Appalachian Community Histories – Elmwood, Wayne County: The Ferguson Mill, Store, and Cemetery Beside Wayne
Elmwood sits so close to Wayne, West Virginia, that its history can easily disappear into the story of the county seat. Old newspaper writers sometimes placed it only about a mile from town, while later cemetery descriptions located it along State Route 37. The community never developed into one of Wayne County’s large industrial centers, nor did it become a separate incorporated town with a courthouse, railroad depot, or long commercial district of its own.
Yet Elmwood held something that made it important to a much wider section of the county.
For years, people came there to have grain ground at a Ferguson family grist mill. A store operated beside the mill. A Ferguson burial ground grew into what became known as Elmwood Cemetery, and by the 1920s some of Wayne County’s prominent families were burying their dead there. What appears on a map as a small place beside Wayne was, for a time, a local center of work, exchange, family, and memory.
The surviving records suggest that Elmwood’s story is best understood not as the sudden founding of a village, but as the gradual transformation of a Ferguson family landscape into a recognized Wayne County community. West Virginia’s official place-name records list Elmwood in Wayne County with the date 1920, but the Ferguson presence in the area reaches back more than a century earlier.
The Ferguson Family and Early Union District
Long before the name Elmwood appeared in twentieth-century geographic records, members of the Ferguson family were part of the settlement history surrounding what became Wayne.
A 1919 history of Union District published in the Wayne County News named Samuel Ferguson and Jesse Spurlock among the district’s earliest settlers, stating that both had built homes in 1802 in the area where the county seat later developed. The article was written more than a century after the settlement it described, so its precise dates should be treated as local historical tradition rather than contemporary documentation. Still, its identification of Ferguson as one of the area’s earliest families agrees with the much larger genealogical record surrounding the family.
Union District developed around the valleys surrounding Twelvepole Creek. The same 1919 account described a country where grazing, farming, and timbering had long shaped everyday life. Wayne eventually became the district’s political center, but the surrounding farms remained important parts of its economy.
Samuel Ferguson’s connection to the area survives physically as well. The Wayne County Genealogical and Historical Society identifies his old farm and gravesite near Wayne and points researchers toward Evelyn Booth Massie’s extensive genealogical history of the Ferguson family. Samuel Ferguson and his wife Mary Jameson Ferguson became the beginning of a family whose descendants remained closely tied to Wayne County for generations.
The history of Elmwood grew from that larger Ferguson presence.
Uncle Charley Ferguson
Among the later Fergusons, Charles W. Ferguson became particularly important to Elmwood.
Known locally as “Uncle Charley,” Ferguson was remembered as much for his character as for his business activities. In 1923, Z. T. Vinson wrote about Ferguson in the Wayne County News from personal memory. Vinson described a man who helped settle disagreements among neighbors, kept accounts for people who needed assistance, looked after the welfare of others, and helped provide for families in need.
His description was unusually affectionate. Vinson believed that few people had exercised a better moral influence upon Wayne County. Ferguson was not a minister, Vinson explained, but his everyday conduct had served much the same purpose.
That community reputation becomes even more significant when paired with other records showing what Ferguson operated at Elmwood.
In January 1927 the Wayne County News published an obituary for Captain Joseph M. Ferguson, a Confederate veteran and brother of Charles. While recounting the Ferguson family, the newspaper described Charles as the man who had for many years lived at Elmwood and operated both a mill and a store there. The property was then occupied by his son, L. B. Ferguson. The newspaper placed Elmwood roughly a mile from Wayne.
Those few lines provide one of the clearest surviving descriptions of early Elmwood. It was not simply a name on a map. It contained a longstanding commercial operation closely identified with one of Wayne County’s established families.
The Mill at Elmwood
The grist mill may have been Elmwood’s most important contribution to everyday life in the surrounding countryside.
Wesley D. Kirby’s history of the Wayne community remembered that Ferguson operated a grist mill on his farm for years. More significantly, Kirby wrote that people traveled there to mill grain from throughout the Guyan Valley watershed.
That statement turns the Ferguson mill from a neighborhood curiosity into something more important.
