Appalachian Community Histories – Prichard, Wayne County: The Story of Round Bottom, Turman’s Ferry, and Prichard
Prichard sits along the Big Sandy River in western Wayne County, close enough to Kentucky that much of its history has always belonged to both sides of the water. Today it is identified by the United States Census Bureau as a census-designated place, with 461 residents recorded in the 2020 census, but the modern name tells only the most recent part of the story. Long before maps labeled the community Prichard, this stretch of the river was associated with Round Bottom, the Hatton family, Turman’s Ferry, farms, country stores, river crossings, and the constant movement of people between what became West Virginia and eastern Kentucky.
The geography explains much of what followed. The Big Sandy was a boundary, but it was never simply a wall. Ferries joined families and communities on opposite banks. Farmers crossed it to trade. Merchants depended upon customers from both states. Soldiers crossed it during the Civil War. More than a century later, railroad planners again looked at Prichard and saw transportation potential, this time imagining freight containers traveling between the ports of Virginia and the industrial Midwest.
Seen across that longer span, Prichard is not merely a small roadside settlement on U.S. 52. It is a community whose history has repeatedly been shaped by one question: how could people and goods move through the Big Sandy Valley?
Round Bottom Before Prichard
One of the oldest names connected with the present Prichard area is Round Bottom. Local historical work associates the bottomland with Samuel Hatton, a Revolutionary War veteran who eventually settled along the Big Sandy. The historical marker erected near Prichard states that Hatton served in the Virginia forces during the Revolution, received a grant of 100 acres at Round Bottom, and came to the area around 1810. He died in 1839 and became the ancestor of numerous Hatton and Hatten families in Wayne County.
The exact details of Hatton’s Revolutionary service and migration have been repeated differently in later genealogical accounts, so the safest conclusion is the one supported by the marker and the land-grant tradition behind it: Round Bottom was already part of the settlement landscape before Wayne County itself existed. Wayne County was not created until 1842, when the Virginia General Assembly formed it from part of Cabell County. That means researchers tracing early families around Prichard must sometimes look under Cabell County rather than Wayne County when searching records from the first decades of the nineteenth century.
Round Bottom continued to appear as a recognizable locality well into the nineteenth century. An 1884 biographical account described James Cowan as living on the farm in Butler District that had belonged to the pioneer Samuel Hatton and gave Cowan’s post office address simply as Round Bottom, Wayne County, West Virginia. The name therefore referred to more than a vague geographical bend in the river. It functioned as the identity of a settled neighborhood before Prichard became the standard community name.
Turman’s Ferry and the River Crossing
The next important name in the story is Turman’s Ferry. The West Virginia Archives and History place-name index makes the connection directly. Its entry for Prichard lists the Wayne County community in 1911 and associates it with “Turman’s Ferry Cabell County 1839.” The archive’s corresponding entry for Turnman’s Ferry points back to Prichard. That record preserves the memory of an older river-centered community that existed before modern county boundaries and place names settled into their familiar form.
Across the river in Kentucky, James Turman developed a ferry, farm, and stopping place that became an important landmark on the lower Big Sandy. William Ely’s nineteenth-century history, The Big Sandy Valley, remembered Turman’s Ferry as one of the most prominent places on the Sandy between Louisa and the river’s mouth for roughly a quarter century before 1864. Travelers, merchants, farmers, and politicians knew the crossing, and an inn associated with the ferry gave people another reason to stop there. By the late nineteenth century, however, Ely observed that newer transportation points were drawing away some of the trade once centered at Turman’s Ferry. He specifically mentioned James Prichard at Round Bottom as sharing in the business of the surrounding neighborhood.
That short observation is important because it captures the area during a transition. Turman’s Ferry still carried an old and recognizable name, but Round Bottom was becoming increasingly associated with James Prichard. The future name of the West Virginia community was beginning to emerge.
War Comes to Turman’s Ferry
The quiet river crossing entered the military record during one of the coldest periods of the Civil War in the Big Sandy Valley.
During the winter of 1863 and 1864, severe cold froze the Big Sandy. Union troops stationed at Louisa depended on supplies moving through the valley, and on January 9, 1864, a detachment of the 39th Kentucky Infantry moved down the Kentucky side of the river toward Catlettsburg. What appeared to be an ordinary winter movement became a disaster near Turman’s Ferry.
