Appalachian Community Histories – Stonewall District, Wayne County: From Pioneer Settlement to Coal, Railroads, and East Lynn Lake
Stonewall is one of the largest historical place names in Wayne County, West Virginia, yet it can be misunderstood if approached as though it were simply another small Appalachian community. Historically, Stonewall was primarily a magisterial district, a broad section of eastern Wayne County made up of creek valleys, mountain ridges, farms, schools, churches, mines, post offices, and smaller communities that developed identities of their own.
By the early twentieth century, places such as East Lynn, Armilda, Bartram, Cove Creek, Gilkerson, Girard, Nestlow, and Stiltner were all associated with Stonewall District. Some became railroad or postal communities. Others remained collections of farms and homes spread along creeks and mountain roads. Together they formed a district whose history reached from the first generation of nineteenth-century settlement through the coal and railroad era and into the modern landscape surrounding East Lynn Lake.
The strongest early account of Stonewall’s history appeared in the Wayne County News on November 27, 1919. Although written more than a century after the earliest events it described, the newspaper preserved traditions concerning the families, mills, churches, schools, and industries that residents believed had shaped the district. When those memories are placed beside census records, county documents, geological surveys, railroad records, and the history of East Lynn, Stonewall becomes much more than a name on a map.
It becomes the story of a large piece of rural Appalachia changing around its people.
Before There Was a Stonewall District
The country that later became Stonewall District was being settled generations before the district itself existed.
According to the 1919 Wayne County News history, John Bias was believed to have been the first settler within the later boundaries of Stonewall. The account placed him at the mouth of Lick Creek in 1802. David Bartram reportedly arrived the following year, and by 1807 several pioneer cabins stood within the area.
The newspaper named Berry Adkins, Thomas Napier, William Lambert, Jesse Adkins, John Ferguson, Thomas Moore, Eldridge Smith, William Thompson, William Ferguson, Absalom Queen, Walter Queen, John Withrow, John Osburn Sr., Ambrose Watts, and William Watts among the early settlers. Many of those surnames remained woven into Wayne County’s landscape through later generations, appearing in deeds, cemeteries, census schedules, roads, schools, churches, and community histories.
Because the newspaper was writing in 1919 about events said to have occurred more than a century earlier, the exact settlement dates should be treated as local historical tradition unless they can be confirmed through land grants, tax records, deeds, or other surviving records. The larger picture, however, is clear. By the opening decades of the nineteenth century, families were establishing farms along the creeks and narrow bottomlands of what became eastern Wayne County.
At the time, there was no Wayne County.
This part of western Virginia belonged to Cabell County until January 18, 1842, when the Virginia General Assembly created Wayne County from a portion of Cabell. West Virginia itself would not become a state until 1863.
The families who settled the Stonewall country therefore lived through several changes in political geography without necessarily moving from the farms and hollows where they had established their homes.
Mills, Schools, and Churches in the Early Settlement
The first industries remembered in Stonewall were small operations designed to meet local needs.
The 1919 history credited Sherrard Adkins with building an old-fashioned gristmill at the mouth of Lick Creek in 1817. Grain that once had to be processed farther from home could now be ground within the settlement. A sawmill followed in 1843, providing another important service in a heavily timbered country where nearly every house, barn, fence, church, and school depended upon wood.
Education developed just as locally.
Thomas Napier was remembered as the builder of Stonewall’s first schoolhouse near the mouth of Rich Creek. The building belonged to an era when Appalachian education depended on small neighborhood schools rather than consolidated county institutions. Children traveled from surrounding farms, sometimes walking considerable distances over rough roads or mountain paths.
Religion provided another foundation of community life. The 1919 newspaper account identified Bethesda Church, organized in 1835 by the Reverend Goodwin Lycan and Thomas Harmon, as the earliest religious organization in the district. A Methodist church at Queens Ridge followed in 1840, and the district’s first Sunday school was said to have begun in 1852.
These institutions reveal what Stonewall looked like before coal companies and railroads transformed parts of the district. It was not a single village. It was a network of settlements connected by kinship, creeks, mills, churches, schools, farms, and primitive roads.