Before modern highways and supermarkets changed rural life, a dependable grist mill was an essential institution. Farm families could raise corn or other grain, but that crop still had to be processed into usable meal or flour. A mill therefore drew people together from surrounding farms and hollows. Farmers arriving with grain exchanged news, talked politics, discussed crops and livestock, learned who was sick or recently married, and often conducted other business while waiting.
If Kirby’s recollection is accurate, the Elmwood mill attracted customers from well beyond the immediate neighborhood around Wayne.
The mill also fit naturally into the agricultural economy of Union District. A Wayne County News article about Twelvepole Creek in 1925 described the valley as containing some of the county’s better farming land and remembered the creek system as an important transportation route during the timber era. The forks of Twelvepole came together less than a mile south of Wayne, placing the county seat and surrounding communities within a landscape shaped by streams, bottomland farms, timber, and roads following the valleys.
In such a setting, a mill could become a gathering place without a large town ever forming around it.
A Store Beside the Mill
The 1927 Ferguson obituary adds another important detail. Charles Ferguson did not operate only a mill. He also conducted a store at Elmwood.
Unfortunately, the surviving online sources provide far less information about the store than the mill. Its exact opening date, inventory, size, and appearance remain unclear. County deeds, tax records, estate inventories, and Ferguson family papers may eventually answer those questions.
Even without those details, the combination of a farm, mill, and store helps explain how Elmwood functioned.
A customer who traveled there to grind grain could also purchase necessities, settle accounts, exchange produce, or hear news from Wayne. Charles Ferguson’s reputation for keeping neighbors’ accounts is especially interesting when placed beside the evidence that he operated a store. Vinson’s memories suggest that commercial dealings and personal relationships were closely connected in Ferguson’s life.
This was a familiar pattern in rural Appalachia. Businesses did not always exist as separate institutions surrounded by formal commercial blocks. A farmstead could also contain a mill, store, workplace, and gathering place. The importance of the location depended less on the number of buildings than on the number of people who had a reason to visit.
Elmwood appears to have been such a place.
From Ferguson Cemetery to Elmwood Cemetery
If the mill represents Elmwood’s economic history, the cemetery preserves its family history.
The Wayne County Genealogical and Historical Society states that Elmwood Cemetery began as a Ferguson family cemetery. The Society’s cemetery research identifies an older portion of the grounds and traces the burial place’s connection with the Ferguson family.
Over time, however, the cemetery became important to families beyond the immediate Ferguson line.
In October 1922, the Wayne County News reported the death of Dr. G. R. Burgess, a physician who had practiced in Wayne County for about forty years. Burgess had also been a farmer, businessman, and one of the organizers of the Wayne County Bank. His first wife, Clara Ferguson, was identified as a daughter of Uncle Charley Ferguson. When Burgess died, he was buried in Elmwood Cemetery.
One month later, the newspaper recorded another prominent burial there. Margaret A. Bowen, widely known as “Aunt Puss,” died in November 1922 after a long illness. The paper remembered her hospitality and her willingness to care for sick neighbors, then reported that a large crowd attended her funeral before she was buried at Elmwood Cemetery.
By 1925, newspapers were still sometimes referring to the burial ground as the “family cemetery at Elmwood.” When Dr. Carlos Eugene Wilkinson died that November, his remains were brought back to Wayne and interred there.
The changing language is revealing. Depending on the family and newspaper report, the grounds could be called the family cemetery, Ferguson Cemetery, or Elmwood Cemetery. Those names document a gradual transition from a private family burial place toward a cemetery serving the wider Wayne community.
The Mansfield Reinterment
One of the most unusual episodes in Elmwood’s history occurred in 1927.
That year relatives decided to move the remains of Colonel Joseph J. Mansfield and his young daughter, Louisa Ann, from an old burial place in Wayne. Mansfield had died during the opening months of the Civil War after being shot by a Federal picket in Putnam County in 1861. His daughter had died from measles shortly before him.
For more than six decades their graves remained on property in Wayne.
When the bodies were exhumed, the Wayne County News reported that Mansfield’s skeleton remained largely intact and that portions of his clothing could still be recognized. Even the walnut coffin and its old square nails had left identifiable remains.
Father and daughter were taken to what the newspaper called the L. B. Ferguson Cemetery at Elmwood, where Mansfield was reburied beside his wife.
