Appalachian Community Histories – Sweet Run, Wayne County: Farms, Old Roads, and the Making of Tri-State Airport
A few miles south of Kenova, the name Sweet Run survives on maps of Wayne County in a place where the landscape tells two very different stories. One belongs to the older world of Appalachian farms, family cemeteries, creek roads, and hollows that connected northern Wayne County with Kenova and the Big Sandy River. The other belongs to airplanes, runways, bulldozers, and the postwar campaign to give Huntington and the surrounding Tri-State region a modern airport.
For much of its documented history, Sweet Run belonged firmly to the first world. It was a rural locality outside Kenova, situated among the hills and small watersheds that divided the Big Sandy drainage from Twelvepole Creek. A county road passed through it. Families farmed there. A cemetery carried its name. Newspapers used “Sweet Run” as a place name without needing to explain what it meant.
Then, during the years after World War II, Sweet Run became the site of one of the largest transportation projects ever undertaken in northern Wayne County. Hundreds of acres were assembled for what became Tri-State Airport, hills and valleys were graded for an airfield, and a landscape that had developed around farms and country roads was remade to serve commercial aviation.
The airport did not completely erase Sweet Run. The name endured. Yet understanding Sweet Run today requires looking beyond a simple gazetteer entry and recovering the community that existed before the runways.
A Community South of Kenova
Exactly when the name Sweet Run came into use remains uncertain. No reliable surviving source establishes a founding date for the community, and there is no reason to assume that Sweet Run developed as a formally planned town.
That was common in rural Appalachia. Communities frequently formed around streams, roads, extended families, farms, mills, churches, schools, and cemeteries rather than around an incorporated town center. A place name might be familiar to generations of local residents before it appeared consistently in newspapers, maps, or government records.
Federal geological work provides an important picture of the larger landscape around Sweet Run at the beginning of the twentieth century. William C. Phalen’s surveys of the Kenova quadrangle placed this part of Wayne County within the western Appalachian Plateau, a landscape of narrow valleys, branching streams, ridges, sandstone, and coal-bearing formations. Kenova stood near the meeting point of West Virginia, Kentucky, and Ohio, while the countryside immediately south remained markedly more rural.
Historical USGS maps from the early twentieth century cover the Sweet Run vicinity and provide a valuable record of the landscape before airport construction. What they do not give us is a dependable founding date for the settlement. The safest conclusion is that Sweet Run developed gradually as part of the farming and transportation landscape outside Kenova rather than beginning at a single identifiable moment.
By 1920, however, the name was unmistakably established.
Sweet Run on the Road to Wayne
One of the best descriptions of early Sweet Run comes from an unlikely source: a case before the Supreme Court of Appeals of West Virginia.
In Haws v. County Court of Wayne County, decided in September 1920, taxpayers challenged how Wayne County intended to spend money from a million-dollar road bond. The case required the court to describe competing routes between Kenova and Wayne, and in doing so the judges preserved an unusually detailed description of the roads through northern Wayne County.
One route ran from Kenova through Ceredo and followed Twelvepole Creek toward the county seat. The alternative left Kenova through Happy Hollow, passed along Sweet Run and Dock’s Creek, crossed the divide into the Buffalo Creek watershed, and eventually reached Twelvepole Creek near Dunleith.
The court called the Happy Hollow route one of the county’s well-known roads. It also emphasized that Sweet Run and Dock’s Creek belonged to the Big Sandy drainage rather than the Twelvepole watershed. In another passage, the judges described the route more precisely as going up Happy Hollow, down Sweet Run, up Dock’s Creek, over the hill separating the watersheds, and down Buffalo Creek.
For Sweet Run history, the legal dispute is less important than the geography preserved inside it.
The opinion shows that Sweet Run was not merely an obscure stream name in 1920. It was part of a frequently used road corridor familiar enough to Wayne County voters, officials, and judges that its name required no special explanation. Travelers moving between Kenova and the interior of the county could pass through a chain of hollows and creek valleys in which Sweet Run formed one link.
This was the road geography of rural Appalachia before modern highways straightened travel across the region. Roads followed water, climbed hollows, crossed ridges where necessary, and descended into another watershed.
Sweet Run belonged to that world.
The Sweet Run Cemetery
Another record from 1920 places people, families, and a burial ground directly in the community.
The Wayne County News reported in February that Charles A. Ferguson, a 36-year-old resident of the Kenova area, had died in a Huntington hospital from pneumonia. He left a wife and six children, four of whom were reported ill with influenza. His funeral was held at what the newspaper specifically called “Sweet Run cemetery,” two miles south of Kenova. A later addition to the story reported that two of the sick children had also died.