The mountain landscape encouraged that pattern. Steep ridges separated one drainage from another, while the bottoms along streams offered the most practical ground for cabins, fields, roads, mills, and later railroad tracks.
Stonewall’s geography shaped its history long before Stonewall had a name.
From Grant District to Stonewall
For years, the territory that became Stonewall belonged to Grant District.
Lucian W. Osborn, writing his History of East Lynn Community in 1927, remembered that the area later called Stonewall District had originally been part of Grant. The entire territory once shared a single voting precinct, first located at the mouth of Cove Creek and later at the mouth of Brush Creek.
That arrangement eventually became impractical as population and settlement increased.
Available historical evidence places the creation of Stonewall District in 1878, when part of the old Grant territory was separated into a new district. By the federal census of 1880, only about two years later, Stonewall was already being counted as a separate civil division with 1,805 inhabitants. The 1890 census recorded 2,015 residents.
The district was named in memory of Confederate general Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson, according to the 1919 Wayne County News account. The choice reflected a wider pattern in West Virginia during the decades after the Civil War, when Jackson increasingly became the subject of monuments, organizations, place names, and public commemoration.
Historian Steven Cody Straley’s research on Jackson’s memory in West Virginia identifies Stonewall District in Wayne County with the year 1878 and places such naming within the larger development of Confederate remembrance in the state. Straley argues that Jackson gradually came to be presented by his admirers not simply as a Confederate general but as a celebrated native of what became West Virginia.
The exact Wayne County governmental order establishing the district would be especially valuable for documenting its creation in greater detail. Until that original order is located and transcribed, 1878 remains the date best supported by the surviving research trail.
A Growing Appalachian District
Stonewall grew quickly during the decades after its creation.
The population increased from 1,805 in 1880 to 2,015 in 1890 and then to 3,060 by 1900. Only ten years later, the 1910 census counted 3,458 residents.
Behind those numbers were hundreds of households scattered through the district’s valleys and communities.
Census schedules recorded farmers, laborers, miners, merchants, craftsmen, teachers, children, widows, landowners, renters, and extended families. The schedules also reveal how misleading it can be to search only for individual community names. A family living near Girard, Gilkerson, Nestlow, Bartram, or another rural settlement might simply appear in the census as a household in Stonewall District.
Schools multiplied as the population increased.
Marshall University’s Special Collections preserves Wayne County school records that include an 1881 summary connected to District Six and an 1890 register for Rife School in Stonewall District. Such surviving school material offers a rare opportunity to move beyond population totals and recover the names of the children and teachers who filled rural schoolhouses only a few years after Stonewall became a separate district.
Local government became increasingly formal as well. By 1921, the West Virginia Blue Book listed Oscar Watts and Harmon Fry of East Lynn as Stonewall District justices of the peace. Joe Terry and Taylor Carey, also associated with East Lynn, served as constables.
The same state publication listed East Lynn, Stiltner, Queens Ridge, and other Wayne County post offices, illustrating how government, postal service, commerce, and community identity overlapped across the district.
East Lynn Emerges as Stonewall’s Commercial Center
No place became more important to Stonewall’s economic history than East Lynn.
Before East Lynn became the dominant community in the district, the surrounding country depended heavily on farms, mills, stores, timber, and livestock. Mail service itself remained limited.
Osborn wrote that the Adkins Mill post office was established at a water mill owned by Attison Adkins in 1868. Chapman Adkins served as the first postmaster, and mail was so limited that bags were reportedly unnecessary and delivery occurred only once each week.
The office later moved toward the growing community center. W. D. Vaughan became postmaster in 1876, and after several additional changes the name Adkins Mill eventually gave way to East Lynn.
Osborn’s account is particularly valuable because he wrote while people who remembered nineteenth-century East Lynn were still living. His history describes stores, blacksmith shops, schools, bridges, mills, churches, post offices, roads, timbering, coal mining, and families in a way that government statistics alone cannot.
