Appalachian Community Histories – Crum, Wayne County: Railroads, WPA Schools, and Community Life Along the Tug Fork
Crum sits in the narrow country of southern Wayne County, where roads, creeks, hollows, and the Norfolk & Western Railway have long competed for space between steep hills. Modern maps show a small census-designated place, and the 2020 Census counted only 136 residents. A century ago, however, Crum occupied a considerably larger place in the life of this part of the Tug and Big Sandy country. It had a railroad station and siding, stores, churches, a post office, schools, highway traffic, organized civic movements, and families whose connections reached across the river into eastern Kentucky and south toward the coalfields around Williamson.
The community that became Crum did not simply appear when somebody placed a name on a railroad timetable. Families had lived in the surrounding valleys for generations, churches had gathered worshipers there long before the railroad, and old family names such as Crum, Marcum, Copley, Queen, Perry, Parsley, and Salmons became woven into the landscape. What changed around the beginning of the twentieth century was transportation. The railroad gave the scattered settlement a center, the post office gave it an official name, and roads, stores, churches, and eventually a substantial school transformed Crum into one of the recognizable communities of southern Wayne County.
Before There Was a Town Called Crum
The history of the Crum area reaches well back into the nineteenth century. One of the most important surviving pieces of evidence comes from West Virginia University’s West Virginia History OnView collection. Its archival record for Silver Creek United Baptist Church at Crum states that the congregation was established in 1823. That date places organized religious life in the immediate area more than eighty years before the Crum post office opened.
The church record is significant because mountain communities often existed socially long before they appeared officially on maps. A nineteenth-century settlement might be understood locally through a creek, family, church, mill, schoolhouse, or post office rather than through a single town name. Silver Creek and the neighboring hollows were already home to families who farmed the narrow bottoms, raised livestock, harvested timber, worshiped together, and maintained connections with settlements throughout southern Wayne County and across the Tug Fork in Kentucky.
By 1884, when Hardesty’s early history of Wayne County was published, the county was still largely rural, although timber, mineral resources, river transportation, and the beginnings of industrial development were changing its economy. The greatest transformation for the southern end of Wayne County would come with the expansion of the Norfolk & Western Railway. The West Virginia Encyclopedia notes that the southern part of the county grew rapidly near the turn of the twentieth century as railway development coincided with booming timber and mining activity from East Lynn south toward Crum.
The Railroad Creates a New Center
Railroad records provide some of the clearest evidence for how Crum became a defined community. The Norfolk & Western Historical Society preserves engineering drawings for the Big Sandy Line and the older Naugatuck Branch through this part of Wayne County. A large right-of-way map, probably originating around 1902 and updated for decades afterward, follows the route through the hills and records tunnels, property boundaries, and land acquired from residents along the line. The associated records preserve the names of local landowners and show how closely railroad construction was tied to the people already living in these valleys.
Official postal history provides another useful marker. Crum’s post office dates to 1905, placing an identifiable federal postal community there by the first years of the twentieth century. State place-name material recorded Crum soon afterward. Together, the post office and railroad evidence suggest that the modern identity of the community solidified during this period rather than arising from an older incorporated town.
Members of the Crum family were prominent in the area, appearing repeatedly in property, railroad, newspaper, commercial, and later civic records. The available evidence clearly establishes their importance to the community, although the surviving sources used here do not conclusively establish the exact circumstances under which the settlement itself received the name Crum.
Railroad development continued after the first trains began passing through. On January 16, 1913, the Norfolk & Western’s Office of the Chief Engineer prepared a drawing for a proposed extension of the passing siding at Crum. The plan was revised in 1916. This was more than a line drawn across a map. A passing siding indicated that Crum had become part of the working geography of a busy railroad, a place where trains and railroad crews had to be managed as traffic moved through the narrow Big Sandy corridor.
By 1925 the company was planning and constructing additional track through the district. Norfolk & Western engineering material for the Big Sandy Line shows tunnels, second-track improvements, Crum’s station and siding, and the complicated process of fitting a modern railroad through steep Appalachian terrain. Separate land acquisition drawings preserve the names of individual property owners whose land was affected by the work.