The Big Sandy News carried a similar account, describing Ferguson’s burial in the family cemetery on Sweet Run.
The notice is brief, but for local history it is exceptionally important. A named cemetery usually represents more than a point on a map. It connects a place to generations of families who expected their dead to remain there.
It also gives Sweet Run a distinctly human history. In 1920, the locality was not simply a stream crossed by a county road. It was a place where people lived, became sick, raised children, buried relatives, and identified family ground with the Sweet Run name.
Farms in the Hills
Fifteen years later, another newspaper story reveals how rural Sweet Run remained.
In November 1935, the Big Sandy News-Recorder reported that 31-year-old Wayne County farmer John S. Ferguson had been shot and killed at Sweet Run, which the paper placed four miles southeast of Kenova. His brother-in-law, Alvin Mead, was jailed on a murder charge following what investigators described as a family dispute over land.
The killing occurred on a 600-acre farm operated by the family.
The violence itself was tragic, but the description of the property is historically revealing. As late as the mid 1930s, newspaper readers were being introduced to Sweet Run as a farming locality outside Kenova, where substantial tracts of land remained in family use.
This is the Sweet Run that existed immediately before the great transformation of the 1940s and 1950s.
Kenova nearby was already deeply connected to the railroad and the commercial economy of the Ohio and Big Sandy rivers. Huntington had grown into one of West Virginia’s major industrial cities. Yet only a few miles away, Sweet Run remained a landscape of farms, country roads, family land, cemeteries, wooded ridges, and narrow drainage valleys.
Then Huntington began looking toward the sky.
The Search for a Tri-State Airport
Huntington’s interest in aviation went back decades. Civic leaders had discussed improved air facilities since the 1920s, but by the end of World War II the need for a modern airport had become increasingly difficult to ignore. Scheduled passenger aviation was expanding rapidly, and Huntington wanted a field capable of serving not simply the city but the surrounding portions of West Virginia, Kentucky, and Ohio.
Sweet Run emerged as the favored location.
On August 24, 1945, the Wayne County News reported that construction of a Tri-State airport at a Wayne County site approximately three miles south of Kenova on Route 75 appeared likely. The proposed location was identified specifically as Sweet Run.
The scale was enormous compared with anything previously associated with the community.
The newspaper described a proposed site of approximately 700 acres. It argued that the location sat near the geographical center of the Tri-State region and could be connected by highway with Huntington, Ceredo, Kenova, eastern Kentucky, southern Wayne County, Mingo County, and communities across the Ohio River.
The article claimed that the site satisfied the aeronautical, engineering, and economic requirements for a major airport. One of the principal physical obstacles mentioned was roughly two miles of high-tension electrical lines that would have to be moved.
For the people who knew Sweet Run as farm country, the implications were extraordinary. Land previously valued for fields, timber, houses, family holdings, and local roads was now being evaluated according to runway dimensions, approaches, highway connections, and its position within a three-state transportation network.
The meaning of the landscape was changing.
Creating the Tri-State Airport Authority
Turning the proposal into an airport required more than selecting a site.
On June 1, 1948, Cabell County, Wayne County, Huntington, Kenova, Ceredo, and the Huntington Industrial Corporation entered into an agreement for the acquisition, construction, and operation of a regional airport. A nine-member board became the Tri-State Airport Authority.
The project soon produced a court case that now provides some of the best surviving documentation of what happened to the land.
In Meisel v. Tri-State Airport Authority, decided in 1951, Wayne County taxpayer L. J. Meisel challenged the legislation creating the authority and its ability to issue revenue bonds. While the case centered on constitutional and financial questions, the court laid out the history of the project in considerable detail.
According to the opinion, approximately 517 acres in Wayne County had been acquired through condemnation proceedings in the name of the County Court of Wayne County. The court placed the land cost at approximately $40,000 and said the money had been provided by the Huntington Industrial Corporation from public subscriptions raised in Wayne and Cabell counties.
That figure tells us something important about Sweet Run’s transformation. The airport was not simply constructed beside the old community. Hundreds of acres of the existing rural landscape became airport property through an organized program of land acquisition.
The West Virginia Supreme Court ultimately allowed the project to move forward, upholding the legal framework behind the authority and its financing.
By then, plans on paper were becoming changes on the ground.
Bulldozers Come to Sweet Run
On March 10, 1950, the Wayne County News announced that the Tri-State Airport Authority had awarded a contract to Keeley Construction Company of Clarksburg.
The work involved clearing, grading, and draining most of a 500-acre site south of Ceredo “at Sweet Run.” Keeley’s winning bid was $349,415, and equipment was expected to begin arriving almost immediately.
Those words describe one of the decisive moments in Sweet Run history.