Major Rhys M. Thomas, commanding the Union post at Catlettsburg, submitted a report that later appeared in the Official Records of the War of the Rebellion. Thomas stated that approximately seventy-five men of the 39th Kentucky, commanded by Captain King, had camped for the night when roughly 150 Confederate soldiers from Colonel Milton J. Ferguson’s command attacked them. The Confederates crossed the frozen Big Sandy on the ice. According to Thomas, one Union lieutenant was killed, another lieutenant and eight men were captured, and twenty soldiers eventually had to be sent to the hospital at Ashland because they were badly frozen.
Later accounts add the frightening details behind those short military statistics. Union soldiers scattered from their quarters into snow and bitter cold, with some suffering frostbite severe enough to contribute to lasting disability. The engagement became known as the Battle or Skirmish of Turman’s Ferry. Although much of the actual fighting occurred on the Kentucky side of the river, the Confederate force had approached from the Virginia, soon to be West Virginia, side and crossed the Big Sandy on the ice. Round Bottom and the future Prichard area therefore formed part of the landscape through which the raid unfolded.
It was an unusual battle shaped as much by weather and geography as by gunfire. The same river that normally required a ferry had frozen solid enough to become a military road.
James Prichard and a New Name
The transformation from Round Bottom to Prichard can be traced much more clearly than the origins of many small Appalachian place names.
A remarkably useful source appeared in 1912, only shortly after the modern place name entered official use. A. M. Prichard’s Descendants of William Prichard, published in Charleston, included a biographical account of James Prichard, son of Lewis Prichard. James was born October 16, 1841, and married Henrietta Smith at Round Bottom in 1870. According to the family history, he lived at Round Bottom from shortly after the Civil War until his death on December 3, 1910. During those decades he operated a small country store and traded in land and livestock.
The same 1912 source makes the naming claim directly: “Round Bottom is now called ‘Prichard’ in honor of this man.” Because the statement was published only two years after James Prichard’s death and at almost exactly the time Prichard began appearing as an official place name, it provides unusually strong evidence for the community’s namesake.
The timeline fits the state records. West Virginia Archives and History identifies Prichard in Wayne County by 1911, only a year after James Prichard died. The older Round Bottom name never disappeared entirely, and it remains visible locally in road names and historical references, but Prichard became the name under which the community entered twentieth-century maps, newspapers, postal records, and government documents.
This also helps distinguish James Prichard from another prominent member of the wider family, Belvard J. Prichard. Belvard became an influential Wayne County lawyer, banker, politician, and businessman and served as president of the Wayne County Bank from its organization in 1902 until his death in 1941. His importance to Wayne County was considerable, but the surviving family history specifically credits James Prichard of Round Bottom as the man for whom the community was named.
Ferries, Stores, and Everyday Commerce
Even after the Prichard name emerged, the old ferry economy remained important enough to produce a case before Kentucky’s highest court.
In Hatten v. Turman, decided in 1906, the Kentucky Court of Appeals considered a dispute over the ferry privilege at Turman’s Ferry. John Turman complained that operators of a nearby store were transporting customers across the Big Sandy in a skiff, competing with his legally established ferry. The court record offers an unusually vivid glimpse of life along the river. The store owners maintained a boat and employed someone to operate it. Customers traveling from West Virginia to the Kentucky store received tickets covering the cost of their passage, and a bell had even been placed on the West Virginia bank so people could signal that they wanted to cross.
What looks at first like a technical lawsuit about ferry franchises becomes a window into Prichard’s daily economy. People on one bank shopped on the other. A merchant could gain business by helping customers cross the river. The ferry was not simply a transportation service. It tied together a neighborhood divided by a state line and a major waterway.
The court sided with Turman, concluding that the rival crossing effectively operated as transportation for compensation and infringed upon the established ferry privilege. The dispute shows that even in the opening years of the twentieth century, before automobiles and improved highways transformed Wayne County, the Big Sandy remained central to ordinary business and travel.
A Community Appears in the Newspapers
By the 1910s and 1920s, Prichard was no longer simply the new name for Round Bottom. It had become a recognized community with its own local identity.