East Lynn’s location helped it grow. Several waterways met nearby, creating a natural gathering point within the mountains.
Then the railroad arrived.
The Railroad and the Coal Boom
The opening of the Big Sandy, East Lynn & Guyan Railroad transformed Stonewall’s connection to the outside economy.
The railroad was completed and opened for service in 1903. Five years later, in 1908, it was absorbed by the Norfolk & Western Railway. The surviving route between Wayne and East Lynn became part of the Norfolk & Western system and provided direct access to the developing coal operations around East Lynn.
Before the railroad, moving coal or timber out of the mountains was difficult and expensive. Roads could become nearly impassable during wet weather. Creeks were useful transportation corridors only under certain conditions. Commercial mining remained limited by the simple problem of getting heavy coal from the mountain to a distant market.
Railroad tracks changed the equation.
Coal companies could now ship large quantities of fuel through Wayne and onto the wider Norfolk & Western network. Equipment and supplies could travel into the district just as efficiently.
The Wayne County News wrote in 1919 that Stonewall had developed its mineral resources more extensively than any other district in the county. Coal and natural gas were said to exist across much of the area, along with shallow oil pools that had not proven profitable. The newspaper specifically credited the East Lynn Coal Company with contributing substantially to the development of the district’s mineral wealth.
Coal mining increasingly reshaped the land around East Lynn.
Mine openings penetrated hillsides. Tipples, railroad spurs, company buildings, machinery, trestles, and mine tracks appeared in a countryside that only generations earlier had depended on water mills and horse power.
The district was becoming part of industrial Appalachia.
Stonewall’s Population Reflects the Change
Census figures reveal the scale of Stonewall’s transformation.
The district contained 2,015 people in 1890. By 1900 there were 3,060. The population reached 3,458 in 1910. Growth then leveled temporarily, with approximately 3,453 people recorded in 1920.
By 1940 the population had climbed to 4,168, including 2,152 males and 2,016 females.
Stonewall was no longer merely an isolated farming district.
Mining, timber, railroad employment, businesses, schools, stores, churches, government offices, and improved transportation supported a larger population. Yet farming remained important, and many residents continued living on land that had been associated with their families for generations.
The 1940 census and housing records provide an unusually detailed picture of this world. Federal enumerators recorded occupations, education, employment, income, residence in 1935, and household information. Housing reports documented features such as electricity, plumbing, home ownership, heating, and building condition.
Taken together, those records show a district existing between two eras.
Traditional rural life remained visible everywhere, but industrialization and twentieth-century modernization were changing how families worked, traveled, went to school, and interacted with the wider world.
Communities Within Stonewall
Stonewall’s size becomes easier to understand when its communities are considered together.
A West Virginia place-name compilation based on the 1933 New Descriptive Atlas of West Virginia identified Armilda, Bartram, Cove Creek, East Lynn, Gilkerson, Girard, Nestlow, and Stiltner within Stonewall District.
These were not necessarily towns in the modern sense.
Some possessed post offices. Some had stores or schools. Others were little more than concentrations of families living along a creek, road, hollow, or ridge. Their boundaries were rarely obvious to outsiders because local identity depended less on municipal lines than on geography and community relationships.
A resident might describe home through several overlapping identities.
A person could live near Nestlow, attend a church along Beech Fork, receive mail through another community, appear in the federal census under Stonewall District, and still simply say that he or she lived in Wayne County.
That layered geography is one reason small Appalachian places can be difficult to reconstruct generations later.
The records often survive under different names.
Roads Begin to Replace Isolation
Railroads opened part of Stonewall to outside markets, but roads eventually became even more important to everyday life.
During the twentieth century, county and state improvements gradually connected hollows that had depended on difficult dirt roads and creek crossings. Depression-era public works programs accelerated the transformation.
Better roads changed where people shopped, attended school, worked, received medical care, and conducted business. Automobiles made neighboring settlements seem closer. School consolidation became practical as buses replaced walking routes to tiny neighborhood schools.
Places that once needed their own stores, post offices, mills, and schools could increasingly depend on larger nearby communities.
