Appalachian Community Histories – Lincoln District, Wayne County: Pioneer Settlement, Railroads, Schools, and a Lost Appalachian District
Lincoln can be easy to misunderstand when its name appears in an old Wayne County newspaper, census schedule, deed, school record, or family history. It was not simply a forgotten town somewhere in southern Wayne County. Lincoln was a magisterial district, a broad section of rugged country containing dozens of communities, creek valleys, farms, schools, post offices, railroad stops, churches, mines, and family settlements.
That distinction explains why so many places that seem separate on modern maps repeatedly appear beneath the same name in historical records. In 1933, a West Virginia place-name compilation placed Cassie, Court, Crum, Dio, Doan, Dunlow, Effie, Felix, Ferguson, Fleming, Genoa, Glen Hayes, Grassy, Marcum, Millett, Missouri Branch, Quaker, Radnor, Stonecoal, Webb, and Wilsondale within Lincoln District. These were communities scattered through a difficult mountain landscape, yet for generations they shared the same local governmental district.
The history of Lincoln District is therefore much larger than the story of any one settlement. It reaches from pioneer cabins and isolated farms to the Norfolk & Western Railway, from one-room mountain schools to paved highways, and from expectations of immense coal wealth to population decline and political redistricting. By 1990, Lincoln District no longer officially existed, but the communities that once made it up remained scattered across southern Wayne County.
A District of Ridges, Creeks, and Hollows
A 1919 account in the Wayne County News described Lincoln as occupying the southern end of Wayne County and called its surface perhaps the most broken of any of the county’s districts. That rugged geography shaped nearly everything that followed.
Settlement tended to follow creek bottoms and narrow valleys because the steep ridges made travel, farming, and construction difficult. Twelvepole Creek and its branches formed some of the most important corridors through the interior, while communities closer to the Tug Fork and Big Sandy were tied economically and socially to the river valleys along the Kentucky border.
The landscape created isolation, but it also contained resources that attracted attention from outside investors. Timber covered the hills, coal lay beneath them, and the valleys offered potential transportation corridors into a region that had long been difficult to reach.
Even in 1919, however, the Wayne County News argued that Lincoln District’s greatest wealth remained in coal that had not yet been fully developed. The newspaper believed much of that mineral wealth would remain inaccessible until transportation reached the coal deposits themselves. It was a familiar Appalachian problem. Resources might be abundant beneath the mountains, but their value depended upon whether they could be moved economically to market.
Pioneer Settlement in Southern Wayne County
The early history of Lincoln District comes partly from a remarkable Wayne County News article published on December 18, 1919. Because the newspaper was describing events that had supposedly occurred more than a century earlier, its pioneer claims should be treated as local historical tradition rather than contemporary documentation. Even so, the account preserves names and stories that would otherwise be difficult to recover.
According to the newspaper, the first cabin in what became Lincoln District was built by a man named Nevins in 1799. Other settlers remembered in the account included John Wilson, Jacob Noe, John Prinston, Richard Wilson, Hezekiah Wiley, Job Spence, Lazarus Damron, Daniel Cox, John Jarrell, and Henry Hampton.
The newspaper also identified Hezekiah Wiley as a son of Jenny Wiley, whose captivity story became one of the best-known frontier narratives in eastern Kentucky and southwestern Virginia. It named William Ratcliff as the first child born in the district, giving his birth at the mouth of Lost Creek below the Falls of Tug River on May 19, 1802.
One of the most interesting stories concerned Daniel Boone.
The 1919 article claimed that a beech tree near the mouth of Billy’s Branch once contained the name of Daniel Boone cut into its bark. Older residents reportedly remembered seeing the carving when they were boys, before the tree was destroyed. The newspaper itself was careful not to declare that Boone had definitely visited the area, stating that his presence in that section of Wayne County had not been proved.
That qualification is important. Appalachian communities contain many Boone trees, Boone rocks, Boone trails, and stories linking the frontiersman with local landscapes. Some are historically documented while others survive mainly as tradition. The Billy’s Branch carving belongs in Lincoln District’s historical memory, but it should not be treated as proof that Boone traveled there.
