Appalachian Community Histories – Centerville, Wayne County: From Centreville Post Office to a White’s Creek Community
Centerville is easy to pass over on a modern map of Wayne County. There is no courthouse square, incorporated town center, or surviving railroad depot to announce that a community once developed there. Its history instead survives in scattered pieces: postal records, old roads, family cemeteries, school references, newspaper columns, and maps showing a name that continued to matter long after its post office disappeared.
That scattered record is also why Centerville has to be studied as more than a dot on a map. The West Virginia State Archives places the community in Butler District, an important clue because residents may appear in historical records under the district rather than under Centerville itself. The records also preserve both “Centerville” and the older spelling “Centreville,” meaning that anyone tracing the community backward must search for both names.
Before Centerville Had a Name
The history of Centerville begins before the community appears by that name. The surrounding country belonged to Cabell County, Virginia, until January 18, 1842, when the Virginia General Assembly created Wayne County from the western portion of Cabell. The establishing act described a county stretching from the Ohio River toward the Tug Fork and Big Sandy country and named it for General Anthony Wayne. It also created the new county government and placed the county seat on the lands of Abraham Trout along Twelvepole.
For the people living in the valleys and hollows that would later be identified with Centerville, the important geography was formed less by political boundaries than by creeks, ridges, farms, and primitive roads. White’s Creek provided one of the principal routes through this part of western Wayne County, connecting interior farms with the Big Sandy River corridor.
A Historic American Engineering Record study prepared for the National Park Service found that the Big Sandy River Road had already become an important transportation route before Wayne County was established. The county formally recognized the local road system in 1842, and the Big Sandy road provided access between communities along the Tug and Big Sandy rivers and settlements closer to the Ohio.
This road network mattered because communities such as Centerville did not develop around the same kind of railroad-centered commercial district found in many Appalachian towns. Their center was more difficult to define. A post office, school, store, church, or road junction might serve as the recognizable heart of a community whose families were spread along several miles of creek bottom and hillside.
Centreville Becomes Centerville
The clearest evidence that Centerville had developed into an identifiable community by the late nineteenth century comes from postal records.
The National Archives preserves the Record of Appointment of Postmasters in Microfilm Publication M841, part of Record Group 28, Records of the Post Office Department. The records are organized by state, county, and post office, making them one of the most important primary sources for establishing the history of rural communities whose post offices sometimes provided their only official federal recognition. The National Archives also preserves site-location reports that can identify a post office’s relationship to roads, creeks, neighboring offices, and other landmarks.
A compiled Wayne County postal index lists the office first as Centreville, operating from 1878 to 1893, and then as Centerville from 1893 to 1908. The West Virginia State Archives independently preserves both spellings in its place-name index, although its listed years differ from the compiled postal chronology. That disagreement makes the underlying federal post-office records especially important for determining the exact date when the spelling officially changed. What is clear is that both forms of the name appeared historically and that the community possessed a functioning post office during the closing decades of the nineteenth century.
Postal service was no small matter in a rural Appalachian community. A post office connected families to newspapers, correspondence, government notices, businesses, relatives who had moved away, and the wider commercial world. The presence of an office also meant that “Centreville” or “Centerville” had become more than a descriptive neighborhood name. It had become an address.
A Small Community Away from the Railroad
An 1895 Rand McNally business atlas offers another glimpse of Centerville during its postal era. A modern index compiled from the atlas reports that Centerville had an estimated population of 98, possessed a post office, and had no railroad service. The population figure should be treated cautiously until checked against the original atlas and census schedules, but the description fits what other records reveal about the community. Centerville remained a small rural settlement tied to surrounding farms and roads rather than a railroad town.
The arrival of the Kenova and Big Sandy Railroad along the larger river corridor in 1903 and 1904 changed transportation in western Wayne County, but it did not erase the older system of roads leading into the interior. The National Park Service’s study of the White’s Creek route found that farms in the valley continued to rely on connections toward White’s Creek, Cyrus, Ceredo, Kenova, and Catlettsburg.
This helps explain why Centerville survived as a place-name even after its post office disappeared. It was not simply a postal office that happened to exist for several decades. The name described a settled rural neighborhood whose residents continued to identify their homes and farms with Centerville.
