other records now fell within Wayne County. That jurisdictional change remains important for anyone researching the community today. The oldest Booton records may be filed under Cabell County even though the land later became unmistakably associated with Wayne.
A Family Name Becomes a Place
The connection between the Booton surname and the landscape continued after the county was organized.
By the late nineteenth century, state records were using both Booton and Booten. The West Virginia Archives’ place-name collection records “Booten (Booton ?)” in Wayne County in 1891 and separately records Booton in 1904. Later compilations based on the 1933 New Descriptive Atlas of West Virginia listed Booten as a place in Union District alongside Bowen, Dickson, Elmwood, Herbert, Lavalette, Shoals, Wayne, and Winslow.
The shifting spelling is not unusual in nineteenth-century rural records. Names passed between handwritten deeds, postal paperwork, census schedules, newspapers, maps, and oral usage. A clerk hearing “Booton” might write Booten, while another recorder might use the older family spelling. Researchers looking for the community therefore have to treat Booton and Booten as closely connected search terms rather than assuming one spelling replaced the other cleanly. The research material also contains occasional examples of Boten, making the problem still more complicated. Pasted markdown
The geography became clearer as federal surveyors entered Wayne County.
The U.S. Geological Survey’s 1904 Gazetteer of West Virginia identified Booton Branch as a small tributary entering Beech Fork of Twelvepole Creek. Another federal leveling survey recorded a benchmark on “Booten Branch,” 3.8 miles southwest of Bowen and one-half mile east of the junction with Millers Fork. These federal references show that some form of the Booton name was firmly attached to the local landscape by the opening years of the twentieth century.
Later place-name scholarship associated the community with nearby Booten Branch. There is reason for caution, however, when telling the story as simply as the town being named after the creek. The Booton surname was already established in the area many decades earlier, and Asa Booton’s farm appeared in the 1842 county boundary law. The family, stream, and eventual community name were clearly intertwined, but the surviving record does not justify reducing that relationship to a single simple naming event.
Booton Gets a Post Office
By the turn of the twentieth century, Booton had become more than a family name and stream designation. It was recognized as a postal community.
R. L. Polk & Company’s West Virginia State Gazetteer and Business Directory described Booton in the 1904-1905 edition as a recently established post office in Wayne County. The directory placed it eight miles north of Wayne, five miles from Dickson, and reported mail arriving three times each week.
For a community like Booton, a post office could serve as the closest thing to an official center. Rural post offices were often located inside general stores or private buildings rather than imposing government structures. Their importance went far beyond receiving letters. Postal designation gave a hollow or crossroads a recognized name that appeared in directories, correspondence, government files, newspapers, and commercial records.
The exact chronology of the Booton post office is less clear than the 1904 directory might suggest. Historical place-name records list Booten as early as 1891, while one postal-history compilation lists a Booten office in Wayne County beginning in the 1880s. The 1904 directory, however, calls Booton a recently established office. Those records may reflect a reopening, a spelling change, inconsistent source dates, or separate stages in the postal designation. Until the original Post Office Department appointment and site-location records are examined together, the safest conclusion is that postal service under the Booten or Booton name existed during this period but that its precise chronology requires further archival verification. The attached research likewise identifies federal postmaster and site-location records as the best way to settle the discrepancy.
Whatever the administrative details, the surviving gazetteer confirms that by the early twentieth century Booton had become a recognized Wayne County place with its own postal identity.
Millers Fork and the Civil War Memory of the Booton Farm
One of the most striking stories attached to the Booton property reaches back to the Civil War.
In October 1927, the Wayne County News reported the exhumation of Colonel Joseph J. Mansfield and his young daughter, whose bodies were being moved to the Ferguson cemetery at Elmwood. The article described Mansfield as a longtime militia colonel in Cabell and later Wayne County. According to the newspaper, Mansfield entered Confederate-aligned state militia service when Federal forces moved into western Virginia in 1861.
The paper reported that he was wounded by a picket at Neary in Putnam County in July 1861. While he was being carried back toward home, Mansfield died at the Asa Booton farm on Millers Fork.
The story was printed sixty-six years after Mansfield’s death, so it is not the same as a wartime military report. Even so, it is an unusually specific piece of local historical memory. It places the Asa Booton farm directly on Millers Fork and shows that the property remained familiar enough in county memory that readers in 1927 would understand the location.
Mansfield’s death also reminds us that the Civil War in western Virginia was not confined to large battles. Wayne County sat in a complicated border region where divided loyalties, militia activity, Federal movements, and local family networks shaped the conflict. A farmhouse or country road might suddenly become part of a soldier’s final journey even if no formal battle occurred nearby.