Education and religion followed settlement into the valleys. Henry Hampton, one of the pioneers named in the newspaper account, was remembered as the teacher of Lincoln District’s first school, located on Mill Creek. Pioneer ministers included Reuben Giddings, Gorwin Lycan, John Jarrell, Stephen Workman, and Joseph Workman.
These early schools and churches were small institutions, but in scattered Appalachian settlements they became some of the most important gathering places in community life.
From Frontier Country to a Growing District
Wayne County itself had been formed from Cabell County in 1842. The southern portion of the county was among the earliest settled areas, yet development remained slow because of its rugged terrain and poor transportation. The northern end of the county benefited more quickly from Huntington, the Ohio River, and expanding railroad connections after the Civil War. Southern Wayne had to wait longer for comparable economic change.
By the late nineteenth century, federal census records show that Lincoln District was growing.
The population stood at about 3,144 in 1890. By 1900 it had increased to 4,326, and in 1910 it reached 4,693. Those figures reflected a period when the entire southern portion of Wayne County was being transformed by railroad construction, timbering, mining ventures, new post offices, and the growth of communities along transportation routes.
The change was dramatic enough that southern Wayne County developed its own political ambitions. During the railroad boom there were efforts to divide Wayne County and create a new county, sometimes proposed under the names Clark or Wilson. Dunlow was considered as the possible county seat. The movement eventually failed, but its existence shows the level of optimism surrounding southern Wayne County near the turn of the twentieth century.
Much of that optimism was connected to steel rails.
The Railroad Reaches Lincoln District
The arrival of the Norfolk & Western Railway changed the possibilities of life in Lincoln District.
During the early 1890s, the Norfolk & Western pushed its Ohio Extension through southern West Virginia toward the Ohio River. The line entered the Twelvepole country, following creek valleys wherever possible through terrain that required sharp curves, repeated stream crossings, bridges, cuts, and tunnels.
Dunlow became one of the most important railroad communities in the district. Construction of its station began in 1891, and the first train reached the community that December. Around the tracks came railroad workers, merchants, coal companies, timber interests, land speculators, and families hoping to participate in the expected boom.
Other Lincoln District communities were also tied to the Twelvepole route. Genoa, Ferguson, Fleming, Doan, Radnor, and neighboring settlements became part of a transportation landscape that had scarcely existed a generation earlier.
The railroad did more than carry passengers. It changed how quickly mail could move, where merchants could obtain goods, how timber could reach distant markets, and which places were attractive to industrial investors. For communities that had depended on wagon roads, horseback travel, and creek paths, the locomotive represented a connection to an economic world far beyond southern Wayne County.
Yet the railroad’s impact was uneven.
Coal, Timber, and Expectations of a Boom
The hills of Lincoln District attracted investors because they promised timber, coal, oil, gas, and other resources. The West Virginia Geological Survey’s massive 1913 study of Cabell, Wayne, and Lincoln counties documented the geology, mineral resources, soils, streams, transportation systems, and economic possibilities of the region.
Coal became particularly important to the way outsiders imagined southern Wayne County.
Railroad development encouraged speculation that communities such as Dunlow might become centers of a major mining region. Companies acquired mineral rights, opened workings, surveyed land, and promoted the economic potential of the mountains.
In some places mining became important, but the enormous coal boom expected by promoters did not fully materialize throughout the Twelvepole country. Some seams proved difficult or uneconomical to mine, and the Norfolk & Western increasingly found that its greatest traffic opportunities lay in hauling coal from fields farther south and east rather than developing every deposit beside its original Wayne County route.
That helps explain the strange observation made by the Wayne County News in 1919. Nearly three decades after the railroad had entered southern Wayne County, the paper still described Lincoln District’s coal wealth as largely undeveloped.
Timber remained important as well. Logging operations took advantage of forests that had once made travel difficult, and the railroad offered a more efficient way to move lumber and other products from the mountains. Farms continued throughout the district at the same time, especially in creek bottoms and more usable patches of land.