A Rand McNally map from 1911 still marked Centerville in Wayne County, several years after the compiled postal records indicate that the office had closed. The map also showed nearby communities including White’s Creek, Prichard, Cyrus, Ceredo, Fort Gay, Wayne, and Echo, placing Centerville within a dense network of small settlements rather than treating it as an isolated point in the mountains.
Farms, Families, and the Centerville Community
The surviving records suggest that Centerville was fundamentally agricultural.
One unusually detailed glimpse appeared in the Wayne County News on May 20, 1926. The newspaper described W. B. Smith as a lifelong Wayne County resident living near Centerville on Wayne Route 1. Smith was identified as a farmer and livestock dealer who had attended the county’s public schools and Morris Harvey College. The article also described his involvement in education and church life. Although it appeared in connection with Smith’s candidacy for the House of Delegates and therefore contained openly favorable political language, its biographical details provide a valuable contemporary description of the type of agricultural and civic life found around Centerville.
Another Wayne County News item from April 10, 1924, mentioned Mrs. G. B. Hayton “of Centerville” while describing a quilting held by the Rigg family. The notice is short, but local newspaper items like this are among the best evidence for understanding small Appalachian places. They show communities not through major events but through visits, funerals, church gatherings, school closings, quilting parties, marriages, illnesses, and other parts of everyday life.
Centerville’s cemeteries provide another layer of evidence. The Wayne County Genealogical and Historical Society identifies the Alley Cemetery on the old Wade Alley farm on Centerville Road, the Shy-Gilkerson Cemetery near Centerville, the William J. Smith Cemetery on Centerville Road, and other burial grounds around White’s Creek, Rock Lick Branch, and Thacker Ridge.
These family cemeteries help define the community in ways a political map cannot. In mountain settlements, family land could remain associated with the same surnames for generations. Houses disappeared, stores closed, roads changed, and postal routes were reorganized, but the burial grounds remained.
The Road from Cyrus to Centerville
Transportation changed dramatically during the twentieth century, and Centerville became part of a larger highway improvement effort.
The Historic American Engineering Record for the White’s Creek Covered Bridge records that in 1929 County Road 19, running up the White’s Creek valley between Cyrus Station and Centerville, was upgraded as part of U.S. Route 52. The same project connected with the older Big Sandy road system and improved travel through western Wayne County.
The road improvement was significant for a place like Centerville. Before widespread automobile ownership and paved highways, trips to the railroad, county seat, river towns, stores, doctors, or markets could be slowed by mud, creek crossings, steep grades, and seasonal flooding. Better roads gradually changed the meaning of distance.
The same National Park Service study documented the importance of the White’s Creek Covered Bridge farther down the valley. Constructed in 1877, the bridge connected the river road with agricultural territory inland. It survived the devastating 1937 flood and continued carrying traffic until a concrete bridge replaced it in 1954. The old covered bridge was removed in 1957.
Centerville was therefore tied to a transportation landscape that evolved from wagon roads and covered bridges to paved state highways within a few generations.
Centerville School
Like the post office, the local school helped give Centerville an identity.
Wayne County’s school system had grown from small subscription schools and short rural terms into a countywide public system by the early twentieth century. A 1919 history published in the Wayne County News described this transformation as one from primitive schoolhouses and brief terms toward longer sessions, standardized studies, and an increasingly organized system of public education.
Centerville School became part of that rural educational landscape. A later West Virginia legislative resolution concerning Wayne County resident Billy Earl Duty records that his family moved to White’s Creek when he was four years old and that he attended Centerville School. Historical topographic mapping also identifies Centerville School in the mid-twentieth-century landscape.
The school would have served more than an educational function. Rural schools frequently became recognizable community landmarks, bringing together children from farms and hollows that might otherwise be several miles apart. Their locations often preserved community names even after stores and post offices disappeared.
Electricity Reaches Centerville
By the late 1930s, another transformation was approaching the White’s Creek valley.
On March 4, 1938, the Wayne County News reported that a meeting would be held at Centerville on March 11 to discuss extending electrical service into the White’s Creek and Prichard sections. Representatives of Appalachian Electric Power Company were expected to explain the proposed project to residents interested in receiving service.
Later that year, reports described plans for approximately twenty miles of new electrical lines serving the White’s Creek, Centerville, and Prichard areas. More than one hundred homes were expected to benefit if the extension was completed.
For families accustomed to kerosene lamps, wood and coal heating, hand pumps, and household labor performed without electrical appliances, rural electrification represented one of the greatest changes in daily life since the construction of improved roads. Centerville was entering a different era, one in which isolation from nearby towns mattered less with every passing decade.