The Booton Name Beyond the Hollow
Members of the Booton family continued to appear in Wayne County public life long after the pioneer period.
A 1925 Wayne County News article looking back at the county’s newspapers named McFarland Booton among the men who had at various times been connected with the local press. The article traced Wayne journalism from the Ceredo Crescent before the Civil War through the Wayne Advocate and the newspaper tradition that developed into the Wayne County News.
Other newspaper notices scattered through the county record preserve Bootons through marriages, burials, churches, organizations, and family connections. A 1919 obituary, for example, reported that Mary Ann Sansom was buried in a family cemetery on the S. P. Booton farm. A 1922 obituary for Margaret “Aunt Puss” Bowen listed Vesta Booton of Wayne among her surviving children. Small notices like these are valuable because they demonstrate how the Booton name remained connected to land and kinship networks throughout Union District.
These references also help explain why reconstructing a small community requires more than finding a single founding date. Booton developed out of a network of households rather than through incorporation. Its history is recorded in fragments scattered across deeds, marriage records, obituaries, farm descriptions, postal records, maps, cemeteries, and newspaper columns.
Booton on the Federal Maps
By the middle of the twentieth century, Booton was securely established on federal maps.
The U.S. Geological Survey’s Lavalette quadrangle, surveyed in 1957 and published in 1959, labels Booton as a settlement in the southern portion of the map. The same quadrangle shows the deeply cut stream valleys that shaped settlement throughout this part of Wayne County, including Beech Fork and nearby branches. Roads and homes followed narrow bottomlands while wooded ridges rose sharply between communities.
The map is valuable because it captures Booton before construction of Beech Fork Lake permanently altered the surrounding landscape. Booton was not a dense village. Like many Appalachian communities, it was better understood as a collection of homes and local places spread through a watershed, held together by roads, kinship, churches, schools, postal identity, and shared geographic names.
Modern USGS mapping still preserves Booton, demonstrating the persistence of a place name whose documentary history can be traced back more than a century.
When Beech Fork Became a Lake
The greatest twentieth-century transformation of the landscape around Booton came through the construction of Beech Fork Lake.
Congress authorized the Beech Fork project under the Flood Control Act of 1962. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers eventually built an 86-foot-high earth-fill dam near Lavalette as part of a wider flood-control system for the Ohio River Basin. The dam was completed in 1977, and Beech Fork Lake opened for recreation in May 1978. At summer pool, the reservoir covers about 720 acres.
Long before the reservoir filled, planners knew water would reach deeply into the old Beech Fork and Millers Fork landscape.
A particularly revealing contemporary account appeared in the October 1972 issue of The Redstart, published by the Brooks Bird Club. Writers surveying the proposed reservoir area explained that the dam would stand roughly eight miles south of Huntington and three miles up Beech Fork from Lavalette. At the planned summer recreation level, they reported, the impoundment would extend water back to Booton on Miller’s Branch and beyond Bowen on Beech Fork.
That sentence marks a major dividing line in local history.
For generations, people around Booton had understood the landscape as a network of flowing branches, creek bottoms, farms, and roads. With construction of the reservoir, portions of that familiar geography became a lake. Roads and access patterns changed. Low ground disappeared beneath the impoundment. Places that had once been described according to their distance from a branch or farm now stood at the edge of a federal flood-control project.
Beech Fork Lake did not erase Booton. Instead, it created another chapter in the community’s relationship with water, adding a reservoir to a history that had always been organized around streams.
Booton Cemetery and the Memory of Families
One of the most tangible reminders of Booton’s past survives in its cemeteries.
Gravestones are especially important in communities where businesses disappear, schools close, post offices are discontinued, and older homes return to the woods. A cemetery can preserve a neighborhood’s names long after almost every other visible feature has changed.
Booton Cemetery contains stones connected with the families who lived in and around the community. Cemetery records available online are useful guides, but typed genealogical information should be checked against photographs of the stones, death certificates, county records, and other original sources whenever possible. The cemetery itself is historical evidence in a literal sense. Names, dates, kinship relationships, military service, and changing styles of memorialization remain carved into the landscape. The research gathered for this article likewise identifies the cemetery and its surviving stones as an important body of material evidence. Pasted markdown
For places like Booton, cemeteries also demonstrate continuity. The post office might vanish from postal directories, a stream might acquire another official name, and a road might be rebuilt, but the families buried on the ridge continue to mark the community as a real historical place.
Booton, Booten, and the Problem of a Changing Name
Perhaps the most interesting challenge in Booton’s history is that the documentary record refuses to use a single spelling.
