Appalachian Community Histories – Union District, Wayne County: Pioneer Families, Twelvepole Creek, and the Heart of the County
Long before Wayne County existed, families were building cabins and farms along the branches of Twelvepole Creek in the country that would eventually become Union District. They entered a landscape of narrow bottomland, wooded ridges, creek crossings, and steep hills where farming was possible but rarely easy. Over time, names such as Spurlock, Ferguson, Adkins, Bowen, Booton, Lambert, and Blankenship became attached to the district, while one bend of Twelvepole grew from a rural settlement into the seat of Wayne County government.
Union never became the great coal district that some parts of southern West Virginia did. Its importance came from somewhere else. The courthouse stood here. Wayne grew here. Roads through the district connected the county seat with the Ohio and Big Sandy valleys. Schools became centers of neighborhood life, timber left the hills by the thousands of board feet, farmers worked the valley land, and later natural gas wells reached beneath the same farms that pioneer families had occupied generations earlier.
In December 1919, the Wayne County News looked backward at this history and called Union a place of “central interest” because the county courthouse had always been within the district. That description captured something fundamental about Union. It was not merely another collection of hollows and rural communities. For much of Wayne County’s history, it stood at the political and institutional heart of the county.
The First Families Along Twelvepole
The oldest published accounts of Union District place European American settlement there at the beginning of the nineteenth century, although the exact dates come from local histories written decades later and should be treated with some caution.
The 1919 Wayne County News history named Jesse Spurlock and Samuel Ferguson as the first settlers in the district, stating that both built homes in 1802 near the place where the courthouse later stood. The same account said that David France arrived in 1806 and was remembered for planting the first apple tree in the Twelvepole Valley. Hezekiah Adkins, John Stephenson, Thomas Chandler, Asher Crockett, Reuben Adkins, and William Adkins followed.
Around the period of the War of 1812, the newspaper placed another group within the future boundaries of Union District, including Hugh Bowen, Asa Bowen, Daniel Davis, Reuben Booton, Jesse Blankenship, John Thompson, John Newman, William Morris, Joshua Stephens, Jerry Lambert, Abraham Stephen, Burwell Spurlock, and others. It remembered Jerry Lambert and Polly Ferguson as the district’s first married couple, while Nancy Bowen and Mary Bloss were identified as among its first children born there.
These claims were already more than a century old when they appeared in print in 1919. They belong partly to family and community memory, but they also reveal which families Wayne County residents of that generation considered foundational to the district. Hardesty’s nineteenth-century history likewise placed the Fergusons and Spurlocks among the early settlers of what became Union District, giving the tradition deeper roots than the 1919 newspaper alone.
Religion soon followed settlement. The district history credited the Reverend Burwell Spurlock with preaching the first sermon in 1816, followed by the Reverend Goodwin Lycan. Before formal churches, graded schools, paved roads, and government buildings appeared, families were already creating the social institutions that turned scattered settlement into community.
A District Shaped by Twelvepole Creek
Union developed within the drainage of Twelvepole Creek, and the landscape determined much of its economy.
The Wayne County News described a district whose hills were generally better suited to grazing than intensive cultivation, although good farms occupied the richer ground in the Twelvepole Valley. Timber was once one of Union’s important products. The surrounding ridges carried marketable forests, and the newspaper remembered a period when large quantities of quality timber left the district before that industry declined.
This combination of creek-bottom agriculture and wooded uplands was typical of much of Wayne County. Families could raise livestock, grow corn and garden crops, maintain orchards, cut timber, and use the creek valleys as natural routes through otherwise difficult country.
The West Virginia Geological Survey captured that environment in much greater detail in its 1913 study of Cabell, Wayne, and Lincoln counties. The government report examined the region’s geology, soils, timber, roads, minerals, oil, gas, and transportation at a moment when rural Wayne County was entering a period of rapid economic change. Union remained agricultural, but the land beneath its farms was becoming valuable for reasons the first settlers could scarcely have imagined.