After the Post Office
The end of Centerville’s post office did not mean the end of Centerville.
That distinction is important when studying Appalachian communities. Federal post offices were established, renamed, moved, and discontinued as mail routes changed. Schools consolidated. Stores opened and closed. Railroads passed nearby or disappeared. None of those changes necessarily erased the community understood by the people who lived there.
Centerville continued appearing on maps after the postal office period. Newspapers continued describing residents as living at or near Centerville. Centerville Road preserved the name geographically. Centerville School carried it into the twentieth century. Family cemeteries anchored it to generations of local residents.
The West Virginia State Archives still places Centerville among the communities of Butler District alongside places such as Echo, Erie, Fort Gay, Hubbardstown, Prichard, and Saltpetre.
Centerville therefore belongs to a type of Appalachian history that is particularly easy to lose. It was not a coal boomtown whose population exploded overnight. It was not a county seat whose courthouse produced shelves of municipal records. It was a rural community whose history accumulated gradually through farms, roads, schools, post offices, churches, cemeteries, and family relationships.
What Remains of Centerville
The story of Centerville is preserved less in monuments than in the landscape itself.
Old postal records document a community once known as Centreville and later Centerville. The 1911 Rand McNally map shows the name surviving beyond the post office. The White’s Creek road records reveal how residents were connected to Cyrus and the Big Sandy corridor. Local newspapers preserve farmers, families, community meetings, and the coming of electricity. School records preserve another generation growing up under the Centerville name. Cemeteries along Centerville Road and neighboring branches carry the story deeper into the nineteenth century.
Together these sources show why small places matter to Appalachian history. A community does not need to have been incorporated or industrialized to possess a history worth preserving. Centerville represents the thousands of rural settlements that formed the human geography of the mountains, places defined not by municipal limits but by who lived there, where they traveled, where their children attended school, where they received their mail, and where their families buried their dead.
Centerville may appear today as only a small name in western Wayne County, but its scattered records reveal something larger. For more than a century, that name has connected families to a particular piece of the White’s Creek country, preserving a community that survived long after the institutions that first placed it on the map had changed or disappeared.
Sources & Further Reading
United States Post Office Department. Record of Appointment of Postmasters, 1832–September 30, 1971. National Archives Microfilm Publication M841. Record Group 28, Records of the Post Office Department. Washington, DC: National Archives and Records Administration. https://www.archives.gov/research/post-offices/postmasters-1832-1971.html
United States Post Office Department. Reports of Post Office Site Locations, 1837–1950. National Archives Microfilm Publication M1126. Record Group 28, Records of the Post Office Department. 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
Virginia General Assembly. “An Act Establishing the County of Wayne of Part of the County of Cabell.” Chap. 60. Acts of the General Assembly of Virginia, 1841–42, 36–38. Passed January 18, 1842. West Virginia Archives and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/counties/wayne01.html
West Virginia Archives and History. “Wayne County Court Records.” County Court Records Microfilm Holdings. Includes deeds, wills, vital records, survey books, court orders, chancery records, and fiduciary materials. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/archives/bluenote.html
West Virginia Archives and History. “Place Names in West Virginia.” Entries for Centerville and Centreville, Wayne County. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/archives/placenames/placnamc.html
West Virginia Archives and History. “Districts and Place Names in West Virginia.” Butler District, Wayne County. https://archive.wvculture.org/hiStory/communities/districtplacenames.html
West Virginia Archives and History. West Virginia Vital Research Records Project. Digitized birth, death, and marriage records. https://archive.wvculture.org/vrr/
United States Census Office. Twelfth Census of the United States, Taken in the Year 1900: Population of West Virginia. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1901. https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/decennial/1900/bulletins/demographic/53-population-wv.pdf