Booton appears in the 1842 Virginia legislation through Asa Booton’s surname. Booten appears in nineteenth and twentieth-century geographic and postal records. Federal surveyors used Booten Branch in one publication and Booton Branch in another. The West Virginia place-name collection preserved both Booten and Booton. Later federal maps settled firmly on Booton for the community itself.
Rather than treating those inconsistencies as errors to be discarded, they are part of the story.
Small Appalachian communities often existed in speech before government agencies tried to standardize them. A name could refer at different times to a family, stream, post office, school district, voting precinct, cemetery, or loose collection of homes. Spelling depended on who was writing it down.
In Booton’s case, searching only the modern spelling risks losing part of the community’s history. Booton, Booten, and occasionally Boten have to be considered together.
A Small Community With an Unusually Deep Record
Booton never needed incorporation papers or a courthouse square to become part of Wayne County history.
The story begins with pioneer families entering the watersheds of what was then Cabell County. By the War of 1812 era, later local historians remembered Reuben Booton among the early settlers of Union District. In 1842, Asa Booton’s house and farm became so important as a geographic landmark that Virginia lawmakers specifically ensured the property would fall inside the new Wayne County.
Over the following century, the name migrated across the historical record. It appeared on branches, in newspapers, in postal directories, on farms, in cemeteries, and eventually on USGS maps. Federal surveyors measured elevations along Booten Branch. A 1904 directory recognized Booton as a postal community. County memory placed the death of militia colonel Joseph Mansfield at the Asa Booton farm during the opening months of the Civil War. By the 1950s, Booton appeared plainly on a federal topographic map.
Then Beech Fork Lake changed the landscape again. Water backed toward Booton, old geographic relationships shifted, and a federal reservoir became part of a place whose history had always been tied to branches and creek bottoms.
That is what makes Booton worth remembering. Its story is not one of rapid industrial growth or a dramatic rise and fall. It is the history of how an Appalachian place forms gradually from land, family, water, roads, and memory.
Few communities of its size can point to a sentence in the law that created their county. Booton can.
Sources & Further Reading
Virginia. General Assembly. Acts of the General Assembly of Virginia, Passed at the Session of 1841–42. Chapter 60, “An Act Establishing the County of Wayne of Part of the County of Cabell.” Passed January 18, 1842. West Virginia Archives and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/counties/wayne01.html
Wayne County News. “History of School System in Wayne County: Shows Immense Growth in Century.” October 23, 1919. West Virginia Archives and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/History/wcn/wcn191023.html
Wayne County News. “Pioneer District History.” December 25, 1919. West Virginia Archives and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/History/wcn/wcn191225.html
Wayne County News. “Squibs from Early History of Districts in This County” and “Aunt Mary Ann Sansom, 92 Years Old, Passes Away.” December 18, 1919. West Virginia Archives and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/History/wcn/wcn191218.html
Wayne County News. “Aged Woman Pictures the Hardships of Early Days.” February 16, 1922. West Virginia Archives and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/History/wcn/wcn220216.html
Wayne County News. “Beloved Woman Succumbs After Year’s Illness.” November 16, 1922. West Virginia Archives and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/History/wcn/wcn221116.html
Wayne County News. “Wayne County of Forty Years Ago: Pictured in Local Papers of the 1880’s.” January 15, 1925. West Virginia Archives and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/History/wcn/wcn250115.html
Wayne County News. “Bodies of Col. J. J. Mansfield and His Daughter Exhumed Here After 66 Years.” October 27, 1927. West Virginia Archives and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/History/wcn/wcn271208.html
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-1-part-14.htm
United States Geological Survey. Gazetteer of West Virginia. Bulletin 233. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1904. https://pubs.usgs.gov/bul/0233/report.pdf
United States Geological Survey. Spirit Leveling in West Virginia, 1896 to 1915. Bulletin 632. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1916. https://pubs.usgs.gov/bul/0632/report.pdf
United States Geological Survey. Lavalette Quadrangle, West Virginia. Surveyed 1957; published 1959. https://pastmaps.com/map/lavalette-wayne-county-wv-usgs-topo-1957-p1959