Clearing and grading an Appalachian airport required more than laying pavement across an open field. The terrain around Sweet Run consisted of the same ridges, slopes, hollows, and drainage patterns that had shaped the location of roads and farms for generations. Creating a modern airfield required imposing a fundamentally different geometry on that landscape.
Where older roads had curved around hills and followed water, runways demanded long, controlled approaches and broad graded surfaces. Where farms had been divided according to ridges, streams, inheritance, and family ownership, airport property had to be assembled according to aviation requirements.
The work underway in 1950 therefore represented more than construction. It marked the conversion of part of an Appalachian rural community into regional transportation infrastructure.
Tri-State Airport Opens
After years of planning, land acquisition, legal organization, grading, drainage, and construction, Tri-State Airport was formally dedicated on November 2, 1952.
The following day’s Huntington Herald-Dispatch estimated that between 10,000 and 12,000 people attended. Visitors watched aircraft, inspected the new facility, listened to speeches, and witnessed the arrival of commercial air service at the new field. The newspaper valued the completed airport at approximately $1.5 million.
The airport’s opening represented the culmination of a campaign that Huntington civic leaders had pursued for decades. The West Virginia Encyclopedia notes that the new facility returned regularly scheduled passenger air service to the Huntington area after the earlier Chesapeake Airport across the Ohio River had lost scheduled service in 1945.
For the wider Tri-State region, it was a celebration of modern transportation.
For Sweet Run, it was something more complicated.
The airport now occupying the landscape was built where the older documentary record had placed farms, roads, drainage valleys, and a rural community south of Kenova. The same name that had appeared in a 1920 road case and beside a family cemetery was now appearing in newspaper stories about grading contracts, condemnation proceedings, airport authorities, and commercial aviation.
Few records better demonstrate how quickly an Appalachian landscape could change during the middle of the twentieth century.
The Airport Keeps Growing
The transformation did not stop in 1952.
A later Federal Aviation Administration planning document records that Tri-State Airport opened with a 4,600-foot paved runway. That runway was extended in 1956, again in 1973, and once more in 2010. A second crosswind runway was constructed during the 1970s, and the present passenger terminal was dedicated in 1961.
By the time of the FAA’s 2015 planning study, airport property encompassed approximately 1,154 acres in Wayne and Cabell counties.
Each enlargement carried the airport farther from the scale of the original rural landscape.
A 1995 USGS aerial photograph makes the contrast visible. A long paved runway cuts across the Wayne County hills, surrounded by taxiways, parking areas, buildings, access roads, and graded land. Beyond the airport boundaries, however, the older Appalachian pattern remains recognizable in the wooded ridges and narrow valleys.
What Remained of Sweet Run
It would be tempting to say that the airport caused Sweet Run to disappear entirely, but that goes farther than the evidence allows.
The name survived.
Federal geographic data still recognize Sweet Run as a populated place in Wayne County, even though it never developed into an incorporated municipality. Modern maps continue to place the name in the area south of Kenova and near the airport.
That survival matters because communities like Sweet Run are easily misunderstood when viewed only through modern maps. A present-day map may make a small unincorporated place appear insignificant, especially beside an airport whose runways dominate the landscape.
The historical record tells a different story.
Sweet Run belonged to an older network of Wayne County communities connected by creek roads rather than interstate highways. It had a recognized transportation route by 1920, a cemetery carrying its name, families who identified themselves with the locality, and farms large enough to become the subjects of newspaper reports and land disputes.
Its greatest historical event was not the founding of a town or the arrival of a railroad. It was the transformation of the land itself.
Why Sweet Run Matters
Sweet Run offers a particularly clear example of a kind of Appalachian history that can disappear almost invisibly.
Many communities in the mountains were never incorporated. They never had courthouses, city councils, downtown commercial blocks, or large newspapers devoted to their affairs. Their history survives instead in deed books, court cases, cemetery records, family papers, old roads, newspaper notices, and the names of creeks and hollows.
Sweet Run survives in exactly that fashion.
A West Virginia Supreme Court case preserves the route through its hills. A 1920 obituary preserves its cemetery. A 1935 murder report preserves the image of a working farm there. A 1945 newspaper article captures the moment regional planners began seeing those same acres as the future of commercial aviation. Another court case documents the acquisition of hundreds of acres, and a 1950 newspaper report records the arrival of the construction crews that began physically reshaping the site.
Then came November 1952, when thousands of people arrived to celebrate an airport built into a landscape that had once been known primarily by the families who farmed it and the travelers who followed its winding roads.
Today airplanes arriving over the hills of Wayne County are part of the familiar landscape around Kenova and Huntington. Beneath that modern geography, however, lies another one.