Lincoln District never became only a coal district or only a railroad district. Its economy remained a mixture of small farming, timbering, mining, railroad employment, local trade, and household production.
A District Filled With Schools
One of the clearest pictures of everyday Lincoln District comes not from a mine report or railroad timetable, but from a list of schoolteachers.
On May 20, 1926, the Wayne County News published the teachers selected by the Lincoln District Board of Education for the coming school year. The number of schools reveals how scattered the population remained.
The list included schools at Vinson, Glenhayes, Dragg Creek, Camp Creek, Yellow Poplar, Locust Knob, Crum, Stonecoal, Wilsondale, Marcum, Walnut Grove, Turkey Creek, Perry Ridge, Doane, Dunlow, Ferguson, Radnor, Genoa, Effie, Billie’s Branch, Grassy, Webb, Lower Mill Creek, Horse Creek, Hickory Gap, Hurricane Branch, and many other locations.
Some were graded schools with principals and assistants. Others were much smaller schools serving a single hollow, ridge, or cluster of families.
That network tells us something important about life before widespread automobiles and reliable paved roads. A school could not simply be placed many miles away and expected to serve children scattered through the mountains. Schools had to be close enough for students to reach them through the terrain.
The same geography that produced dozens of small communities therefore produced dozens of schools.
In places where the post office, store, railroad stop, or mill might disappear, the school often remained one of the strongest expressions of local identity. Children from a particular creek or hollow attended classes together, families gathered for school programs, and teachers became well-known figures throughout the surrounding community.
As roads improved and school transportation expanded during the twentieth century, many of these small schools would eventually be consolidated. Their disappearance changed the social geography of Lincoln District just as much as the closing of a post office or railroad station.
Building Roads Through the Mountains
If the railroad represented the great transportation revolution of the late nineteenth century, the automobile road represented the next one.
By the early 1920s, Wayne County newspapers were filled with discussion of road construction. Lincoln District became central to plans for the Tug River Highway, a proposed route intended to connect Huntington with the southern West Virginia coalfields.
In August 1922, Lincoln District voters approved a bond issue to finance construction. A November newspaper report described approximately thirty-five miles of roadway through the district as one of the most important remaining links in the larger highway. The project promised to connect previously isolated communities with Wayne County, Huntington, Williamson, and the developing road network of southern West Virginia.
The scale of investment can be seen in a contract awarded the following year.
On March 9, 1923, the Wayne County Court awarded a contract for approximately six and one-half miles of highway between Radnor and a point near Dunlow. The price was $143,124, with money coming from Lincoln District road bonds. Contemporary reporting treated the contract as another major step toward completing the Tug River Highway.
For people living in the district, these roads represented more than convenience.
Better roads affected where families shopped, where children attended school, how quickly doctors could reach patients, where agricultural products could be sold, and whether residents needed a railroad timetable to travel outside their communities.
The automobile would eventually compete with the very railroad that had helped modernize Lincoln District a generation earlier.
The Twelvepole Line Begins to Fade
The Norfolk & Western’s original Twelvepole route had never been ideal for increasingly heavy railroad traffic.
Its curves and repeated creek crossings created operational problems, especially as enormous quantities of coal began moving toward the Ohio River. Between the early 1900s and the middle 1920s, the railroad increasingly shifted important traffic to its more efficient Big Sandy route.
Communities along Twelvepole remained connected to rail service, but they no longer stood along the Norfolk & Western’s most important line.
By the beginning of the Great Depression, the company sought permission to abandon a large section of the old route between Wayne and Lenore. State and local interests opposed the proposal, but declining passenger and freight traffic made continued operation increasingly difficult to justify.
The last train passed through Dunlow on September 1, 1933. Soon afterward rails and ties were removed from much of the abandoned line.
The loss could have severed the transportation corridor entirely, but another transformation was already underway. Portions of the old railroad right-of-way were eventually adapted for highways and local roads. Routes first carved through the mountains for locomotives became useful to automobiles.
The transportation technology changed, but the geography did not.
Lincoln District on the 1933 Map
The same year that trains disappeared from much of the old Twelvepole route, a statewide geographical compilation preserved a detailed picture of Lincoln District’s communities.