The Big Sandy News carried a “PRICHARD, W. VA.” community column in June 1916, recording the kinds of marriages, church activities, business dealings, visits, and family movements that made up daily life in a rural Appalachian settlement. Pasted markdown
Eleven years later, the Wayne County News devoted another section to “LOCAL NEWS ITEMS, PRICHARD.” Its March 17, 1927, column mentioned families with names including Keyes, Cooksey, Hatten, Frazier, Shannon, Boyd, Meredith, Perry, Bryant, and Cole. Residents traveled to Fort Gay, Kenova, Huntington, Portsmouth, and Logan, while two men from Zelda, Kentucky, came to Prichard on business. The short notices show just how connected the community remained to the larger Big Sandy and Ohio River region. Prichard was small, but its residents moved constantly through the towns around them.
The newspaper column also preserves something government reports rarely capture. Prichard was a place of mothers visiting children, funerals drawing relatives across county lines, people moving between hollows, Sunday visits, business trips, and neighbors following one another’s illnesses and travels. Behind the place names, ferries, and transportation schemes was a community built from those ordinary relationships.
From the River to the Railroad
Prichard’s transportation story entered an entirely new phase at the end of the twentieth century.
Transportation planners studying freight movement through the Appalachian region began considering Prichard as the site of an inland intermodal terminal. A 2015 state study reported that the concept grew out of the Heartland Corridor double-stack rail initiative and that feasibility work in 1999 and 2003 identified Prichard as a preferred location. The plan was ambitious. Containers arriving through the Port of Virginia could be carried inland by rail, transferred at Prichard, and connected with regional markets or continue through the Heartland Corridor toward Columbus and Chicago.
The Heartland Intermodal Gateway was eventually constructed on the southern end of Prichard. State records describe a facility encompassing roughly 65 acres in its completed form, built following a 2013 agreement involving Norfolk Southern and designed to transfer standard shipping containers between trucks and railcars. The project cost about $32 million, financed through state funding and a federal grant.
The terminal opened with enormous expectations, but the hoped-for freight traffic did not materialize. A later Virginia inland-port study used Prichard as a cautionary example, reporting that the facility had been developed without enough committed demand and never approached the roughly 20,000 annual lifts considered necessary for a successful operation. Norfolk Southern provided service for a period, but traffic remained too low to sustain the original intermodal model, and the facility eventually ceased operating in that form.
For a place whose earlier history revolved around ferry traffic, it was a striking repetition. Once again, Prichard’s future seemed tied to whether transportation passing through the Big Sandy Valley could support a local economy.
The Central Appalachia Inland Port
The story did not end with the original gateway’s closure.
In 2022, West Virginia transferred the Heartland Intermodal Gateway to the Wayne County Commission, placing the facility under local control. County leaders and regional partners then searched for a new operator and a different way to use the site. R. J. Corman Railroad Switching Company eventually received a contract to lease the facility, which was renamed the Central Appalachia Inland Port at Prichard.
Operations returned in phases. The first stage centered on railcar repair rather than immediately attempting to recreate the original container-transfer model. R. J. Corman established a repair hub with approximately fourteen employees while leaving open the possibility of future transloading and intermodal operations. Regional economic-development planning documents for 2025-2029 continue to identify the Prichard facility as an active economic-development asset, and current transportation planning describes it as a rail repair hub with ambitions to expand into additional freight services.
That modern operation gives Prichard an unusual historical continuity. Transportation technology has changed almost beyond recognition, but the location continues to matter for many of the same geographical reasons that made Round Bottom and Turman’s Ferry important.
From Round Bottom to Prichard
Prichard’s history becomes much richer when it is followed backward through its older names.
Round Bottom connects the community to the earliest nineteenth-century settlement of the Big Sandy Valley and families such as the Hattons. Turman’s Ferry recalls a time when a boat crossing could determine where people shopped, traveled, gathered, and conducted business. The frozen river brought Civil War soldiers into the neighborhood in January 1864. James Prichard arrived after the war, operated his store, dealt in land and livestock, and became so closely identified with Round Bottom that the community eventually took his name.
By the 1920s, newspapers treated Prichard as a settled community whose families traveled regularly between Fort Gay, Kentucky, Huntington, Kenova, Portsmouth, and the surrounding hollows. Decades later, transportation planners looked at the same strip of Big Sandy bottomland and imagined freight trains carrying international containers through Appalachia.
Some plans succeeded better than others, and some names lasted longer than others. Yet the river, the railroad, and the need to connect one place with another run through nearly every period of Prichard’s history.