For Crum, the railroad meant more than trains passing through. It provided employment, connected residents with Williamson, Kenova, Huntington, and communities farther away, carried goods into local stores, and tied the valley to the industrial economy developing throughout the southern West Virginia coalfields.
A Community Takes Shape
By the 1920s, newspaper reports allow us to see Crum less as a point on a railroad map and more as a living community.
A Wayne County News community column from October 1927 provides an unusually detailed snapshot. William Spurlock had purchased the grocery store belonging to J. B. Crum and a restaurant owned by Jessie Prince. J. B. Crum Sr. was putting up a new building. Work had begun on hard-surfacing the state highway. Albert Crum was identified as an employee of the Norfolk & Western Railroad. Residents traveled to churches and businesses in nearby communities, including places across the Kentucky line. Meanwhile, prayer meetings and Bible classes remained part of local life, with a Bible class meeting each Friday night at Crum Baptist Church.
Those few newspaper lines reveal much of what made Crum function. Commerce, religion, transportation, family visits, automobile ownership, railroad employment, and improving highways were all appearing in the same small community.
The road work was particularly important. The railroad had initially connected Crum to distant markets more efficiently than the mountain roads did, but improved highways gradually changed how residents moved through Wayne County. As roads were widened, surfaced, and linked to larger state routes, automobiles and trucks competed increasingly with passenger rail transportation.
Health care in the surrounding countryside remained personal and local. Another 1927 Wayne County News report listed licensed midwives throughout Wayne County. Among them were Sinda Messer and Rachel Marcum of Crum. The article explained that midwives were especially important in rural places where doctors could be difficult to reach. State regulation required them to register and receive a physician’s endorsement, reflecting an effort to bring older forms of rural medical care into a more formal public health system.
For families living far up creeks or hollows, the midwife could still be among the most important medical figures in community life.
Education Before Crum High School
Schools became another institution around which Crum developed.
By the 1920s Crum had a graded school, but secondary education presented a greater problem. Students who wanted to continue beyond the local grades could face lengthy travel to another community. The growth of Crum, combined with the difficulty of transportation through southern Wayne County, eventually created pressure for a larger school closer to home.
That campaign became especially organized in 1937.
On November 5, the Wayne County News reported the formation of the Crum High School Club. I. V. Perry was chosen president, R. L. Carter treasurer, and J. B. Crum Jr. secretary. C. F. Harris, Frank Marcum, J. B. Crum Sr., George Brown, and James Williamson formed a supporting committee. According to the newspaper, 195 voters and taxpayers signed resolutions supporting the effort.
The movement illustrates how strongly residents connected a school with the future of their community. A local high school could reduce long travel for students, strengthen Crum’s role as a center for nearby hollows, and allow more children in southern Wayne County to continue their education.
The campaign soon produced results.
Crum Tries to Become an Incorporated Town
The school campaign was not the only sign that residents were thinking about Crum’s future. During the same year, local leaders attempted to make the community an incorporated municipality.
In July 1937, the Wayne County News reported that Judge C. W. Ferguson had rejected a petition seeking a charter for Crum. The court did not decide whether incorporation itself was desirable. Instead, opponents successfully argued that sufficient notice had not been given. R. L. Carter, Jesse Parsley Jr., and J. B. Crum Jr. were identified as sponsors of the movement, and they quickly indicated that they would try again.
A second election followed.
On October 2, 1937, residents voted on incorporation again. The newspaper reported the result several days later: 66 votes favored incorporation and 40 opposed it. An earlier vote had favored incorporation 76 to 33. Sponsors announced that they intended to return to circuit court seeking a charter. The Norfolk & Western Railway and several large taxpayers had been identified among the opponents during the incorporation controversy.
Exactly what happened to the charter petition after these votes deserves further research in the Wayne County Circuit Court order books. Crum today is classified by the Census Bureau as a census-designated place rather than an incorporated municipality, making the 1937 campaign one of the more intriguing unresolved episodes in the community’s history.