Cassie, Court, Crum, Dio, Doan, Dunlow, Effie, Felix, Ferguson, Fleming, Genoa, Glen Hayes, Grassy, Marcum, Millett, Missouri Branch, Quaker, Radnor, Stonecoal, Webb, and Wilsondale were all placed within Lincoln District.
Some had post offices. Some had schools. Some had railroad connections or stores. Others consisted largely of homes stretched along a creek or tucked into neighboring hollows.
Together they demonstrate why Lincoln should not be searched for as though it were one forgotten town.
Lincoln was the administrative name connecting a broad network of Appalachian places.
This is especially important for genealogical research. A birth, marriage, death, census entry, deed, tax record, or newspaper notice might identify someone as living in Lincoln District even though the person’s immediate community was Crum, Dunlow, Genoa, Radnor, Effie, or another settlement. Searching only the community name can therefore miss records filed under the larger district.
Population Change in the Twentieth Century
The population history of Lincoln District reflects both the opportunities and instability of southern Wayne County.
Federal tables recorded 4,326 residents in 1900 and 4,693 in 1910. The published 1920 federal census table reported 3,074 people, although another contemporary state publication contains a conflicting figure, making the exact 1920 comparison worth treating cautiously.
Later census figures show continued fluctuation.
Lincoln District had 5,294 residents in 1960 but only 3,998 in 1970, a decline of roughly one-fourth in a decade according to the Census Bureau. By 1980 the reported population had risen again to 5,485.
Those numbers should not be read as a simple story of steady decline. District boundaries, employment patterns, transportation, school consolidation, the movement of families, and changes in the regional economy all shaped where people lived and how they were counted.
What is clear is that the Lincoln District of the late twentieth century was no longer the same place economically that railroad and coal promoters had imagined near the beginning of the century.
Many small post offices had disappeared. Numerous community schools had consolidated. The Twelvepole railroad was gone. Automobiles connected residents with larger towns, and many workers increasingly traveled farther from home for employment.
The communities survived, but the institutions that once made each hollow more self-contained gradually became fewer.
The End of Lincoln District
Lincoln District survived as an official census and governmental geography much longer than the railroad that had once transformed it.
The change finally came between the 1980 and 1990 censuses.
In its notes explaining West Virginia boundary changes, the United States Census Bureau stated that Wayne County had been redistricted and that Lincoln District was abolished. Its territory was added to Stonewall District, and the county’s district boundaries were changed.
With that administrative decision, a name that had organized southern Wayne County records for generations disappeared from the official county map.
The communities did not disappear with it.
Crum remained Crum. Dunlow remained Dunlow. Genoa, Ferguson, Glenhayes, Radnor, Stonecoal, Webb, Wilsondale, and the other places associated with Lincoln District continued to carry their own histories. What disappeared was the political geography that had tied them together.
For historians, genealogists, and descendants of Wayne County families, however, Lincoln District remains essential.
Why Lincoln District Still Matters
The story of Lincoln District is the story of how geography shaped Appalachian life.
Its steep ridges encouraged settlement along creeks. Those scattered settlements created the need for small local schools. Coal and timber attracted investors, but difficult transportation restricted development. The railroad opened the region, created new towns, and reorganized older communities. Better railroad routes later shifted traffic elsewhere. Roads financed through local bonds then brought another transportation revolution, eventually using some of the same corridors first opened for rail travel.
The district’s history also reminds us that Appalachian communities cannot always be understood by looking only for incorporated towns.
A person might have lived at Effie, attended school along Mill Creek, received mail through another post office, worked near Dunlow, traveled over the Tug River Highway, and still have been recorded officially as a resident of Lincoln District.
Each description could be correct.
That layered geography is why the old district name continues to appear across census records, newspapers, deeds, school documents, election records, court cases, railroad papers, and family histories.
Lincoln District disappeared from official census geography before the 1990 enumeration, but more than a century of records had already fixed the name into Wayne County history.
