Appalachian History Series – The Romney Literary Society: Books, Debate, and Education on the South Branch
On a winter evening in Romney, Virginia, long before the town stood inside the borders of West Virginia, a small group of men gathered in the office of Dr. John Temple. The date was January 30, 1819. According to Hu Maxwell and H. L. Swisher’s History of Hampshire County, ten Romney men came together that night to organize a literary society.
Their names were Samuel Kercheval, Charles T. Magill, John Temple, Thomas Blair, James N. Stephens, Nathaniel Kuykendall, David Gibson, W. C. Wodrow, James R. Jack, and William C. Morrow. They elected Kuykendall as chairman and Magill as secretary, then appointed a committee to draw up a constitution.
The formal beginning came a few days later. On February 4, 1819, the committee reported back, the constitution was adopted, officers were chosen, and the group took the name “The Polemic Society of Romney.” That is why the date sometimes appears in two different ways. January 30 was the organizing meeting. February 4 was the formal adoption of the constitution and name.
From those two evenings came one of the earliest literary and debating organizations in what is now West Virginia. It began with no grand building, no large treasury, and no certainty of long life. It began with a handful of local men who believed that books, discussion, and education could strengthen a community on the South Branch of the Potomac.
A Society for Books and Debate
The constitution of the new society shows what its founders had in mind. They wanted the advancement of literature and science. They wanted to purchase a library for the use of the members. They wanted to improve themselves through debate.
The society’s rules also reveal the culture of the room. Each member paid fifty cents a month. Political and religious questions were not supposed to be debated unless they were handled in abstract and general terms. Profane language in the presence of the society brought a fine of one dollar. So did bringing spirituous liquors into the meetings.
After expenses were paid, the remaining money was to go toward books.
That rule mattered. The society was not only a debating club. It was a library-building project. In an Appalachian county seat far from the great eastern cities, its members were trying to gather books that could outlive a single evening’s argument.
The first debates came quickly. On February 13, 1819, the society met in the courthouse and debated whether a representative should be governed by instructions from his constituents. The decision went to the affirmative. On February 19, the question was whether education in a public school was better than education in a private school. The society favored the public school.
In the following weeks, the members argued about banking, the immortality of the soul, tariffs, education, transportation, and public policy. The rule against political and religious debate did not always keep politics and religion outside the room. The questions were often broad enough to touch the anxieties of the age.
In those meetings, Romney’s lawyers, doctors, merchants, teachers, and civic leaders practiced the habits of public speech. They sharpened arguments, tested ideas, and carried those ideas back into the town.
The First Books
The first money for books was appropriated on April 23, 1819. The first purchases were Plutarch’s Lives and a volume on the law of nations. A few months later, the treasury held only two dollars and forty six cents, but the society kept buying.
By October, it had added histories of the ancient world and Europe. Later came Livy, Tacitus, and Marshall’s Life of Washington. A bookcase followed. The library was beginning to take shape.
The titles tell us something about the men who gathered there. They wanted classical history, biography, law, politics, and moral instruction. They read the ancient world beside the young American republic. They read Washington beside Rome. They were building a library that would help them argue about both public virtue and practical government.
The society’s own Catalogue of the Members and Library of the Literary Society of Romney, printed in Romney by Harper in 1849, gives one of the best windows into its ambitions. The catalogue stated that the society had been founded on February 4, 1819 and incorporated by an act of the Virginia General Assembly passed January 3, 1823. It described the purchase of a library as a leading object of the society and reported that the collection then held 935 volumes.
Later accounts describe the library as growing much larger before the Civil War, with about 3,000 volumes sometimes given as the number. That figure should be handled carefully because the society’s own 1849 printed catalogue gives 935 volumes at that date. What is clear is that Romney had built a serious library by the middle of the nineteenth century, one large enough to matter far beyond a few private shelves.
From Polemic Society to Literary Society
The original name, The Polemic Society of Romney, reflected the debating purpose of the group. “Polemic” meant argument, dispute, and formal controversy. It was an honest name for men who gathered to test propositions before one another.
The Virginia General Assembly soon became part of the story. Around 1821, the society received a charter under the name “Library Society of Romney.” That name did not satisfy the members. They did not see themselves as only a library society. They were a literary society, with books, debate, education, and improvement bound together.
After delays and further action, the society accepted a new charter in 1823 and became the Literary Society of Romney. That name remained with it for the rest of its life.
The change was more than a technical matter. The word “literary” better captured the society’s scope. It was not merely storing books. It was trying to cultivate learning.
Romney Academy and the Classical Institute
The society’s influence soon moved beyond its own meetings. Its members helped push for higher education in Romney and supported the growth of classical studies at Romney Academy. In a region where advanced schooling was limited, that work mattered.