The episode demonstrates how far the cemetery had moved beyond its earliest purpose. A Ferguson family burial ground had become a place where the remains of a prominent figure from Wayne County’s Civil War generation could be permanently reinterred.
Elmwood was becoming part of the county’s collective memory.
Was Elmwood Founded in 1920?
The date 1920 appears beside Elmwood in West Virginia Archives and History’s place-name database. It would be tempting to write that Elmwood was founded in that year.
The evidence does not support such a simple conclusion.
The Ferguson family had been part of the Wayne area since the early settlement period, while Charles Ferguson’s farm, mill, store, and family connections clearly belong to an older landscape. The research gathered for this article also indicates that Elmwood does not appear under that name in some important nineteenth and early twentieth-century geographic sources. The stronger interpretation is that 1920 marks the appearance or recognition of Elmwood as a documented place-name, not the moment when people first occupied the site.
By 1933 there was no question that Elmwood had become a recognized Wayne County place. The New Descriptive Atlas of West Virginia, as preserved in the state’s Districts and Place Names database, listed Elmwood in Union District alongside Wayne, Booten, Bowen, Crete, Dickson, Herbert, Lavalette, Shoals, and Winslow.
Exactly when someone first began calling the Ferguson property or surrounding neighborhood “Elmwood” remains one of the most interesting unanswered questions.
The answer may still be waiting in a deed, land book, will, tax record, early newspaper advertisement, or family letter.
A Small Place With a Wide Reach
Elmwood never needed to become a large town to matter.
Its history was built around institutions that rural people depended upon. The Ferguson mill processed grain for families from across the Guyan Valley watershed. The store provided another reason for people to make the trip. Charles Ferguson became remembered as both a businessman and a trusted neighbor. His family’s burial ground gradually became Elmwood Cemetery, where the history of Wayne County accumulated one funeral at a time.
Even the cemetery’s survival tells part of the story. The Wayne County Genealogical and Historical Society still identifies Elmwood Cemetery on Route 37 near Wayne and preserves images of its older section and of the Charles W. Ferguson monument.
For travelers today, Elmwood can be easy to pass without realizing how much history is tied to the name. Wayne’s courthouse and downtown naturally dominate the historical landscape nearby, but communities do not always grow around courthouse squares or railroad stations. Sometimes they grow around a family farm, a millstone turning grain into meal, a country store where neighbors settle their accounts, and a burial ground on the hillside.
Elmwood appears to have grown in exactly that way.
Its history is therefore not simply the story of a small community beside Wayne. It is the story of how one family’s land became part of the working and remembered landscape of Wayne County, and how the name Elmwood eventually came to describe a place whose roots were already much older than the name itself.
Sources & Further Reading
Wayne County News. “Pioneer District History.” December 25, 1919. West Virginia Archives and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/History/wcn/wcn191225.html
Vinson, Z. T. “Sturdy Pioneers of Wayne County Eulogized by Z. T. Vinson in Remarkable Word Picture.” Wayne County News, December 20, 1923. West Virginia Archives and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/History/wcn/wcn231220.html
Wayne County News. “Captain Joseph M. Ferguson, Obit.” January 13, 1927. West Virginia Archives and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/History/wcn/wcn270113.html
Wayne County News. “Death Takes Dr. G. R. Burgess.” October 12, 1922. West Virginia Archives and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/History/wcn/wcn221012.html
Wayne County News. Obituary of Margaret A. “Aunt Puss” Bowen. November 16, 1922. West Virginia Archives and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/History/wcn/wcn221116.html
Wayne County News. December 3, 1925. West Virginia Archives and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/History/wcn/wcn251203.html