For a short period, however, residents were not merely discussing civic improvements. A majority of those voting were trying to transform Crum into a legally recognized town.
The WPA School Changes Crum
Few projects changed Crum as visibly as the school construction that followed the campaign of 1937.
On February 11, 1938, the Wayne County News announced that federal approval had arrived for a large Works Progress Administration school project. The proposed building was initially described as a twelve-room school costing approximately $60,000. The Wayne County Board of Education would provide about $36,000, with the WPA supplying approximately $24,000. Plans called for construction from native stone on a three-and-one-half-acre tract previously used as a baseball field. At the time, Crum’s existing school consisted of only three rooms serving grades one through eight.
The newspaper made clear why residents had pushed so hard. A larger building could relieve overcrowding and spare Crum students the long trip to Wayne for high school instruction.
Construction evolved as plans and funding changed. A March report referred to a fourteen-room building and named Jack Windsor and J. L. Baker as supervisors. By the end of the year money had run short and work had stopped temporarily. Then another federal appropriation arrived. On December 30, the newspaper reported that President Franklin D. Roosevelt had approved an additional $29,566 WPA project to finish the school. The partially completed native-stone building was described as two stories tall with ten classrooms.
Crum’s school was therefore not simply another county building. It was part of the massive New Deal construction program that placed federal money and local labor into communities throughout Appalachia during the Great Depression.
The stone itself gave the project a distinctly local character. Native material and local labor produced a substantial public building at a time when the community was attempting to establish both a high school and a stronger civic identity.
Scouts, Roads, and a Strange Discovery in 1938
The school was only one public project underway around Crum during 1938.
That spring, Crum Boy Scouts began developing a camp near the head of the left fork of Silver Creek. The Wayne County News described plans for a large two-story cabin to serve as a mess hall and barracks, several smaller cabins, and approximately two miles of road. Sherman Salmons donated the land, and the organizers hoped eventually to accommodate about one hundred Scouts. Residents were asked to contribute materials, while assistance from the WPA was also sought.
The project illustrates the remarkable amount of organized community activity taking place in Crum during the late 1930s. Residents were campaigning for schools, debating incorporation, building recreational facilities, improving transportation, and participating in federal relief programs almost simultaneously.
The same year produced one of the stranger episodes in local history. On Old Fork of Jennies Creek several miles from Crum, heavy rain exposed large bones on the property of Owen Marcum. Contemporary newspaper writers believed the remains might belong to a mastodon and reported that hundreds of visitors traveled to see the bones. The identification should be treated cautiously because the newspaper was reporting a contemporary interpretation rather than a modern scientific determination. Still, the discovery briefly turned the hills above Crum into a regional curiosity.
Crum High School Becomes the Center of Community Life
By the early 1940s, the new school had become a major institution in southern Wayne County.
Wayne County News reports from 1941 document Crum Junior High School, its teachers, honor rolls, student activities, and even a recreation center in the community. One report described an old spinning wheel donated by Minerva Marcum of Bull Creek and demonstrated at the recreation center, a small example of older mountain domestic traditions existing beside the increasingly modern school and transportation systems of the twentieth century.
Over the following decades, Crum High School became one of the strongest anchors of community identity. Yearbooks preserved by the West Virginia State Archives document generations of students, teachers, athletics, clubs, local businesses, and graduating classes. The school gave families scattered through surrounding hollows a common institution and eventually made the Mountaineers name part of local identity.
A 1960 newspaper page shows how extensive school life had become. Crum High School students presented plays, appeared on honor rolls, competed in athletics, and took part in the kind of activities associated with high schools across the state.
Then, shortly before Christmas that year, fire struck the gymnasium.
The December 23, 1960, Wayne County News estimated damage at approximately $16,000, including $13,000 to the building and $3,000 to its contents. The Rev. Tom Hensley discovered the smoldering fire after bringing his wife, who worked as a school cook, to the building early that morning. Hensley, his wife, janitor Aubrey Steppe, and cook Juanita Conn carried water and fought the fire before it could cause even greater destruction. Football equipment was lost, bleachers were heavily damaged, steel roof supports were twisted by heat, and the gym was temporarily unusable for basketball.