The change did not erase Stonewall’s smaller places, but it changed what was required for them to survive.
A community could remain on the map long after its post office closed.
A family name could remain attached to a cemetery after the nearby school disappeared.
A creek settlement could continue to have meaning to residents even when outsiders saw only houses scattered along a road.
That pattern became increasingly common throughout Stonewall.
East Lynn Lake Reshapes the District
The largest physical change in modern Stonewall history came with the creation of East Lynn Lake.
The federal flood-control project dammed the East Fork of Twelvepole Creek and transformed a landscape shaped by generations of settlement, farming, timbering, mining, roads, schools, and family cemeteries.
East Lynn Dam was completed in 1971, and creation of the reservoir required extensive federal land acquisition and infrastructure work. Roads were relocated. Utility systems were moved. Property passed from private ownership into the federal project. Cemeteries and graves within affected areas required relocation or other arrangements.
The resulting lake became one of Wayne County’s defining modern landmarks, but beneath its recreational identity lies an older historical landscape.
The valleys surrounding East Lynn had once contained farms, roads, mine workings, homes, schools, and burial grounds connected to families whose presence in the district stretched back generations.
Coal and timber had already changed Stonewall dramatically.
The railroad had changed it again.
East Lynn Lake altered the physical geography itself.
Stonewall After the Coal and Railroad Era
Stonewall survived all of those changes.
The district continued as a recognized Wayne County subdivision long after many of the institutions that once defined its individual communities faded. The federal government still recognizes Stonewall District as a county subdivision, and the 2020 census counted 6,859 residents across its large territory.
The population now lives in a landscape very different from the one described in the 1919 Wayne County News.
The old water mills are gone. Many neighborhood schools have disappeared through consolidation. Postal identities have changed. Some coal operations have closed, and regular railroad shipments on the old Wayne Branch ended after the closing of the Camp Creek mining operation in 2015. A modern transportation study traces the surviving railroad corridor back to the same line that reached East Lynn during the coal boom more than a century earlier.
Yet the older district remains visible everywhere for anyone willing to read the landscape.
Family cemeteries sit on hillsides above modern roads. Creek names preserve the geography around which early farms developed. Abandoned railroad grades follow routes once crowded with coal cars. Old deeds preserve boundaries that predate the district itself. Census schedules record families whose descendants remain in Wayne County.
Stonewall’s past survives less as one historic downtown than as hundreds of pieces scattered across a large Appalachian landscape.
Why Stonewall District Matters
Stonewall District offers a particularly useful way to understand how rural Appalachian communities developed.
Its history was never centered entirely on one town.
Instead, the district grew through a network of places tied together by waterways, family relationships, roads, schools, churches, mills, post offices, mines, and eventually railroads. East Lynn became the strongest commercial and industrial center, but communities such as Armilda, Bartram, Cove Creek, Gilkerson, Girard, Nestlow, and Stiltner remained part of the larger Stonewall story.
The district also reveals how many different versions of Appalachia can exist in the same place.
There was the pioneer Stonewall of water mills, log schools, farms, and churches.
There was the industrial Stonewall of coal mines, natural gas, tipples, railroad tracks, company operations, and a rapidly growing population.
There was the twentieth-century Stonewall of improved roads, consolidated schools, automobiles, electricity, and changing rural communities.
Finally, there was the Stonewall reshaped by East Lynn Lake, where federal engineering permanently altered valleys that families had occupied for generations.
Those landscapes overlap today.
To understand Stonewall District is therefore not simply to locate another name in Wayne County.
It is to follow more than two centuries of Appalachian history across an entire section of the county, from John Bias’s remembered cabin at Lick Creek and the first water-powered industries to coal trains, mountain roads, abandoned mine openings, family cemeteries, and the waters of East Lynn Lake.
Stonewall was never one town.
Its history belongs to all of those places together.
