Appalachian Community Histories – Butler District, Wayne County: Early Settlement, Schools, Coal, and Life Along the Big Sandy
Butler is easy to misunderstand if its name is approached like the name of an ordinary Appalachian community. Historically, Butler was one of Wayne County’s magisterial districts, a broad section of southeastern Wayne County that contained a collection of settlements, farms, creeks, river bottoms, schools, churches, and crossroads rather than a single town called Butler.
The distinction matters because the history of Butler is really the history of an entire corner of Wayne County. The West Virginia Archives and History place-name collection, compiled from the 1933 New Descriptive Atlas of West Virginia, placed Carrel, Centerville, Echo, Erie, Fort Gay, Hubbardstown, Merideth, Paddle, Pharaoh, Prichard, Saltpetre, and Tudell within Butler District. The research gathered for this article likewise identifies Butler as a district whose story encompasses Fort Gay and numerous smaller communities rather than as an independent village. Pasted markdown
At the district’s eastern edge, the Big Sandy River separated West Virginia from Kentucky. Beyond the river stood communities tied to Butler by trade, family, ferries, roads, and everyday movement. To the west, the bottomlands gave way to rolling and increasingly rugged country cut by creeks and hollows. A Wayne County News history published in 1919 described precisely that landscape, noting the bottomland toward the river and the hills farther west.
Within that landscape developed one of Wayne County’s earliest settlement areas, one of its earliest schools, early salt and coal operations, a river town that became Fort Gay, and an educational history that stretched from log schoolhouses to a monumental district high school.
Settlement Along the Big Sandy
The oldest stories associated with Butler reach back to the closing years of the eighteenth century, although they must be handled carefully.
In December 1919, the Wayne County News published a history of Butler District that identified Samuel Short as its first settler and stated that he built a cabin near the site of present-day Fort Gay about 1796. According to the same account, Robert Tabor followed and patented a tract of approximately 2,500 acres in 1798. The article named Thomas Short, Samuel Hatten, William Adams, Peyton and Joseph Newman, John and Richard Grayson, Thomas Vaughan, Peter Loar, Benjamin Sperry, and William Artrip among those believed to have settled in the district before 1800.
The newspaper continued with another generation of names that became familiar in Wayne County history, including Michael Burke, John Smith, Pleasant Workman, Joel Ferguson, James Bartram, William and Solomon Perry, Joseph Fulkerson, John Breedon, Jess Cyrus, John Deering, Goodwin Lycan, Samuel Smiley, John Thompson, and Abraham Queen.
These details offer a rare picture of how Wayne County residents in the early twentieth century remembered their pioneer period, but the dates should not be treated exactly like entries in a land book written in 1796. The account appeared more than a century after the events it described. The tradition of Short and Tabor as early settlers appears repeatedly in later Wayne County histories, yet the strongest confirmation would come from surviving Virginia land grants, tax lists, surveys, and Cabell County records from the period before Wayne County existed.
Even with that caution, the broader pattern is clear. Settlement clustered near the Big Sandy and along its tributaries while families gradually moved into the surrounding creeks and hills. The river was not an obstacle separating Butler from the outside world. In many respects, it was the district’s first major transportation route.
The 1919 history also preserved stories of daily pioneer life. It identified John Short, the son of Samuel and Elizabeth Breeden Short, as the first child born in the district in 1801. It recorded the 1802 marriage of Samuel Hatten and Nancy Campbell, reportedly performed by Methodist minister Darby Kelly on a sandbar in the Big Sandy because the bride’s family lived in Kentucky. Another marriage, between John Smith and Elizabeth Vaughan in 1813, received unusual attention because the groom was remembered as arriving in a homemade tow-linen suit and moccasins.
Whether every detail survived unchanged through a century of retelling is difficult to know. What survives unmistakably is the memory of a border community whose residents moved naturally between what became West Virginia and Kentucky.
Mills, Salt, Timber, Coal, and Farms
Butler’s early economy depended first on the resources close at hand.
The 1919 Wayne County News history credited William Thompson with establishing an early gristmill on Mill Creek about half a mile from Fort Gay. Solomon Perry was said to have constructed the district’s first sawmill on Big Hurricane. Perry represented the sort of versatility often required in an early mountain settlement. The newspaper remembered him not only as a mill operator, but also as a carpenter, millwright, and Methodist preacher.
Salt production also appeared early. The same account reported that salt was manufactured within Butler during the first quarter of the nineteenth century. The district was once heavily wooded, particularly with oak, and the newspaper stated that some of that timber was used in shipbuilding. By 1919, however, the writer already regarded large-scale timbering there as largely a thing of the past.