The story also shows how deeply the school had become embedded in community life. Teachers, cooks, custodians, coaches, students, parents, and residents all revolved around the same institution.
By 1965, Crum High School continued to appear regularly in the county newspaper through honor rolls, scholarships, faculty news, and student achievements. In one six-week grading period that year, Principal Glenn Prichard reported that 26 percent of the student body had earned at least a B average.
Stores and the Commercial Heart of Crum
Schools and railroads were only part of Crum’s identity. Stores provided meeting places and supplied families who otherwise faced long trips through the mountains for everyday goods.
Among the most important surviving reminders of that commercial era is the William and Mary Queen Store. Preservation records date the sandstone building to approximately 1935. The Preservation Alliance of West Virginia reported that Italian stonemasons working under Alec Deminio constructed it from local sandstone and that the building served historically as a general store. The organization described it as one of the community’s central buildings.
A later statewide architectural survey conducted for the West Virginia State Historic Preservation Office identified the William and Mary Queen Store as a historic resource and recommended it as individually eligible for National Register consideration.
The store belongs to the same era as the school campaign, incorporation effort, road improvements, Scout project, and expansion of community institutions. Taken together, these developments show that Crum in the 1930s was not a place disappearing into the hills. It was a community attempting to build for the future.
Other commercial buildings continued serving residents well into the late twentieth century. The West Virginia State Archives photograph collection includes an exterior photograph of Copley’s Market at Crum from 1983, preserving another visual record of the stores that once defined everyday life there.
The End of Crum High School
Like many Appalachian communities, Crum eventually confronted the effects of declining population, changing employment, improved roads, school consolidation, and the disappearance of institutions that had once allowed small communities to function as independent centers.
The most symbolic change came during the 1987-1988 school year.
Crum High School and Fort Gay High School were consolidated to form Tolsia High School. A West Virginia government decision concerning former school employees later documented that Tolsia began operating during the 1987-1988 school year and that employees from Crum and Fort Gay were reassigned, transferred, or otherwise affected by the consolidation. A National Register nomination for Fort Gay High School likewise records the 1987 consolidation of the two schools.
Tolsia High School opened its doors in January 1988, ending the era in which Crum’s teenagers attended a high school carrying their own community’s name.
The loss of Crum High School did not end education in the community. Crum PK-8 continues the local Mountaineers identity, and Wayne County Schools still operates the school in the community.
There is a certain continuity in that survival. Generations after residents formed a club to fight for a better school in 1937, education remains one of Crum’s most important institutions.
Crum Today
The modern Crum recorded by the Census Bureau is much smaller than the community visible in twentieth-century newspapers and railroad records. The 2020 Census counted 136 people and 66 housing units in the Crum census-designated place.
Population figures, however, do not fully explain what Crum was or why its history matters.
The community belonged to a larger Appalachian network stretching along the Tug Fork and Big Sandy country. Residents crossed into Kentucky for church, school, business, and family visits. Railroad employees followed the Norfolk & Western through the valley. Merchants dealt with suppliers elsewhere. Students traveled between communities. Roads eventually connected places that had once depended heavily on rails, horses, and footpaths.
The physical traces of those changes remain in railroad grades, old commercial buildings, school history, church records, cemeteries, photographs, family documents, and the extraordinary engineering drawings preserved from the Norfolk & Western.
Why Crum’s History Matters
Crum offers a good example of how an Appalachian community can have a history far larger than its present population suggests.
Its story begins before the town name, with families living along creeks and a Baptist congregation established in the early nineteenth century. It accelerates with the railroad and post office at the beginning of the twentieth century. By the 1920s, stores, churches, railroad employment, schools, automobiles, and improved roads had created a recognizable community center.
The 1930s brought Crum’s most ambitious period of institution building. Residents twice voted for incorporation. Nearly two hundred voters and taxpayers supported a movement for a local high school. Federal New Deal money helped transform that campaign into a substantial native-stone school. Scouts built a camp in the surrounding hills, merchants invested in buildings, highways improved, and families continued creating the social networks that held the community together.