Wayne County Is Created
For the first four decades of Union’s settlement history, there was no Wayne County.
The region belonged to Virginia and passed through earlier county jurisdictions before forming part of Cabell County. That changed on January 18, 1842, when the Virginia General Assembly approved an act creating Wayne County from the western portion of Cabell.
The act named the new county for General Anthony Wayne and established boundaries stretching from the Ohio River toward the Big Sandy and Tug Fork country. More important for Union District, the legislature specified where the new county government would sit.
The permanent place for holding court was to be on the property of Abraham Trout along Twelvepole. The county court was authorized to obtain land there for a courthouse and other public buildings.
That decision changed the history of the district.
Instead of placing the courthouse along the Ohio River or closer to the Big Sandy settlements, Virginia lawmakers located it in the Twelvepole Valley. The result was the creation of a political center in the interior of Wayne County. A settlement gathered around the courthouse, government business brought residents in from distant parts of the county, merchants followed, and the place became known as Trout’s Hill and Wayne Court House.
The town was eventually incorporated as Fairview, although the courthouse name remained in common use. In 1911 the community officially became Wayne.
From that point forward, the history of Union District and the history of the county seat became inseparable.
When the Civil War Reached Wayne Court House
The courthouse also made Union District strategically important during the Civil War.
Wayne County sat in a divided border region where loyalty to the Union and the Confederacy could vary from one family or neighborhood to another. Control of the courthouse meant more than occupying a building. It meant access to county records, roads, government authority, and an important gathering place in western Virginia.
In August 1861, Federal troops from Camp Pierpont at Ceredo moved against Confederate supporters at Wayne Court House. Contemporary accounts reported that a force of fifty-three men reached the town and took possession of it. Fighting and skirmishing continued as Confederate forces attempted to regain the place.
The official chronology of the war records skirmishes at Wayne Court House on August 26 and 27, 1861. West Virginia’s statehood-era records likewise describe Federal troops occupying the courthouse area, Confederate forces attempting to retake it, and prisoners being captured.
War returned to the Twelvepole country later. In January 1864, Captain John S. Witcher of the 3rd West Virginia Cavalry pursued a Confederate force along the roads leading toward Wayne Court House. His official report described Wayne Court House as the headquarters of Confederate Colonel Ferguson and recorded a fight near the town in which Captain Spurlock was captured.
These encounters were small compared with Gettysburg, Antietam, or the larger battles fought elsewhere in West Virginia, but for the families of Union District they brought armed warfare directly into the roads and hills surrounding their county seat.
Wayne Grows Around the Courthouse
After the war, Wayne continued developing as the district’s largest community.
The courthouse brought lawyers, litigants, jurors, officeholders, merchants, travelers, and families into town. Stores and homes gathered around the government center, while farms continued to spread along Twelvepole and its tributaries.
The arrival of the railroad near the end of the nineteenth century strengthened those connections. Wayne no longer depended entirely on wagon roads and horseback travel to reach the outside world. Rail transportation made it easier to move passengers, mail, goods, timber, and other products through the valley.
Yet Union District remained much larger than Wayne itself.
Official West Virginia place-name records based on early twentieth-century mapping associate Booten, Bowen, Crete, Dickson, Elmwood, Herbert, Lavalette, Shoals, Wayne, and Winslow with Union District. Those names represent the smaller communities and neighborhoods surrounding the county seat, places where families created their own schools, churches, stores, farms, cemeteries, and local identities while remaining part of the larger district.
From One-Room Schools to Consolidation
Education became one of Union District’s defining institutions.
The 1919 district history remembered Union as an early leader in the development of Wayne County schools. That development reflected a larger transformation taking place across the county, where subscription schools and primitive buildings gradually gave way to longer terms, public financing, graded instruction, and consolidated schools.
One of the clearest glimpses into this transition comes not from a history book but from a lawsuit.