Coal added another layer to the district’s economy. Mining near Hubbardstown predated the major twentieth-century development of many Appalachian coalfields. The 1919 account remembered coal being removed there and transported to market on barges down the Big Sandy River. It described one accessible coal vein as roughly two and one-half to four feet thick while reporting a deeper seam estimated at eight or nine feet.
Those industries never erased agriculture from Butler’s identity. In fact, the same writer who described salt, coal, mills, and timber concluded that the district’s real wealth rested in its farms. The Big Sandy bottomlands provided some of the more productive agricultural ground in Wayne County, while families farther from the river cultivated smaller patches of bottomland and hillsides.
This mixture of farming and small-scale extraction distinguished Butler from the image of an Appalachian district completely dominated by coal. Coal mattered, particularly around Hubbardstown, but so did cornfields, livestock, mills, timber, and the river that connected local production with outside markets.
Wayne County and a Changing Border District
When the first families settled the region, there was no Wayne County and no West Virginia.
The area belonged to Virginia and later formed part of Cabell County. The Virginia General Assembly created Wayne County in 1842, more than four decades after the settlement traditions associated with Short and Tabor began. A 1919 history of Wayne County education recalled that governmental transition while tracing the development of the county’s schools.
West Virginia statehood in 1863 brought another political transformation. Communities that had once existed within Virginia now found themselves within a new state formed during the Civil War.
The principal town in Butler also changed with the times. The settlement near the Forks of the Big Sandy came to be known as Cassville during the nineteenth century. The Wayne County News reported that Cassville was incorporated under West Virginia law on November 13, 1875, with James H. Marcum serving as its first mayor.
Cassville suffered a major fire in 1883 that, according to the 1919 history, destroyed nearly its entire business section. Yet the community endured, and its position on the river continued to give it an importance beyond its population.
The name Fort Gay gradually overtook Cassville in local use. The Town of Fort Gay’s official history records that the municipality, originally chartered as Cassville, formally changed its name to Fort Gay in 1932.
By then, the community had become Butler District’s best-known population center, but Fort Gay was only one part of the larger district.
The First Schools of Wayne County
Education forms one of the strongest threads running through Butler’s history.
A lengthy Wayne County News article published on October 23, 1919, credited Butler District with the earliest schools in Wayne County. According to that account, Thomas Napier, Stephen Bean, and John Deering were among the county’s earliest teachers. A school building was erected near Fort Gay in 1805, and Napier reportedly taught there before conducting another term on Tabor Creek during the same year.
These earliest schools bore little resemblance to the public institutions that later generations would know.
The 1919 account described primitive log schoolhouses with enormous fireplaces, split-log benches, rough writing desks attached to the walls, and windows covered with greased paper to admit light. Students often participated in what residents remembered as “loud” or “babbling” schools, where children repeated lessons aloud simultaneously.
Education was initially organized locally through subscription schools and individual teachers. Parents gathered enough pupils to justify a school and constructed whatever building the community could manage. Formal state supervision, professional examinations, longer terms, standardized curricula, and improved buildings came much later.
The importance of Butler in this story is difficult to overlook. Long before the district gave its name to a twentieth-century high school, local tradition already placed it at the beginning of organized education in Wayne County.
African American Education After Emancipation
An equally important chapter appeared in the Wayne County News in April 1935, when Fort Gay teacher Elsie Livisay Matney provided a history of African American schooling in Wayne County.
Matney stated that the county’s first school for Black children was established in 1870 along Tabor Creek in Butler District. Thomas Gillispie, an African American teacher, taught there for two consecutive terms. During the second term, according to Matney’s account, the school building burned. Rather than end the term, Gillispie moved his classes into a rock cave approximately two miles north of Fort Gay and continued teaching.
The school did not remain in a single location. Another school opened near Wayne in 1872, but the educational effort soon returned to Butler, where a log building was constructed on property belonging to Frank Bromley. James Bartram, who was white, and Abe Cook, who was Black, were among its teachers. The school later moved again to property owned by Andrew Black outside Fort Gay.
By the 1880s, Matney recalled, more African American families were purchasing homes and land around Fort Gay, Wayne, and Ceredo. A small frame school erected at Fort Gay in 1883 served generations of Black students. Mary Osborne was among its teachers, followed later by educators including Emma Bromley, Jessie Lindsey, and Matney herself.
When Matney wrote in 1935, the Fort Gay school had no more than eight students. Yet its small enrollment obscured its larger significance. Her account traced a local Black educational tradition from the immediate post-emancipation years into the twentieth century, beginning in Butler District only a few years after the Civil War.