The district survives now in fragments: an old school name, a railroad grade beneath a modern road, a cemetery on a hillside, a coal deed, a census page, a newspaper clipping, or a family story identifying someone simply as being “of Lincoln District.”
Put those fragments together and they reveal something much larger than a lost political boundary. They reveal a network of communities that spent generations adapting to the mountains around them, connected first by creeks and footpaths, then by rails and roads, and finally by a shared history that outlived the district itself.
Sources & Further Reading
Wayne County News. “Squibs from Early History of Districts in This County: Lincoln District.” December 18, 1919. West Virginia Archives and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/History/wcn/wcn191218.html
Wayne County News. “History of School System in Wayne County: Shows Immense Growth in Century.” October 23, 1919. West Virginia Archives and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/History/wcn/wcn191023.html
Wayne County News. “New Huntington Road Is Opened to Traffic Now.” November 16, 1922. Wayne County Genealogical and Historical Society. https://waynewv.com/wcghs/oldsite/Old%20Newspapers/Newspapers%201922.htm
Wayne County News. “Radnor to Dunlow Contract Is Let for $143,124.00.” March 15, 1923. Wayne County Genealogical and Historical Society. https://waynewv.com/wcghs/oldsite/Old%20Newspapers/Newspapers%201923.htm
Wayne County News. “Trains Taken From Old Line to Big Sandy.” June 18, 1925. Wayne County Genealogical and Historical Society. https://waynewv.com/wcghs/oldsite/Old%20Newspapers/Newspapers%201925.htm
Wayne County News. “Teachers Are Employed for Lincoln District.” May 20, 1926. West Virginia Archives and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/History/wcn/wcn260520.html
West Virginia Archives and History. “Districts and Place Names in West Virginia.” Based on the New Descriptive Atlas of West Virginia, 1933. Accessed October 10, 2026. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/communities/districtplacenames.html
U.S. Bureau of the Census. Population by Counties and Minor Civil Divisions, 1910, 1900, 1890. Bulletin 360. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1912. https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/decennial/1910/bulletins/demographics/360-population-by-counties-minor-civil-divisions-1910-1900-1890-part-4.pdf
U.S. Bureau of the Census. Population: West Virginia. Number of Inhabitants, by Counties and Minor Civil Divisions. Fourteenth Census of the United States, 1920. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/decennial/1920/bulletins/demographics/population-wv-number-of-inhabitants.pdf
U.S. Bureau of the Census. Fifteenth Census of the United States: 1930, Population, Volume I. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1931. https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/decennial/1930/population-volume-1/03815512v1ch10.pdf
U.S. Bureau of the Census. Sixteenth Census of the United States: 1940, Population. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/decennial/1940/population-volume-2/33973538v2p7ch5.pdf
U.S. Bureau of the Census. 1960 Census of Population: West Virginia, Number of Inhabitants. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1961. https://www2.census.gov/prod2/decennial/documents/10107945v1pAch10.pdf
U.S. Bureau of the Census. 1970 Census of Population: West Virginia. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. https://www2.census.gov/prod2/decennial/documents/00496492v1p50ch2.pdf
U.S. Bureau of the Census. 1980 Census of Population and Housing: West Virginia. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Commerce. https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/decennial/1980/volume-1/west-virginia/1980censusofpopu80150uns_bw.pdf
U.S. Bureau of the Census. 1990 Census of Population and Housing: West Virginia. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Commerce, 1992. https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/decennial/1990/cph-2/cph-2-50.pdf
Krebs, C. E., and D. D. Teets Jr. Cabell, Wayne and Lincoln Counties. County Reports and Maps. Wheeling, WV: West Virginia Geological Survey, 1913. https://books.google.com/books?id=ePNLAAAAMAAJ
West Virginia Geological and Economic Survey. “Wayne County Topography Map.” 1913. In Cabell, Wayne, and Lincoln Counties. https://downloads.wvgs.wvnet.edu/pubcat/docs/WVGES_Publication_Catalog.pdf