Wayne County News. “Bodies of Col. J. J. Mansfield and His Daughter Exhumed Here After 66 Years.” December 8, 1927. West Virginia Archives and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/History/wcn/wcn271208.html
Wayne County News. “What Do You Know About Twelve Pole?” August 27, 1925. West Virginia Archives and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/History/wcn/wcn250827.html
Wayne County News. “Wayne County of Forty Years Ago.” January 15, 1925. West Virginia Archives and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/History/wcn/wcn250115.html
Kirby, Wesley D. “A Brief History of Wayne Community.” West Virginia Archives and History. Accessed October 9, 2026. https://archive.wvculture.org/hiStory/agrext/wayne.html
West Virginia Archives and History. “Place Names in West Virginia.” Accessed October 9, 2026. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/archives/placenames/placname.html
West Virginia Archives and History. “Districts and Place Names in West Virginia.” Accessed October 9, 2026. https://archive.wvculture.org/hiStory/communities/districtplacenames.html
Wayne County Genealogical and Historical Society. Wayne Cemetery Book, Volume One. Accessed October 9, 2026. https://wcghswv.org/wayne_cemetery_book1.php?thisPage=wayne_cemetery_book1
Wayne County Genealogical and Historical Society. Wayne Cemetery Book, Volume Three. Accessed October 9, 2026. https://wcghswv.org/wayne_cemetery_book3.php?thisPage=wayne_cemetery_book3
Wayne County Genealogical and Historical Society. “Samuel Ferguson Historical Marker.” Accessed October 9, 2026. https://wcghswv.org/samuel_ferguson.php?thisPage=sf_marker
Hardesty, H. H. Hardesty’s Historical and Geographical Encyclopedia: Wayne, Lincoln and Cabell Counties, West Virginia. Chicago and Toledo: H. H. Hardesty & Co., 1884. https://waynewv.com/wcghs/wayne_county_hisotry.php?thisPage=wayne_county_hisotry
Massie, Evelyn Booth. Ferguson Family Genealogical History of Wayne County, West Virginia (Early Cabell and Kanawha, Virginia). 1985. https://openlibrary.org/books/OL2555142M/Ferguson_family_genealogical_history_of_Wayne_County_West_Virginia_
Krebs, Charles E., and D. D. Teets Jr. Cabell, Wayne and Lincoln Counties. Morgantown: West Virginia Geological Survey, 1913. https://ngmdb.usgs.gov/Prodesc/proddesc_10497.htm
Gannett, Henry. A Gazetteer of West Virginia. Bulletin 233. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1904. https://pubs.usgs.gov/bul/0233/report.pdf
United States Geological Survey. Wayne Quadrangle, West Virginia-Kentucky. 1:62,500. Washington, DC: U.S. Geological Survey, 1909. USGS Historical Topographic Map Collection
Library of Congress. “[Survey of a Tract of Land on Twelve Pole Creek, Wayne County, West Virginia].” Manuscript map, ca. 1880. Geography and Map Division, Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/resource/g3893w.cwh00328/
West Virginia State Archives. “County Court Records: Wayne County.” West Virginia Department of Arts, Culture and History. Accessed October 9, 2026. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/archives/bluenote.html
Wayne County Clerk. “Document Inquiry and County Records.” Wayne County, West Virginia. Accessed October 9, 2026. https://waynecountywv.org/countyclerk.php
Wayne County Assessor. “Land Books and Mapping.” Wayne County, West Virginia. Accessed October 9, 2026. https://waynecountywv.org/assessor.php
West Virginia and Regional History Center. “Wayne County Newspaper Clippings, A&M 0168.” West Virginia University Libraries. Accessed October 9, 2026. https://archives.lib.wvu.edu/repositories/2/resources/2486
West Virginia and Regional History Center. “West Virginia Postmasters Appointment Records, A&M 3026.” West Virginia University Libraries. Accessed October 9, 2026. https://archives.lib.wvu.edu/subjects/724
Wayne County Genealogical and Historical Society. “Historic Wayne County Newspapers.” Accessed October 9, 2026. https://waynewv.com/wcghs/
Appalachian Regional Commission. “Appalachian Counties Served by ARC.” Accessed October 9, 2026. https://www.arc.gov/appalachian-counties-served-by-arc/
Appalachian Regional Commission. “Wayne County, West Virginia.” Accessed October 9, 2026. https://www.arc.gov/states_counties/wayne-west-virginia/
Author Note: Elmwood is a place whose history survives less through a formal founding than through the Ferguson family, their mill and store, and the cemetery that grew from their land. I wanted to preserve that quieter story because small communities beside county seats can easily disappear into the history of the larger town.