Sources & Further Reading
“Squibs from Early History of Districts in This County: Stonewall District.” Wayne County News, November 27, 1919. West Virginia Archives and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/wcn/wcn191127.html
“History of School System in Wayne County.” Wayne County News, October 23, 1919. West Virginia Archives and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/History/wcn/wcn191023.html
“First Deed Recorded in This County 84 Years Ago.” Wayne County News, January 28, 1926. West Virginia Archives and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/History/wcn/wcn260128.html
West Virginia Archives and History. “Wayne County News Transcriptions.” https://archive.wvculture.org/History/wcn/wcntoc.html
Virginia General Assembly. “An Act Establishing the County of Wayne of Part of the County of Cabell.” January 18, 1842. West Virginia Archives and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/counties/wayne01.html
West Virginia State Archives. “County Court Records on Microfilm: Wayne County.” https://archive.wvculture.org/history/archives/bluenote.html
Wayne County Clerk. “Recorded Document Search and County Clerk Records.” Wayne County, West Virginia. https://waynecounty.westvirginiacourt.us/county-clerk.html
U.S. Census Office. Report on Population of the United States at the Eleventh Census: 1890. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. https://www2.census.gov/prod2/decennial/documents/1890a_v1-11.pdf
U.S. Bureau of the Census. Population of the United States by Counties and Minor Civil Divisions, 1910, 1900, 1890. Bulletin 360. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. 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. Fourteenth Census of the United States, 1920: Population. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/decennial/1920/volume-1/41084484v1ch5.pdf
U.S. Bureau of the Census. Sixteenth Census of the United States, 1940: Population, Volume II. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/decennial/1940/population-volume-2/33973538v2p7ch5.pdf
U.S. Bureau of the Census. Sixteenth Census of the United States, 1940: Housing, Volume I. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/decennial/1940/housing-volume-1/housing-v1p2-ch7.pdf
U.S. Census Bureau. “Stonewall District, Wayne County, West Virginia.” Census Data. https://data.census.gov/profile/Stonewall_district%2C_Wayne_County%2C_West_Virginia?g=060XX00US5409993036
Osborn, Lucian W. History of East Lynn Community. 1927. West Virginia Archives and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/agrext/eastlynn.html
Marshall University Special Collections. “Wayne County School Board Records, 1881 and 1890.” Accession 1987/01.0449. https://mds.marshall.edu/sc_finding_aids/791/
Marshall University Special Collections. “Camp Creek Church of Christ Register and Record, 1920–1950.” Accession 0760. https://mds.marshall.edu/sc_finding_aids/330/
West Virginia Archives and History. “West Virginia Vital Research Records: Birth Records.” https://archive.wvculture.org/vrr/va_bcsearch.aspx
West Virginia Archives and History. “West Virginia Vital Research Records: Marriage Records.” https://archive.wvculture.org/vrr/va_mcsearch.aspx
West Virginia Archives and History. “West Virginia Vital Research Records: Death Records.” https://archive.wvculture.org/vrr/va_dcsearch.aspx
Hardesty, H. H. & Co. Hardesty’s Historical and Geographical Encyclopedia: Maps and Histories of Wayne, Lincoln and Cabell Counties, West Virginia. 1884. Wayne County Genealogical and Historical Society. https://waynewv.com/wcghs/wayne_county_hisotry.php?thisPage=wayne_county_hisotry
Krebs, Charles E., and D. D. Teets Jr. Cabell, Wayne and Lincoln Counties. Morgantown: West Virginia Geological Survey, 1913. https://books.google.com/books?id=ePNLAAAAMAAJ
West Virginia Geological Survey. Maps Accompanying the Geological Survey of Cabell, Wayne and Lincoln Counties. 1913. https://books.google.com/books?id=bCcs5fJRZ9sC
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
U.S. Geological Survey. Nestlow, West Virginia, 7.5-Minute Quadrangle. 1962, photorevised 1975. https://prd-tnm.s3.amazonaws.com/StagedProducts/Maps/HistoricalTopo/PDF/WV/24000/WV_Nestlow_701140_1962_24000_geo.pdf