In Ward v. Board of Education, decided by the West Virginia Supreme Court in 1917, residents of Union District challenged a plan to close one-room schools in subdistricts three and four and consolidate pupils into the Dickson-Mays Graded School.
The case preserves an unusually detailed picture of rural educational life. Residents petitioned for the two one-room schools to be replaced by a two-room graded school near Dunkle Brothers store. The school board eventually selected land on the lower portion of the B. A. McGinnis farm, about half a mile from the store, acquired the property, obtained plans, accepted construction bids, and completed the building.
The disagreement that followed shows why school consolidation could become so emotional. A one-room school was not merely a public building. It belonged to the daily rhythm of a neighborhood. Children walked there, families gathered there, and generations might have learned beneath the same roof. Closing one school and building another could change the center of community life.
The state Supreme Court ultimately sided with the Union District Board of Education and dissolved the injunction against the consolidation.
By the end of 1919, Union residents were discussing still greater educational ambitions. The Wayne County News reported interest in establishing a senior high school, evidence that the district was moving from scattered neighborhood schools toward a more centralized educational system based around Wayne.
Building Roads Through the Hills
Schools were not the only institutions being transformed. Roads were changing as well.
For generations, transportation in Union District followed creeks, ridges, wagon roads, and paths that could become difficult or nearly impassable during bad weather. The arrival of improved road construction changed the relationship between farms, Wayne, Huntington, and the smaller communities of the district.
A West Virginia Supreme Court case from 1893 reveals how expensive that process could become. In Davis v. Wayne County Court, the court examined debts created for Wayne County road and bridge improvements during the 1880s. One certificate specifically referred to money payable from the road fund of Union District No. 2.
The case concerned constitutional limits on county debt, but behind the legal argument was a more ordinary Appalachian problem: roads had to be built and maintained through difficult terrain, and somebody had to pay for them.
Three decades later another lawsuit showed how road construction could affect individual farms. In Adkins v. Wayne County Court, the court examined an August 1919 deed conveying a strip of property for a right of way through a Union District farm. The landowner alleged that the county had promised to build a Class A hard road through the property but had graded and opened the route without completing the promised hard surface.
Together, the two cases document Union District’s long transition from local dirt and wagon roads toward a modern public road network. The arguments reached the state Supreme Court because roads had become increasingly valuable. A better road could raise the usefulness of a farm, improve access to school and market, and connect rural families more closely to Wayne and Huntington.
Timber, Farms, and the Coming of Natural Gas
The economic history of Union District did not follow the classic coal-boom pattern associated with Logan, Mingo, or McDowell counties.
The 1919 district history openly acknowledged that Union lacked the coal wealth of some other areas. It described grazing, farming, and timber as more important parts of the local economy and suggested that the district’s future would depend heavily on agricultural and educational improvements.
That prediction was only partly correct.
By the 1930s, natural gas had become an increasingly visible part of Wayne County’s economy. In January 1938, the Wayne County News reported that sixteen gas wells had been drilled in the county during the previous year. Twelve of those wells were on farms in Union District.
The newspaper named landowners including Ben Blankenship, R. S. Sansom, Lucien Lester, P. W. Sansom, Robert Blankenship, Dennie Copley, J. G. Lambert, Sarah Sansom, D. Adkins, Floyd Brewer, V. L. Lusher, and J. B. Crum Sr. Companies involved in county drilling included Kentucky-West Virginia Gas Company, United Fuel Gas Company, and several others.
The report reveals an important change in the district’s relationship with its land. A farm could now be valuable not only for its soil, timber, livestock, or location, but for the gas trapped beneath it.
The hills remained rural, yet they were increasingly connected to regional energy markets.
The Communities Inside Union District
The name Union can be misleading if it is imagined as a single town.
Historically, Union District was a larger administrative and geographic area containing multiple communities. Wayne was its institutional center, but places such as Booten, Bowen, Dickson, Elmwood, Lavalette, Shoals, Winslow, Herbert, Crete, and other neighborhoods formed their own pieces of the district’s history.