It is easy to pass through Prichard today and see a small Wayne County community beside U.S. 52. Its deeper history tells another story. This was Round Bottom, a pioneer settlement landscape. It was the neighborhood opposite Turman’s Ferry, one of the best-known crossings on the lower Big Sandy. It stood beside a Civil War battlefield created by a frozen river. It became the home of the merchant whose name replaced the older one. And more than two centuries after the first settlers came into the bottomland, Prichard remains tied to the movement of people, railcars, and commerce through the Big Sandy Valley.
Sources & Further Reading
West Virginia Archives and History. “Place Names in West Virginia: P.” Entry for Prichard, Wayne County, 1911, with reference to Turman’s Ferry, Cabell County, 1839. Charleston: West Virginia Department of Arts, Culture and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/archives/placenames/placnamp.html
West Virginia Archives and History. “Place Names in West Virginia: T.” Entry for Turnman’s Ferry, Cabell County, 1839, cross-referenced to Prichard, Wayne County. Charleston: West Virginia Department of Arts, Culture and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/archives/placenames/placnamt.html
Prichard, Armstead Mead. Descendants of William Prichard. Charleston, WV: Tribune Printing Company, 1912. https://archive.org/download/descendantsofwil00pric/descendantsofwil00pric.pdf
Ely, William. The Big Sandy Valley: A History of the People and Country from the Earliest Settlement to the Present Time. Catlettsburg, KY: Central Methodist, 1887. https://kygenweb.net/boyd/general/BigSandyValleyPDF/BSV211-260.pdf
Hatten v. Turman, 123 Ky. 844, 97 S.W. 770. Kentucky Court of Appeals, December 4, 1906. https://case-law.vlex.com/vid/hatten-v-turman-902338043
Prichard v. Budd, 76 F. 710. United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, 1896. https://law.resource.org/pub/us/case/reporter/F/0076/0076.f1.0710.pdf
Prichard v. Prichard, 135 W. Va. 767, 65 S.E.2d 65. Supreme Court of Appeals of West Virginia, 1951. https://law.justia.com/cases/west-virginia/supreme-court/1951/10244-2.html
United States War Department. The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. Reports concerning military operations around Turman’s Ferry and the Big Sandy Valley, January 1864. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/03/The_war_of_the_rebellion-a_compilation_of_the_official_records_of_the_Union_and_Confederate_armies%28IA_cu31924080787462%29.pdf
Big Sandy News. “Prichard, W. Va.” June 9, 1916. Library of Congress, Chronicling America collection. https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/ndnp/kyu/batch_kyu_flamingo_ver01/data/sn83004226/00202195878/1916060901/0876.pdf
Wayne County News. “Local News Items, Prichard.” March 17, 1927. West Virginia Archives and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/History/wcn/wcn270317.html
Wayne County News. Historical Newspaper Collection. West Virginia Archives and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/History/wcn/wcntoc.html
Wayne County News. Registered midwife listings, including Isabelle Skeens of Prichard. December 8, 1927. West Virginia Archives and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/History/wcn/wcn271208.html
Harris, John T., ed. West Virginia Blue Book, 1921. Charleston, WV: Senate Clerk’s Office, 1921. https://www.wvlegislature.gov/legisdocs/publications/bluebook/WVS_Bluebook_1921.pdf
National Archives and Records Administration. Record of Appointment of Postmasters, 1832–September 30, 1971. Microfilm Publication M841, Records of the Post Office Department, Record Group 28. Washington, DC: National Archives. https://www.archives.gov/research/post-offices/postmasters-1832-1971.html
Blevins, Cameron, and Richard W. Helbock. “U.S. Post Offices.” Historical dataset based primarily on records of the United States Post Office Department. https://cblevins.github.io/us-post-offices/
Rand McNally and Company. “Wayne County, West Virginia.” County map, 1911. Reproduced by 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
United States Geological Survey. Prichard, WV-KY. 7.5-minute historical topographic quadrangle, 1:24,000. Washington, DC: U.S. Geological Survey, 1962. https://store.usgs.gov/filter-products?country=US&keyword=&lq=Hickory+Kentucky&page=45®ion=KY&sort=relevance