As with the district’s earliest white schools, some of the 1870 details were preserved through later testimony rather than surviving contemporary school records. Even so, Matney was writing as a teacher within the system, was the daughter of a former Fort Gay teacher, and named teachers, property owners, and surviving former pupils. Her newspaper account remains one of the most valuable surviving records of African American education in early Wayne County.
Population and the Communities of Butler
Federal census records show that Butler was not a tiny administrative district with only a few scattered households.
The district had 4,234 residents in 1880 and 4,453 in 1890. By 1900 the population had reached 4,888, and in 1910 it stood at 4,907. The 1920 census recorded 4,520 residents in Butler District, including 617 in Cassville. By 1940 the district had reached 5,058 residents before recording 4,717 in 1950. Pasted markdown
Those figures also help explain why treating Butler simply as another forgotten community gives the wrong impression. Thousands of residents were distributed among Fort Gay, Prichard, Hubbardstown, Centerville, Echo, Erie, Merideth, Pharaoh, Saltpetre, Paddle, Tudell, Carrel, and the farms and hollows between them.
The 1940 census enumeration descriptions make the geography especially clear. Federal officials divided Butler into sections that included Fort Gay, Prichard, Hubbardstown, and surrounding territory divided partly by state roads 27 and 37.
Butler was therefore both an administrative unit and a collection of interconnected local identities. A person could consider Prichard or Hubbardstown home while simultaneously being a resident of Butler District and Wayne County.
Roads Begin to Change the District
Isolation was relative in Butler. The Big Sandy had provided transportation for generations, but moving inland from the river remained considerably harder.
In 1919, the writer describing Butler’s productive farms concluded that the district was waiting for better roads before it could fully develop its agricultural potential. That observation captured one of the central problems facing rural Appalachia in the early twentieth century. A farm might produce crops, livestock, timber, or other goods, but poor roads limited the ease with which those products and the families who produced them could reach markets, schools, doctors, and neighboring communities.
Improvement came gradually.
In 1926, the Wayne County Court awarded a contract for construction of a sixteen-foot-wide county road on Big Hurricane Creek in Butler District. The project ran from the residence of T. B. Crabtree toward Crabtree Mountain, and the winning bid totaled $972.50.
A short road contract was hardly a dramatic event by itself, but dozens of such improvements changed life across mountain counties. Roads linked creek communities to Fort Gay and other commercial centers, made school consolidation more practical, and slowly shifted transportation away from the older combination of river travel, horseback movement, and rough local paths.
Butler District High School
By the late 1920s, education again became central to Butler’s story.
High school students in the Fort Gay area faced the difficult task of traveling to schools elsewhere in Wayne County. Mountainous terrain and poor roads made lengthy daily trips particularly difficult at a time when private automobiles remained beyond the reach of many families.
In 1929, the West Virginia Legislature authorized the establishment of Butler District High School. The legislative history records the school’s establishment that year, followed by amendments in 1931 and 1933.
At first there was no permanent high school building. Classes beginning in 1929 met in temporary facilities, including a church and the Knights of Pythias lodge building. Architect Levi Johnson Dean was eventually commissioned to design a permanent structure in the Beaux-Arts tradition.
On September 25, 1931, residents gathered in Fort Gay for the laying of the cornerstone. Contemporary reporting estimated the crowd at nearly 700 people. Members of the Knights of Pythias conducted the ceremony, Marshall College representatives addressed the gathering, and the Fort Gay school orchestra provided music. Newspapers, enrollment information, lists of school officials, legislative acts concerning the school, and other records were deposited inside the cornerstone.
The building cost approximately $32,000 and initially enrolled ninety-six students. Its size and architectural ambition reflected something larger than the construction of another school. Families who had once depended upon small, scattered schoolhouses were creating a substantial institution intended to serve a wider mountain district.
Education had traveled an extraordinary distance since the log schoolhouse remembered near Fort Gay in 1805.
An Independent School District
The political organization of Butler’s schools continued to change.
In 1933, House Bill 513 created the Independent School District of Butler. The enrolled legislation established its boundaries, created a board of education, and provided rules for operating and maintaining its schools while amending the earlier laws relating to Butler District High School.
The legislation is particularly valuable because it moves the story beyond later reminiscence. It shows directly, in the surviving government record, how seriously the district’s educational system was treated and how closely local identity, taxation, government, and schooling remained connected.