National Archives and Records Administration. Record of Appointment of Postmasters, 1832–September 30, 1971. Microfilm Publication M841. Records of the Post Office Department, Record Group 28. 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. Records of the Post Office Department, Record Group 28. Washington, DC: National Archives and Records Administration. https://www.archives.gov/research/post-offices/locations-1837-1950.html
National Archives and Records Administration. “Records of the Post Office Department, Record Group 28.” Guide to Federal Records. https://www.archives.gov/research/guide-fed-records/groups/028.html
National Archives and Records Administration. “Post Office Records.” https://www.archives.gov/research/post-offices
West Virginia Archives and History. “Place Names in West Virginia.” Entries for Booten and Booton, Wayne County. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/archives/placenames/placnamb.html
West Virginia Archives and History. “Districts and Place Names in West Virginia.” Based on the 1933 New Descriptive Atlas of West Virginia. https://archive.wvculture.org/hiStory/communities/districtplacenames.html
West Virginia Archives and History. “Wayne County News: Table of Contents.” https://archive.wvculture.org/History/wcn/wcntoc.html
West Virginia Archives and History. Vital Research Records Project. https://archive.wvculture.org/vrr/
West Virginia Archives and History. “Marriage Records Search.” Vital Research Records Project. https://archive.wvculture.org/vrr/va_mcsearch.aspx
West Virginia Archives and History. “West Virginia State Archives County Records.” https://archive.wvculture.org/history/archives/bluenote.html
West Virginia Archives and History. “West Virginia State Archives.” https://archive.wvculture.org/history/archives/wvsamenu.html
West Virginia Archives and History. “Historical and Genealogical Bibliography.” https://archive.wvculture.org/history/archives/biblio.html
West Virginia Archives and History. “Manuscript Collections.” https://archive.wvculture.org/history/collections/manuscripts.html
Wayne County, West Virginia. “County Clerk.” https://www.waynecountywv.org/countyclerk.php
Cabell County Doors to the Past. “Cabell County Marriages, 1834.” Entry for Asa Booton and Roxanna Spurlock, September 5, 1834. https://www.cabellcountydoorstothepast.com/marriages1/1834.htm
Dyer, Hu Maxwell. Dyer’s Index to Land Grants in West Virginia. Vol. 1, Wayne County section. https://ldsgenealogy.com/WV/books/Dyers-index-to-land-grants-in-West-Virginia-v-1-part-9.htm
Dyer, Hu Maxwell. Dyer’s Index to Land Grants in West Virginia. Vol. 2, county boundary section. https://ldsgenealogy.com/WV/books/Dyers-index-to-land-grants-in-West-Virginia-v-2-part-36.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.
Koch, George, and George Hurley. “Beech Fork Sortie, 1969.” The Redstart 39, no. 3 (October 1972): 94–95. https://www.brooksbirdclub.org/uploads/5/2/8/3/52832773/1972_redstart_vol_39-4.pdf
United States Army Corps of Engineers, Huntington District. “Beech Fork Lake.” Great Lakes and Ohio River Division. https://www.lrd.usace.army.mil/Submit-ArticleCS/Recreation/Article/3897002/beech-fork-lake/
United States Army Corps of Engineers. “Beech Fork Lake and East Lynn Lake Regional Master Plan.” https://www.lrd.usace.army.mil/Missions/Projects/Article/3630237/beech-fork-lake-east-lynn-lake-regional-master-plan/
United States Army Corps of Engineers. Beech Fork Lake Water Control Manual. Huntington District. https://water.sec.usace.army.mil/cda/documents/wc/3324/BBF_16082024_WCM_redacted.pdf
Birdwell, Leslie. “Beech Fork Lake.” e-WV: The West Virginia Encyclopedia. Revised February 16, 2024. https://www.wvencyclopedia.org/entries/400
Blevins, Cameron, and Richard W. Helbock. US Post Offices. Historical geographic dataset. https://cblevins.github.io/us-post-offices/
Blevins, Cameron. “The Data Biography of the US Post Offices Dataset.” https://cblevins.github.io/us-post-offices/data-biography/
Adkins, Ronnie. The Adkins Family of Wayne County, West Virginia; Also Cabell, Lincoln, and Boone: A Genealogical History of the Descendants of William and Elizabeth Parker Adkins of Henrico County, Virginia, from 1690 to 1990. 1990. FamilySearch. https://www.familysearch.org/library/books/records/item/480243-the-adkins-family-of-wayne-county-west-virginia-also-cabell-lincoln-and-boone-a-genealogical-history-of-the-descendants-of-william-and-elizabeth-park-er-adkins-of-henrico-county-virginia-from-1690-to-1990
Wayne County Genealogical and Historical Society. Historical newspaper and genealogical collections. https://waynewv.com/wcghs/oldsite/Old%20Newspapers/Newspapers%201950.htm
Author Note: Booton is a reminder that some of Appalachia’s smallest communities can leave remarkably deep documentary trails. I hope this article helps preserve the families, waterways, farms, and changing landscape that gave this corner of Wayne County its identity.