West Virginia Archives and History. “Districts and Place Names in West Virginia.” Based on the New Descriptive Atlas of West Virginia, 1933. https://archive.wvculture.org/hiStory/communities/districtplacenames.html
West Virginia Legislature. West Virginia Blue Book, 1921. Charleston, WV, 1921. https://www.wvlegislature.gov/legisdocs/publications/bluebook/WVS_Bluebook_1921.pdf
U.S. Post Office Department. Record of Appointment of Postmasters, 1832–1971. Record Group 28, National Archives and Records Administration, Microfilm Publication M841. Background on Stonewall-area post offices is also discussed in Lucian W. Osborn’s History of East Lynn Community. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/agrext/eastlynn.html
Marshall University Special Collections. “Fred B. Lambert Papers, 1809–1964.” Collection 0236. https://mds.marshall.edu/lambert_papers/
Marshall University Special Collections. “Cabell-Wayne Historical Society Collection, 1880–1973.” Collection 0099. https://mds.marshall.edu/cabell_wayne_hist_soc_collection/
West Virginia and Regional History Center, West Virginia University. “Wayne County Newspaper Clippings.” A&M 0168. https://archives.lib.wvu.edu/repositories/2/resources/2486
West Virginia and Regional History Center, West Virginia University. “Osburn Family Historical Items.” A&M 2723. https://archives.lib.wvu.edu/subjects/724
West Virginia and Regional History Center, West Virginia University. “Lawrence A. Lang Collection of West Virginia Land Records.” A&M 3833. https://archives.lib.wvu.edu/subjects/724
West Virginia GIS Technical Center. “Wayne County Tax Maps, Stonewall District.” https://data.wvgis.wvu.edu/pub/Clearinghouse/planningLanduseCadastres/wv_tax_maps/PDF/50_Wayne_County/09_Stonewall_Dist/09-0004.pdf
West Virginia Archives and History. “Wayne County History Sources.” https://archive.wvculture.org/History/archives/counties/wayne.html
Taylor, Mildred. History of Wayne County, West Virginia. Wayne, WV, 1963. Listed in the West Virginia State Archives Wayne County bibliography. https://archive.wvculture.org/History/archives/counties/wayne.html
A Pictorial History of Wayne County. Wayne County Historical Publications, 1988. Listed in the West Virginia State Archives Wayne County bibliography. https://archive.wvculture.org/History/archives/counties/wayne.html
Straley, Steven Cody. “‘A Constant Reminder to All’: Remembering Thomas ‘Stonewall’ Jackson in West Virginia.” Master’s thesis, Marshall University, 2021. https://mds.marshall.edu/etd/1371/
U.S. Geological Survey. “East Lynn Sandstone.” National Geologic Map Database, Geolex. https://ngmdb.usgs.gov/Geolex/UnitRefs/EastLynnRefs_1482.html
Norfolk & Western Historical Society. “Norfolk & Western Railway Historical Timeline.” https://www.nwhs.org/nw_timeline.php
KYOVA Interstate Planning Commission and Michael Baker International. Wayne Branch Rail-Trail Feasibility Study: Wayne County, West Virginia. December 2024. https://kyovaipc.org/Wayne_Branch_Rail_Trail_Feasibility_Study_12_Dec_2024_reduced.pdf
U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Great Lakes and Ohio River Division. “East Lynn Lake.” January 10, 2024. https://www.lrd.usace.army.mil/Missions/Projects/Article/3641237/east-lynn-lake/
U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Hydrologic Engineering Center. “Twelve Pole Creek.” https://www.hec.usace.army.mil/sustainablerivers/sites/twelvepole/
U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Great Lakes and Ohio River Division. “Beech Fork Lake & East Lynn Lake Regional Master Plan.” https://www.lrd.usace.army.mil/Missions/Projects/Article/3630237/beech-fork-lake-east-lynn-lake-regional-master-plan/
Author Note: This history of Stonewall District brings together newspapers, census records, maps, local histories, government documents, and archival collections to reconstruct a place that was never simply one town. Some of the earliest settlement details survive through later local accounts, so those traditions should be read alongside the primary records that confirm the district’s broader development.