The high school later became known as Fort Gay High School. The building continued serving generations of students until the high school consolidated with Crum High School in 1987 to form Tolsia High School. The old structure later served as a middle school before closing, and its architectural and educational importance eventually brought recognition through the National Register of Historic Places.
The surviving building stands as one of the most visible reminders of the Butler name, even for people who no longer think of the surrounding countryside primarily in terms of historic magisterial districts.
Remembering Butler District
Butler District cannot be reduced to Fort Gay, although Fort Gay became its most recognizable center. Nor can its history be reduced to coal, farming, education, or any single industry.
Its story began along a river boundary that was never much of a cultural boundary at all. Families crossed the Big Sandy to marry, trade, worship, work, and visit. Farms spread across the bottoms. Mills appeared along the creeks. Salt was produced in the early nineteenth century. Oak forests supplied valuable timber. Coal from around Hubbardstown traveled toward market by barge.
Schools rose from rough log buildings to permanent public institutions. Black residents created an educational tradition after emancipation despite segregation and limited resources. Roads slowly reached farther into the creeks and hills. Cassville became Fort Gay. The district high school became a landmark.
Even the list of Butler communities preserved in the 1933 atlas tells part of the story. Carrel, Centerville, Echo, Erie, Fort Gay, Hubbardstown, Merideth, Paddle, Pharaoh, Prichard, Saltpetre, and Tudell were separate places, but they also belonged to a larger historical geography called Butler.
That is why Butler deserves to be remembered as more than an old governmental label on a county map.
For generations of Wayne Countians, Butler described the country they lived in. It meant the Big Sandy bottoms and the western hills, the road up Big Hurricane, schools along Tabor Creek, coal loaded for the river, farms waiting for better roads, and a high school whose cornerstone drew hundreds of residents together in 1931.
Many individual communities within the district have histories worth telling on their own. Taken together, however, they reveal something larger: the development of one corner of Appalachian West Virginia from pioneer settlement into a network of river towns, farm communities, schools, roads, and family landscapes whose history remains written across southeastern Wayne County.
Sources & Further Reading
West Virginia Archives and History. “Squibs from Early History of District in This County.” Wayne County News, December 4, 1919. Accessed October 3, 2026. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/wcn/wcn191204.html
West Virginia Archives and History. “History of School System in Wayne County.” Wayne County News, October 23, 1919. Accessed October 3, 2026. https://archive.wvculture.org/History/wcn/wcn191023.html
West Virginia Archives and History. “Wayne County News: Table of Contents.” West Virginia State Archives. Accessed October 3, 2026. https://archive.wvculture.org/History/wcn/wcntoc.html
Wayne County Genealogical and Historical Society. “Wayne County News, 1931.” Includes “Cornerstone Is Laid at Ft. Gay,” October 1, 1931. Accessed October 3, 2026. https://waynewv.com/wcghs/oldsite/Old%20Newspapers/Newspapers1931.htm
Wayne County Genealogical and Historical Society. “Wayne County News, 1935.” Includes “Teacher Gives History Of Colored School In County,” April 11, 1935. Accessed October 3, 2026. https://waynewv.com/wcghs/oldsite/Old%20Newspapers/Newspapers%201935.htm
West Virginia Archives and History. “Districts and Place Names in West Virginia.” Compiled from the New Descriptive Atlas of West Virginia, 1933. Accessed October 3, 2026. https://archive.wvculture.org/hiStory/communities/districtplacenames.html
West Virginia State Archives. “County Court Records Microfilm Holdings.” West Virginia Archives and History. Accessed October 3, 2026. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/archives/bluenote.html
West Virginia Archives and History. “West Virginia Vital Research Records.” Accessed October 3, 2026. https://archive.wvculture.org/vrr/
West Virginia Legislature. Acts of the Legislature of West Virginia, 1929. Charleston, WV: State of West Virginia, 1929. See chap. 108, establishing Butler District High School in Wayne County. https://www.wvlegislature.gov/legisdocs/publications/acts/Acts_1929.pdf
West Virginia Legislature. Acts of the Legislature of West Virginia, 1931. Charleston, WV: State of West Virginia, 1931. See legislation concerning Butler District High School. https://www.wvlegislature.gov/legisdocs/publications/acts/Acts_1931.pdf