For nearly half a century afterward, Crum High School helped define the place. Its classrooms, gymnasium, clubs, athletics, graduations, plays, teachers, and yearbooks became part of the shared memory of southern Wayne County. When the high school disappeared into consolidation in the late 1980s, one chapter of that story ended, but Crum itself did not.
Today it is easy to pass through a small Appalachian community and see only what remains. Crum is better understood by looking at what was built there, who fought to build it, and why. Behind the modern census figure lies a community shaped by Silver Creek churches, railroad tunnels, family stores, midwives, school campaigns, WPA stonework, ball games, highway crews, and generations of people who made a narrow valley in southern Wayne County their home.
Sources & Further Reading
Norfolk & Western Railway. “Map Showing Right of Way Acquired on the Naugatuck Branch of the Ohio Extension, Mingo & Wayne Counties WV.” Drawing D207, ca. 1902, revised through 1928. Norfolk & Western Historical Society Archives. https://www.nwhs.org/archivesdb/detail.php?ID=156376
Norfolk & Western Railway. “Proposed Extension of Passing Siding at Crum, WV.” January 16, 1913. Revised February 4, 1916. Norfolk & Western Historical Society Archives. https://www.nwhs.org/archivesdb/detail.php?ID=222597
Norfolk & Western Railway. “Big Sandy Line, Second Track, MP NA13–NA17.” February 16, 1925. Norfolk & Western Historical Society Archives. https://www.nwhs.org/archivesdb/detail.php?ID=122464
Norfolk & Western Railway. Crum-area land acquisition and right-of-way drawings, including properties of Myrtle Crum, Wilda Harmon, Ezra Copley, Tom Salmons, Florence McCoy, U. G. Parsley, Ellen Endicott, and William Endicott. Norfolk & Western Historical Society Archives. https://www.nwhs.org/archivesdb/detail.php?ID=122465
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. Historical Topographic Map Collection. National Geologic Map Database, topoView. https://ngmdb.usgs.gov/topoview/
Rand McNally and Company. “Wayne County, West Virginia.” In Commercial Atlas of America. 1911. https://www.mygenealogyhound.com/maps/West-Virginia-County-Maps/WV-Wayne-County-West-Virginia-1911-map-Rand-McNally-Kenova-Ceredo-Prichard.html
PostalHistory.com. “Wayne County, West Virginia Post Offices.” Entry for Crum, established 1905. https://www.postalhistory.com/postoffices.asp?county=Wayne&state=WV&task=display
West Virginia Archives and History. “Place Names in West Virginia.” Entry for Crum, Wayne County. West Virginia Department of Arts, Culture and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/archives/placenames/placnamc.html
West Virginia Legislature. West Virginia Blue Book, 1921. Charleston, WV: State of West Virginia, 1921. https://www.wvlegislature.gov/legisdocs/publications/bluebook/WVS_Bluebook_1921.pdf
Wayne County News. “News Letters: Crum.” October 27, 1927. West Virginia Archives and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/History/wcn/wcn271027.html
Wayne County News. “Teachers Are Employed for Lincoln District.” May 20, 1926. Wayne County Genealogical and Historical Society newspaper collection. https://waynewv.com/wcghs/oldsite/Old%20Newspapers/Newspapers%201926.htm
Wayne County News. Reports concerning the proposed incorporation of Crum. July–October 1937. Wayne County Genealogical and Historical Society newspaper collection. https://waynewv.com/wcghs/oldsite/Old%20Newspapers/Newspapers%201937.htm
Wayne County News. Report on the organization of the Crum High School Club. November 5, 1937. Wayne County Genealogical and Historical Society newspaper collection. https://waynewv.com/wcghs/oldsite/Old%20Newspapers/Newspapers%201937.htm
Wayne County News. “New $60,000 School Building at Crum Receives Final WPA Approval Monday.” February 11, 1938. Wayne County Genealogical and Historical Society newspaper collection. https://waynewv.com/wcghs/oldsite/Old%20Newspapers/Newspapers%201938.htm