By the 1830s and 1840s, the society’s educational ambitions had grown. Virginia legislative acts gave the society authority to raise money and direct funds toward educational purposes. The 1849 catalogue says that acts passed in 1832 and 1844 helped place the society in possession of considerable means. Then an act passed in December 1846 gave it authority to establish a seminary of learning at or near Romney for instruction in the various branches of science and literature.
Out of that movement came the Romney Classical Institute. The institute operated under the auspices of the Literary Society, and the Reverend William Henry Foote served as president of its board of visitors. The 1849 catalogue described the school as prosperous, with about eighty pupils in attendance at the fifth semiannual session. Greek, Latin, French, mathematics, and higher branches of English education were among the subjects taught.
The purpose was not narrow. The institute was meant to prepare young men for advanced standing in colleges and universities, to prepare others for useful life, and to offer young ladies a finished education for the duties expected of them in that era.
The language belongs to the nineteenth century, but the larger point is clear. A debating society that began in a doctor’s office had become a force behind education in Hampshire County.
A Library Scattered by War
The Civil War struck Romney hard. The town sat in a contested region and changed hands repeatedly. Armies moved through the streets, loyalties divided families, and public life was interrupted.
The Literary Society suffered with the town. Many members went off to war. Some never returned. The library, built over decades, was ransacked and scattered. Books that had been bought with fifty cent dues, debate-night discipline, legislative help, and patient local effort were carried away or lost.
After the war, only a portion of the library could be recovered. The National Register nomination for Literary Hall states that about 400 volumes remained. For a society whose identity had been tied to books, the loss was devastating.
The damage was not only material. A library is a record of what a community believed was worth saving. When the Romney collection was broken apart, part of the town’s intellectual memory was broken with it.
Revival and Literary Hall
For several years after the war, it seemed that the Literary Society of Romney might not recover. The old members were fewer. The library was damaged. The school building was in disrepair. The habits of antebellum civic life had been shaken by war.
Then in 1869, the society was revived.
The revival came at an important moment for Romney. West Virginia, a new state born during the Civil War, needed institutions of its own. One of those needs was a school for deaf and blind students. Romney wanted that school, and the Literary Society played a key role in helping secure it.
The society transferred property to the Board of Regents of West Virginia so the state school could be established in Romney. The West Virginia Schools for the Deaf and the Blind opened in Romney in 1870 after receiving property connected to the Literary Society. The old Romney Classical Institute became part of that new educational story.
At the same time, the revived society raised money by public subscription. The National Register nomination records the amount as $1,383.60. With that money and renewed civic energy, the society built Literary Hall in 1869 to 1870 at Main and High Streets in Romney.
The building was a physical statement that the old society had not vanished. It gave the group a place to meet, a place to house surviving books, and a place to center the intellectual life of the community once more.
The Hall at Main and High
Literary Hall was not a rough temporary room. It was a formal two-story brick building, tall in proportion, with details that blended older Federal symmetry with later Victorian touches. It stood at a visible place in town, at the corner of Main and High Streets.
The building mattered because it gave form to an idea. For decades, the Literary Society had existed through meetings, books, records, charters, and school projects. Literary Hall made that work visible in brick and mortar.
For about a decade after its construction, much of Romney’s intellectual life centered around the revived society and its hall. Meetings resumed, books were gathered again, and the organization that had begun in 1819 found a second life after the destruction of war.
But the revival could not last forever. As older members died, the society’s energy faded. Meetings became less frequent. The last recorded meeting took place at Literary Hall on February 15, 1886.
Afterward, the society passed into memory, but Literary Hall remained. The building was later associated with fraternal use and preservation, and it still stands as one of Romney’s most meaningful landmarks.
Why the Romney Literary Society Matters
The Romney Literary Society matters because it shows how early Appalachian communities built culture with the tools they had. It did not begin as a state institution. It did not begin with a large endowment. It began with local people gathering in a small office and deciding that books and debate were worth organizing around.
From that beginning came a library, a debating tradition, educational campaigns, support for Romney Academy, the Romney Classical Institute, Literary Hall, and a property transfer that helped bring the West Virginia Schools for the Deaf and the Blind to Romney.
The society’s story also challenges the idea that mountain communities were isolated from intellectual life. Romney’s readers were buying histories, biographies, classical works, and legal texts. They were debating education, public representation, banking, transportation, religion, and national policy. They were not waiting for culture to arrive from somewhere else. They were building it themselves.
The society was small. Maxwell and Swisher noted that no more than fifty two names appeared on its rolls in the first eleven years, and no record showed more than seventeen members present at a single meeting. Yet those few members left a large mark.