United States Bureau of the Census. Population by Counties and Minor Civil Divisions, 1910, 1900, 1890. Bulletin 360. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1911. https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/decennial/1910/bulletins/demographics/360-population-by-counties-minor-civil-divisions-1910-1900-1890-part-4.pdf
Gannett, Henry. A Gazetteer of West Virginia. United States Geological Survey Bulletin 233. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1904. https://pubs.usgs.gov/publication/b233
Rand McNally and Company. “West Virginia.” In The Enlarged Business Atlas and Shippers Guide. Chicago: Rand McNally and Company, 1893. University of Alabama Map Library. https://alabamamaps.ua.edu/historicalmaps/us_states/westvirginia/index_Before1900.html
Rand McNally and Company. “West Virginia.” In The New General Atlas of the World. Chicago: Rand McNally and Company, 1895. University of Alabama Map Library. https://alabamamaps.ua.edu/historicalmaps/us_states/westvirginia/index_Before1900.html
Rand McNally and Company. “Wayne County, West Virginia.” 1911 county map. My Genealogy Hound. https://www.mygenealogyhound.com/maps/West-Virginia-County-Maps/WV-Wayne-County-West-Virginia-1911-map-Rand-McNally-Kenova-Ceredo-Prichard.html
Historic American Engineering Record. White’s Creek Covered Bridge, Abutments, HAER No. WV-53. Washington, DC: National Park Service, Historic American Engineering Record. https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/master/pnp/habshaer/wv/wv0300/wv0354/data/wv0354data.pdf
Wayne County News. “History of School System in Wayne County.” October 23, 1919. West Virginia Archives and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/History/wcn/wcn191023.html
Wayne County News. “News Letters.” April 10, 1924. West Virginia Archives and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/History/wcn/wcn240410.html
Wayne County News. “W. B. Smith Candidate for Legislature.” May 20, 1926. West Virginia Archives and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/History/wcn/wcn260520.html
Wayne County News. “First Deed Recorded in This County 84 Years Ago; 2,100 Recorded Last Year.” January 28, 1926. West Virginia Archives and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/History/wcn/wcn260128.html
Wayne County News. “New Electric Line Proposed: Meeting Will Be Held at Centerville for Study of Extension.” March 4, 1938. Transcribed by the Wayne County Genealogical and Historical Society. https://waynewv.com/wcghs/oldsite/Old%20Newspapers/Newspapers%201938.htm
Wayne County News. “Appalachian to Extend Service to Forty-Five Families.” September 23, 1938. Transcribed by the Wayne County Genealogical and Historical Society. https://waynewv.com/wcghs/oldsite/Old%20Newspapers/Newspapers%201938.htm
West Virginia Archives and History. “Wayne County News.” Newspaper transcription collection and table of contents. https://archive.wvculture.org/History/wcn/wcntoc.html
Wayne County Genealogical and Historical Society. Wayne County Cemetery Records, Volume Five. Includes cemeteries along Centerville Road, White’s Creek, Rock Lick Branch, and surrounding areas. https://wcghswv.org/wayne_cemetery_book5.php?thisPage=wayne_cemetery_book5
West Virginia Legislature. House Concurrent Resolution honoring Billy Earl Duty. 2022 Regular Session. Includes biographical information concerning White’s Creek and attendance at Centerville School. https://www.wvlegislature.gov/Bulletin_Board/house_journal.cfm?hdj=hdj2022-02-07-27.htm&headtype=jour&houseorig=h&ses_year=2022&sesstype=RS
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 State Historic Preservation Office. “Wayne County National Register of Historic Places Nominations.” West Virginia Department of Arts, Culture and History. https://wvculture.org/agencies/state-historic-preservation-office-shpo/register-of-historical-places/national-register-of-historic-places-nominations/wayne-county/
Dickinson, Kay Stamper, and Jack L. Dickinson. Last Train to Dunlow: History from the Hollows of Wayne County, West Virginia and Coming of the N&W Railroad, 1870–1940. 2005. https://books.google.com/books/about/Last_Train_to_Dunlow.html?id=RlyrvgEACAAJ
Thompson, Robert Michael. Pioneers, Rebels and Wolves: A History of Wayne County. Lulu. https://www.lulu.com/shop/robert-thompson/prw/paperback/product-12195140.html
Kirby, Wesley D. “A Brief History of Wayne Community.” West Virginia Archives and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/hiStory/agrext/wayne.html
PostalHistory.com. “Wayne County, West Virginia Post Offices.” Useful as a finding aid for the Centreville and Centerville postal chronology, which should be checked against the original Post Office Department records. https://www.postalhistory.com/postoffices.asp?county=Wayne&state=WV&task=display
Author Note: Centerville is the kind of Appalachian community whose story survives in scattered records rather than in a single town history. I hope this article helps preserve those pieces and encourages readers with photographs, family records, or memories of the area to add to the record.