Wayne County News. Reports on construction of the Crum school and additional Works Progress Administration funding. March 18 and December 30, 1938. Wayne County Genealogical and Historical Society newspaper collection. https://waynewv.com/wcghs/oldsite/Old%20Newspapers/Newspapers%201938.htm
Wayne County News. Reports concerning the Crum Boy Scout camp. August–October 1938. Wayne County Genealogical and Historical Society newspaper collection. https://waynewv.com/wcghs/oldsite/Old%20Newspapers/Newspapers%201938.htm
Wayne County News. Reports concerning the discovery of alleged prehistoric remains near Old Fork of Jennies Creek. August 1938. Wayne County Genealogical and Historical Society newspaper collection. https://waynewv.com/wcghs/oldsite/Old%20Newspapers/Newspapers%201938.htm
Wayne County News. Report listing licensed Wayne County midwives, including Sinda Messer and Rachel Marcum of Crum. 1927. West Virginia Archives and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/History/wcn/wcn271208.html
Wayne County News. Wayne County World War I memorial list, including William Crum Jr. and Ransom Marcum of Crum. May 11, 1922. West Virginia Archives and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/History/wcn/wcn220511.html
Wayne County News. Report concerning Charles M. Perry’s Carnegie Medal and his rescue of two children from Norfolk & Western Train No. 16 at Crum. May 7, 1931. Wayne County Genealogical and Historical Society newspaper collection. https://waynewv.com/wcghs/oldsite/Old%20Newspapers/Newspapers1931.htm
Wayne County News. Crum Junior High and Graded School reports. October 31, 1941. Wayne County Genealogical and Historical Society newspaper collection. https://waynewv.com/wcghs/oldsite/Old%20Newspapers/Newspapers%201941.htm
Wayne County News. Report on the Crum High School gymnasium fire. December 23, 1960. Wayne County Genealogical and Historical Society newspaper collection. https://waynewv.com/wcghs/oldsite/Old%20Newspapers/Newspapers%201960.htm
Wayne County News. Crum High School reports, honor rolls, scholarships, and school activities. 1965. Wayne County Genealogical and Historical Society newspaper collection. https://waynewv.com/wcghs/oldsite/Old%20Newspapers/Newspapers%201965.htm
West Virginia Archives and History. “Crum High School, Mountaineer.” High school yearbook collection, various years, 1951–1987. West Virginia State Archives. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/archives/yearbooks.html
West Virginia University Libraries. “Silver Creek United Baptist Church, Crum, Wayne County, W. Va.” Centennial Church History Project, A&M 1667. West Virginia History OnView. https://wvhistoryonview.org/catalog/051255
West Virginia Archives and History. West Virginia Vital Research Records Project. Wayne County birth, marriage, and death records. https://archive.wvculture.org/vrr/
Wayne County Clerk. Deed books, probate records, marriage records, tax records, and recorded instruments. Wayne County, West Virginia. https://waynecountywv.org/countyclerk.php
West Virginia Judiciary. “Wayne County Circuit Court.” Court records, order books, petitions, and proceedings. https://www.courtswv.gov/public-resources/court-information-county/wayne_county
West Virginia Adjutant General. State Service Commission Papers. Wayne County records. West Virginia Archives and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/ag/wvssc.html
West Virginia State Archives. Photograph Collection Ph90-011, including “Copley’s Market, Crum,” 1983. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/collections/photographaccessions.html
West Virginia State Historic Preservation Office. Reconnaissance Historic Resource Survey for Pleasants, Lincoln, Jackson, Mason and Wayne Counties. Charleston, WV: West Virginia Division of Culture and History. https://mapwv.gov/shpo/docs/PDFs/ArchitecturalSurveys/RMU-51.pdf
Preservation Alliance of West Virginia. “William and Mary Queen Store, Crum, Wayne County.” West Virginia Endangered Properties. https://www.pawv.org/endanger/archives/02-2012