That may be the most important lesson. In Hampshire County, the work of a few people changed the direction of a town. The Romney Literary Society began with argument, dues, fines, and books. It ended with a surviving landmark and a legacy of education that reached far beyond its own membership.
For a place like Romney, the society was more than a club. It was a reminder that Appalachia’s history is not only the history of wars, roads, farms, railroads, and industries. It is also the history of libraries, classrooms, public questions, and people who believed that a community could strengthen itself by reading together.
Sources & Further Reading
Catalogue of the Members and Library of the Literary Society of Romney. Romney, Va.: Harper, Printer, June 1, 1849. https://www.historichampshire.org/histories/LiterarySocietyBooklet.pdf
Pauley, Michael J. “Literary Hall.” National Register of Historic Places Inventory/Nomination Form. West Virginia Department of Culture and History, 1979. https://wvculture.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Literary-hall.pdf
Maxwell, Hu, and H. L. Swisher. History of Hampshire County, West Virginia, From Its Earliest Settlement to the Present. Morgantown, W. Va.: A. Brown Boughner, 1897. Chapter XXXVIII, “Romney Literary Society.” https://wvgw.net/hampshire/history/maxwell-swisher/38_romney-literary-society.html
West Virginia & Regional History Center. “Romney Literary Society (Romney, W. Va.).” West Virginia University Libraries. https://archives.lib.wvu.edu/agents/corporate_entities/265
West Virginia & Regional History Center. “Fox Family Papers, A&M 0477.” West Virginia University Libraries. https://archives.lib.wvu.edu/agents/families/147
Jewett, Charles C. Notices of Public Libraries in the United States of America. Washington: Printed for the House of Representatives, 1851. https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/moa/AEY8526.0001.001?view=toc
Federal Writers’ Project. Historic Romney, 1762–1937. Romney, W. Va.: Town Council of Romney, 1937. https://search.worldcat.org/title/2006735
Brannon, Selden W., ed. Historic Hampshire: A Symposium of Hampshire County and Its People, Past and Present. Parsons, W. Va.: McClain Printing Company, 1976. https://www.historichampshire.org/biblio.htm
Munske, Roberta R., and Wilmer L. Kerns, eds. Hampshire County, West Virginia, 1754–2004. Romney, W. Va.: Hampshire County 250th Anniversary Committee, 2004. https://wvrhc.lib.wvu.edu/collections/appalachian-collection/appalachian-studies-bibliography/appalachian-studies-bibliography-1994-2012/social-conditions-social-life-and-customs
Rice, Otis K. The Allegheny Frontier: West Virginia Beginnings, 1730–1830. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1970. https://www.kentuckypress.com/9780813190679/the-allegheny-frontier/
Oates, David. The Background, Foundation and Early History of the West Virginia Schools for the Deaf and Blind. Romney, W. Va., ca. 1950. https://www.historichampshire.org/schools/WVSDB-Historyc1950-DOates.pdf
West Virginia Schools for the Deaf and the Blind. “History of the Schools.” Accessed June 15, 2026. https://www.wvsdb2.state.k12.wv.us/page/history-of-the-schools
e-WV: The West Virginia Encyclopedia. “West Virginia Schools for the Deaf and the Blind.” Accessed June 15, 2026. https://www.wvencyclopedia.org/entries/1045
e-WV: The West Virginia Encyclopedia. “Hampshire County.” Accessed June 15, 2026. https://www.wvencyclopedia.org/entries/133
e-WV: The West Virginia Encyclopedia. “Romney.” Accessed June 15, 2026. https://www.wvencyclopedia.org/entries/108
Society of Architectural Historians. “Literary Hall.” SAH Archipedia. Accessed June 15, 2026. https://sah-archipedia.org/buildings/WV-01-HM2
Historic Hampshire. “Deeds for Literary Hall in Romney.” Accessed June 15, 2026. https://historichampshire.org/records/romney/LitSocDeeds.htm
Historic Hampshire. “Timeline for Hampshire County, WV.” Accessed June 15, 2026. https://www.historichampshire.org/timeline.htm
The South Branch Intelligencer. Romney, W. Va. Issues cited for 1870 in the Literary Hall National Register nomination, especially March 18, April 8, April 18, and July 1, 1870. https://wvculture.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Literary-hall.pdf
The Clio. “Literary Hall, Romney West Virginia.” Accessed June 15, 2026. Use as a public-history overview only, not as the main authority. https://theclio.com/entry/36955
Author Note: The Romney Literary Society shows how a small Appalachian town built culture through books, debate, and public education long before modern institutions reached many mountain communities. This article treats the January 30, 1819 organizing meeting and the February 4, 1819 formal founding date carefully, since both dates matter to the society’s history.