It is the geography of Happy Hollow, Sweet Run, Dock’s Creek, farm roads, family cemeteries, and old routes across the watershed.
Recovering that landscape does not diminish the importance of Tri-State Airport. Instead, it adds another chapter to its story. Before the runways, terminal, and arriving aircraft, this ground belonged to one of the small rural communities that made up northern Wayne County.
Its name was Sweet Run.
Sources & Further Reading
Haws v. County Court of Wayne County, 86 W. Va. 650, 104 S.E. 119. Supreme Court of Appeals of West Virginia, September 21, 1920. https://openjurist.org/86/wva/650/haws-v-county-court-of-wayne-county
Wayne County News. “Charles A. Ferguson.” February 19, 1920. Reprinted by the Wayne County Genealogical and Historical Society. https://waynewv.com/wcghs/oldsite/V13N2.pdf
Big Sandy News. “Charles A. Ferguson.” February 20, 1920. Transcription preserved by the Lawrence County Kentucky Genealogical and Historical Society. https://www.lckghs.com/index.php/en/obituaries/2-uncategorised/369-obit-1920
Big Sandy News. “John S. Ferguson.” November 15, 1935. Transcription preserved by the Lawrence County Kentucky Genealogical and Historical Society. https://lckghs.com/index.php/en/obituaries?id=379&layout=edit
Wayne County News. “Airport Site for Wayne County Seems to Be Assured.” August 24, 1945. Wayne County Genealogical and Historical Society. https://waynewv.com/wcghs/oldsite/Old%20Newspapers/Newspapers%201945.htm
Wayne County News. “Airport Grading to Start Soon.” March 10, 1950. Wayne County Genealogical and Historical Society. https://waynewv.com/wcghs/oldsite/Old%20Newspapers/Newspapers%201950.htm
Meisel v. Tri-State Airport Authority, 64 S.E.2d 32. Supreme Court of Appeals of West Virginia, March 1, 1951. https://law.justia.com/cases/west-virginia/supreme-court/1951/cc778-2.html
Horan, Robert D. “12,000 See Airport Dedication: Huntington Puts Itself on Air Map.” Huntington Herald-Dispatch, November 3, 1952. West Virginia Archives and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/History/transportation/tristateairport01.html
Phalen, William Clifton. Economic Geology of the Kenova Quadrangle, Kentucky, Ohio, and West Virginia. U.S. Geological Survey Bulletin 349. Washington, DC: U.S. Geological Survey, 1908. https://pubs.usgs.gov/publication/b349
Phalen, William Clifton. Kenova Folio, Kentucky-West Virginia-Ohio. Geologic Atlas of the United States, Folio 184. Washington, DC: U.S. Geological Survey, 1912. https://pubs.usgs.gov/publication/gf184
Sanborn Map Company. Sanborn Fire Insurance Map from Kenova, Wayne County, West Virginia. March 1904. Library of Congress Geography and Map Division. https://www.loc.gov/item/sanborn09411_001/
Ceredo Advance. Ceredo, WV, 1885–1939. Chronicling America, Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/item/sn86092392/1893-06-21/ed-1/
West Virginia State Archives. “Wayne County Court Records.” County Court Records Microfilm Holdings. West Virginia Department of Arts, Culture and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/archives/bluenote.html
West Virginia State Archives. “Wayne County History Sources.” West Virginia Department of Arts, Culture and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/History/archives/counties/wayne.html
Marshall University Special Collections. “Cabell-Wayne Historical Society Collection, Collection 0099.” Marshall Digital Scholar. https://mds.marshall.edu/cabell_wayne_hist_soc_collection/
Watts, Tillie. Oral history interview by Jeannie Davis. 1980. OH64-228, Marshall University Special Collections, Huntington, WV. https://mds.marshall.edu/oral_history/235/
Tri-State Airport Authority. Huntington Tri-State Airport Master Plan Update. March 2014. https://www.tristateairport.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/HTS-Master-Plan-Study-Final-Report-1.pdf
Tri-State Airport Authority. Huntington Tri-State Airport Sustainable Management Plan. Federal Aviation Administration, 2015. https://www.faa.gov/sites/faa.gov/files/airports/environmental/sustainability/Huntington-Tri-State-Airport-Sustainability-Management-Plan.pdf
Casto, James E. “Tri-State Airport.” e-WV: The West Virginia Encyclopedia. Last revised February 14, 2024. West Virginia Humanities Council. https://wvencprod.wvnet.edu/entries/747
Author Note: Sweet Run is one of those Appalachian communities whose history is easier to see in old roads, court records, cemeteries, and newspaper notices than on a modern map. Its story also shows how a rural Wayne County landscape could be dramatically reshaped when regional transportation and development arrived in the middle of the twentieth century.