Marshall University Special Collections. Fred B. Lambert Papers, 1809–1964. MS 76. Huntington, WV: Marshall University. https://mds.marshall.edu/lambert_papers/index.16.html
Lambert, Fred B. “Will of Mary Vinson. The Roy Family, Copley, Crum, John Malcolm’s Will, Webb, Maupin.” MS 76, Box 12, Notebook 1. Fred B. Lambert Papers, Marshall University Special Collections. https://mds.marshall.edu/lambert_papers/index.16.html
Lambert, Fred B. “Peter Loar Sale, 1820; Perdue, Workman, Crum, Perry, Ferguson and Marcum.” MS 76, Box 20, Notebook 3. Fred B. Lambert Papers, Marshall University Special Collections. https://mds.marshall.edu/2020.html
Lambert, Fred B. “Davis, Stephens, Crum Bible Record.” MS 76, Box 5, Notebook 7. Fred B. Lambert Papers, Marshall University Special Collections. https://mds.marshall.edu/2020.html
United States Census Bureau. Federal population census schedules for Wayne County, West Virginia, 1850–1950. Library of Congress, “West Virginia Local History and Genealogy.” https://guides.loc.gov/west-virginia-local-history-genealogy/vital-records
Wayne County Genealogical and Historical Society. Wayne County Cemetery Records. Wayne County, West Virginia. https://wcghswv.org/wayne_cemetery_book1.php?thisPage=wayne_cemetery_book1
West Virginia and Regional History Center. Historical Records Survey, Wayne County. Reels 252–253. West Virginia University Libraries. https://wvrhc.lib.wvu.edu/collections/public-records/historical-records-survey
West Virginia and Regional History Center. Wayne County Newspaper Clippings. A&M 0168. West Virginia University Libraries. https://archives.lib.wvu.edu/subjects/724
Hardesty, H. H. History of Wayne County, West Virginia. 1884. Reproduced by the Wayne County Genealogical and Historical Society. https://waynewv.com/wcghs/wayne_county_hisotry.php?thisPage=wayne_county_hisotry
Taylor, Mildred. History of Wayne County. 1963. Referenced in the bibliography for the West Virginia Encyclopedia’s “Wayne County” entry. https://wvencyclopedia.org/entries/897
Lewis, Stephen. An Overview of the History of Wayne County. 1997. Referenced in the bibliography for the West Virginia Encyclopedia’s “Wayne County” entry. https://wvencyclopedia.org/entries/897
Massey, Tim R. “Wayne County.” e-WV: The West Virginia Encyclopedia. West Virginia Humanities Council. https://wvencyclopedia.org/entries/897
United States Army Corps of Engineers. Water Resources Development in West Virginia. Material concerning the Tug Fork and the 1977 flood. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4c/Water_resources_development_by_the_U.S._Army_Corps_of_Engineers_in_West_Virginia_-_USACE-p16021coll7-4308.pdf
Supreme Court of Appeals of West Virginia. Charles v. State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance Company. No. 21662. 1994. https://www.courtswv.gov/sites/default/pubfilesmnt/2023-11/21662.pdf
West Virginia Public Employees Grievance Board. Damron v. Wayne County Board of Education. Decision concerning the consolidation of Crum and Fort Gay high schools into Tolsia High School. https://pegb.wv.gov/Decisions%20Docs/dec2016/Damron.pdf
Thornton, Isabel. “Fort Gay High School.” National Register of Historic Places Registration Form. 2017. West Virginia State Historic Preservation Office. https://wvculture.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Fort-gay-high-school.pdf
United States Census Bureau. “Crum CDP, Wayne County, West Virginia.” 2020 Census and TIGER/Line geographic records. https://tigerweb.geo.census.gov/tigerwebmain/Files/acs26/tigerweb_acs26_cdp_2020_tab20_wv.html
Author Note: Crum’s history shows how much can be hidden behind the name of a small Appalachian community, from an early nineteenth-century church to railroads, stores, schools, and New Deal construction. I hope this article helps preserve the people and institutions that made Crum an important center of life in southern Wayne County.