West Virginia Geological and Economic Survey. “Wayne County General and Economic Geology Map.” 1913. In Cabell, Wayne, and Lincoln Counties. https://downloads.wvgs.wvnet.edu/pubcat/docs/WVGES_Publication_Catalog.pdf
West Virginia Geological and Economic Survey. “Wayne County Agricultural Soils Map.” 1913. In Cabell, Wayne, and Lincoln Counties. https://downloads.wvgs.wvnet.edu/pubcat/docs/WVGES_Publication_Catalog.pdf
Library of Congress. “[Survey of a Tract of Land on Twelve Pole Creek, Wayne County, West Virginia].” Hotchkiss Map Collection, ca. 1880s. https://www.loc.gov/resource/g3893w.cwh00328/
Gannett, Henry. A Gazetteer of West Virginia. U.S. Geological Survey Bulletin 233. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1904. https://pubs.usgs.gov/publication/b233
Straley, Steven Cody. National Register of Historic Places Registration Form: Dunlow Norfolk & Western Railway Depot. 2022. West Virginia State Historic Preservation Office and National Park Service. https://wvculture.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Dunlow-Depot-with-Pictures-Reduced.pdf
Norfolk & Western Railway. “Dunlow Depot Blueprints.” 1896. HS-D10649. Reproduced in the Dunlow Norfolk & Western Railway Depot National Register documentation. https://wvculture.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Dunlow-Depot-with-Pictures-Reduced.pdf
“The Last of the ‘Twelve Pole’ Line.” Norfolk and Western Magazine 11, no. 11 (November 1933): 408–10. Reproduced in the Dunlow Norfolk & Western Railway Depot National Register documentation. https://wvculture.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Dunlow-Depot-with-Pictures-Reduced.pdf
Hardesty, H. H., & Co. Hardesty’s Historical and Geographical Encyclopedia: Maps and Histories of Wayne, Lincoln and Cabell Counties, West Virginia. Chicago and Toledo: H. H. Hardesty & Co., 1884.
West Virginia and Regional History Center. “West Virginia Postmasters Appointment Records, 1857–1971.” A&M 3026. West Virginia University Libraries. https://ip-150-68.dynamic.wvu.edu/repositories/2/resources/1217
West Virginia and Regional History Center. “U.S. Post Office Department, Post Office Site Location Reports, 1837–1950.” A&M 3058. West Virginia University Libraries. https://archives.lib.wvu.edu/repositories/2/resources/1240
West Virginia Archives and History. “Vital Research Records Project.” West Virginia Department of Arts, Culture and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/vrr/
Wayne County Clerk. “Document Inquiry and County Records.” Wayne County, West Virginia. https://www.waynecountywv.org/countyclerk.php
Library of Virginia. “West Virginia County Records Microfilm: Wayne County.” County Records Research Guide. https://lva-virginia.libguides.com/west-virginia/county-records
West Virginia and Regional History Center. “Historical Records Survey, Wayne County, West Virginia.” 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/repositories/2/resources/2486
West Virginia and Regional History Center. “F. B. Lambert Papers.” A&M 1244. West Virginia University Libraries. https://archives.lib.wvu.edu/subjects/3352
Salstrom, Paul. “Oral Histories with Lincoln, Logan, Wayne, and Mingo County Residents.” A&M 3551, 1988. West Virginia and Regional History Center, West Virginia University Libraries. https://ip-150-68.dynamic.wvu.edu/repositories/2/resources/1953
Massey, Tim R. “Wayne County.” e-WV: The West Virginia Encyclopedia. https://www.wvencyclopedia.org/entries/897
Taylor, Mildred. History of Wayne County. 1963.
Lewis, Stephen. An Overview of the History of Wayne County. 1997.
State v. S. M. & M. Turnpike Co. West Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals, 1904. https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/state-v-s-m-m-turnpike-co-wva-1904
Staley v. Wayne County Court. West Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals, 1930. https://www.casemine.com/judgement/us/5914a666add7b049346da857
Author Note: Lincoln District no longer appears on the modern Wayne County map, but its name survives across generations of census records, newspapers, schools, railroads, deeds, and family histories. I hope this history helps reconnect the many communities that once shared the district and preserves a piece of southern Wayne County’s identity that could otherwise be forgotten.