Sharps, Joseph A. Geologic Map of the Fallsburg Quadrangle, Kentucky-West Virginia, and the Prichard Quadrangle in Kentucky. Geologic Quadrangle Map GQ-584. Washington, DC: U.S. Geological Survey, 1967. https://pubs.usgs.gov/publication/gq584
West Virginia State Archives. “Wayne County Court Records.” Records include deeds, survey books, wills, estate files, births, deaths, marriages, court orders, and related county documents. Charleston: West Virginia Archives and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/archives/bluenote.html
Wayne County Clerk. “County Clerk Records and Document Inquiry.” Wayne, WV: Wayne County Government. https://waynecountywv.org/countyclerk.php
Wayne County Genealogical and Historical Society. “Samuel Hatton Sr.” Local history and historical-marker documentation concerning Hatton and Round Bottom. https://waynewv.com/wcghs/samuel_hatton_sr.php?thisPage=sh_marker
Wayne County Genealogical and Historical Society. “Wayne County Cemetery Book.” Cemetery transcriptions for Prichard and surrounding Wayne County communities. https://wcghswv.org/wayne_cemetery_book1.php?thisPage=wayne_cemetery_book1
Wayne County Government. “Wayne County’s History.” Wayne, WV: Wayne County Commission. https://www.waynecountywv.org/index.php
e-WV: The West Virginia Encyclopedia. “Wayne County.” Charleston: West Virginia Humanities Council. https://www.wvencyclopedia.org/entries/897
West Virginia Archives and History. “Wayne County.” Historical overview of settlement, transportation, industry, banking, and economic development. https://archive.wvculture.org/hiStory/agrext/wayne.html
United States Census Bureau. “Prichard CDP, West Virginia.” Decennial Census, 2020. Washington, DC: U.S. Census Bureau. https://data.census.gov/
West Virginia Public Port Authority. Heartland Intermodal Gateway Operator Procurement Documents. Charleston: West Virginia Department of Transportation, 2015. https://transportation.wv.gov/ports/HIG/Documents/WVPPAPrichardOperatorBidDocuments2015.pdf
WSP | Parsons Brinckerhoff. Heartland Intermodal Gateway Rail Service Cost Analysis: Final Report. Prepared for the West Virginia Public Port Authority, December 2015. https://transportation.wv.gov/ports/Documents/HIGRailServiceCostAnalysis_FinalReport12_04_2015.pdf
West Virginia Department of Transportation. “Request for Expression of Interest: Heartland Intermodal Gateway.” August 12, 2019. https://transportation.wv.gov/communications/PressRelease/Pages/EOIHeartlandIntermodalGateway.aspx
West Virginia Department of Transportation. Request for Expression of Interest: Heartland Intermodal Gateway, Wayne County. 2019. https://transportation.wv.gov/ports/Documents/EOI-8-12-19.pdf
Office of Governor Jim Justice. “Gov. Justice, WVDOT Transfer Heartland Intermodal Gateway Facility to Wayne County Commission.” August 11, 2022. https://governorjustice.wv.gov/News/press-releases/2022/Pages/Governor-Justice-and-WVDOT-transfer-Heartland-Intermodal-Gateway-facility-to-Wayne-County-Commission.aspx
R. J. Corman Railroad Group. “R. J. Corman Switching Company, LLC Announces New Service Operation at Central Appalachia Inland Port at Prichard in WV.” October 20, 2023. https://www.rjcorman.com/newsroom/press-releases/r-j-corman-switching-company-llc-announces-new-service-operation-central
R. J. Corman Railroad Group. “R. J. Corman Switching Company, LLC Held Ribbon-Cutting Event at Its New Location at the Central Appalachia Inland Port at Prichard in WV.” February 26, 2024. https://www.rjcorman.com/newsroom/press-releases/r-j-corman-switching-company-llc-held-ribbon-cutting-event-its-new-location
West Virginia and Regional History Center, West Virginia University. “Historical Records Survey.” Wayne County materials, including county histories and inventories of local government records. https://wvrhc.lib.wvu.edu/collections/public-records/historical-records-survey
West Virginia and Regional History Center, West Virginia University. “Postmasters Appointment Records, A&M 3026.” Morgantown: West Virginia University Libraries. https://archives.lib.wvu.edu/subjects/3147
Author Note: Prichard is one of those Appalachian communities whose history becomes much older once its earlier names are followed through the records. What began as research into a Wayne County community led back to Round Bottom, Turman’s Ferry, early settlement along the Big Sandy, Civil War activity, and more than two centuries of transportation history.