West Virginia Legislature. “House Bill No. 513: An Act Creating and Establishing the Independent School District of Butler in the County of Wayne and State of West Virginia.” Passed March 11, 1933. https://code.wvlegislature.gov/signed_bills/1933/1933-RS-HB513-ENR_signed.pdf
West Virginia Legislature. Index to Special Acts of the Legislature of West Virginia, 1863–1998. Charleston, WV: West Virginia Legislature. https://www.wvlegislature.gov/legisdocs/publications/acts/Resolutions_Index_1863-1998.pdf
West Virginia Legislature. West Virginia Blue Book, 1930. Charleston, WV: State of West Virginia, 1930. https://www.wvlegislature.gov/legisdocs/publications/bluebook/WVS_Bluebook_1930.pdf
Thornton, Isabel. “Fort Gay High School.” National Register of Historic Places Registration Form. Charleston: West Virginia State Historic Preservation Office, 2017. https://wvculture.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Fort-gay-high-school.pdf
National Park Service. “Fort Gay High School.” National Register of Historic Places, NRIS 100001903. Accessed October 3, 2026. https://npgallery.nps.gov/AssetDetail/NRIS/100001903
White, M. Wood. White’s New County and District Atlas of the State of West Virginia: Comprising Fifty-Four Counties; Three Hundred and Twenty-Seven Township Districts; and Two Thousand Five Hundred and Sixty-Seven School Districts. Grafton, WV: M. Wood White; Philadelphia: S. A. Mitchell, 1873. David Rumsey Map Collection. https://www.davidrumsey.com/maps1120365-28431.html
West Virginia and Regional History Center. “Maps, Atlases, and Gazetteers.” West Virginia University Libraries. Accessed October 3, 2026. https://wvrhc.lib.wvu.edu/collections/maps-atlases-and-gazetteers
Library of Virginia. “The Wayne Advocate.” Virginia Newspaper Bibliography. Accessed October 3, 2026. https://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/vnd/results.php?categories=West+Virginia+Newspapers&page=14
Library of Virginia. “The Wayne News.” Virginia Newspaper Bibliography. Accessed October 3, 2026. https://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/vnd/results.php?categories=West+Virginia+Newspapers&page=14
United States Census Office. Report on Population of the United States at the Eleventh Census: 1890. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1895. https://www2.census.gov/prod2/decennial/documents/1890a_v1-11.pdf
United States Census Bureau. Census of Population: 1950. Number of Inhabitants, West Virginia. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1952. https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/decennial/1950/pc-08/pc-8-47.pdf
United States Census Bureau. “Butler District, Wayne County, West Virginia.” Census Bureau Profile. Accessed October 3, 2026. https://data.census.gov/profile/Butler_district%2C_Wayne_County%2C_West_Virginia?g=060XX00US5409990324
Town of Fort Gay. “About Us.” Accessed October 3, 2026. https://local.wv.gov/FortGay/Pages/about.aspx
The West Virginia Encyclopedia. “Wayne County.” e-WV: The West Virginia Encyclopedia. Accessed October 3, 2026. https://www.wvencyclopedia.org/entries/897
The West Virginia Encyclopedia. “Tug Fork.” e-WV: The West Virginia Encyclopedia. Accessed October 3, 2026. https://www.wvencyclopedia.org/entries/754
Hardesty, H. H. & Co. Hardesty’s Historical and Geographical Encyclopedia: Maps and Histories of Wayne, Lincoln and Cabell Counties, West Virginia. New York: H. H. Hardesty & Co., 1884. https://books.google.com/books/about/Hardesty_s_Historical_and_Geographical_E.html?id=s7kM0gEACAAJ
West Virginia State Historic Preservation Office. Reconnaissance Historic Resource Survey for Pleasants, Lincoln, Jackson, Mason and Wayne Counties. Charleston: West Virginia Division of Culture and History. https://mapwv.gov/shpo/docs/PDFs/ArchitecturalSurveys/RMU-51.pdf
Wayne County Genealogical and Historical Society. “Old Newspapers, 1919.” Accessed October 3, 2026. https://waynewv.com/wcghs/oldsite/Old%20Newspapers/Newspapers%201919.htm
Wayne County Genealogical and Historical Society. “Old Newspapers, 1950.” Accessed October 3, 2026. https://waynewv.com/wcghs/oldsite/Old%20Newspapers/Newspapers%201950.htm
U.S. Geological Survey. Availability of Low-Sulfur Coal in Wayne County, West Virginia. Open-File Report 72-359. Washington, DC: U.S. Geological Survey, 1972. https://pubs.usgs.gov/of/1972/0359/report.pdf
Author Note: Butler is different from many communities featured on AppalachianHistorian.org because it was historically a magisterial district rather than a single town. Its story brings together Fort Gay and numerous smaller communities whose shared history developed along the Big Sandy River, surrounding creeks, farms, schools, roads, and industries.