Some were centered around stores. Others grew around farms, post offices, schools, churches, road junctions, or family settlements. A few became lasting place names. Others faded from common use or survived mainly through cemeteries, deeds, old maps, newspaper notices, and family memory.
That pattern is important because rural Appalachian history is rarely contained within incorporated towns alone. Much of Union District’s history happened between them, along creek banks and branch roads, on farms whose owners appeared repeatedly in deed books, school disputes, jury lists, road petitions, tax records, and newspaper columns.
The district was therefore less a single settlement than a network of connected communities organized around Twelvepole Creek and the county seat at Wayne.
A District at the Center of Wayne County History
Union District’s story is easy to overlook because it lacks one dramatic event that defines it.
There was no single great mine explosion, no vast company town, and no industrial boom that transformed the district overnight. Instead, Union accumulated importance gradually.
Pioneer families settled the Twelvepole Valley. Churches appeared. Farms spread across the usable bottomland. Timber left the ridges. The Virginia legislature created Wayne County and placed the courthouse on Abraham Trout’s land. Civil War soldiers fought around Wayne Court House. Schools expanded from one-room buildings to graded and high school education. Roads were improved through the hills. Rail transportation connected Wayne more closely with the outside world. Natural gas companies drilled beneath old family farms.
Through all of those changes, the courthouse remained.
That may be the most important fact in Union District’s history. The decision made in 1842 to place Wayne County’s governmental center along Twelvepole gave the district a role that its geography or mineral wealth alone might never have produced. People from every corner of the county eventually had reasons to travel there, whether they were recording a deed, appearing in court, paying taxes, attending school, shopping, serving on a jury, or conducting county business.
The Wayne County News understood this when it described Union in 1919 as a section of “central interest.” More than a century later, the description still fits.
Union District was the country around the courthouse, but it was also the farms, schools, roads, churches, timberlands, family settlements, and small communities surrounding it. Together they formed one of the oldest continuously important landscapes in Wayne County, a place where the history of Twelvepole Creek and the history of county government became intertwined.
Sources & Further Reading
Wayne County News. “Pioneer District History.” December 25, 1919. West Virginia Archives and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/History/wcn/wcn191225.html
Virginia General Assembly. “An Act Establishing the County of Wayne of Part of the County of Cabell.” Chapter 60, Acts of the General Assembly of Virginia, 1841–1842. Passed January 18, 1842. West Virginia Archives and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/hiStory/counties/wayne01.html
Wayne County News. “History of School System in Wayne County.” October 23, 1919. West Virginia Archives and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/History/wcn/wcn191023.html
Wayne County News. “Aged Woman Pictures the Hardships of Early Days.” February 16, 1922. West Virginia Archives and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/History/wcn/wcn220216.html
Wayne County News. “Wayne County of Forty Years Ago Pictured in Local Papers of the 1880s.” January 15, 1925. West Virginia Archives and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/History/wcn/wcn250115.html
Wayne County News. Union District juror material. January 28, 1926. West Virginia Archives and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/History/wcn/wcn260128.html
Wayne County News. Reports on Union District natural gas development. 1938. Wayne County Genealogical and Historical Society. https://waynewv.com/wcghs/oldsite/Old%20Newspapers/Newspapers%201938.htm
Ward v. Board of Education, 80 W. Va. 541 (1917). https://openjurist.org/80/wva/541/ward-v-board-of-education
Davis v. Wayne County Court, 38 W. Va. 104 (1893). https://openjurist.org/38/wva/104/davis-v-wayne-county-court
Adkins v. Wayne County Court, 94 W. Va. 460, 119 S.E. 284 (1923). https://openjurist.org/94/wva/460/adkins-v-wayne-county-court-8216942
West Virginia State Archives. “Wayne County Court Records Microfilm Holdings.” Includes deed books, deed indexes, surveyor’s books, wills, appraisements, fiduciary records, and county administrative records. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/archives/bluenote.html
Wayne County Clerk. “County Clerk.” Wayne County, West Virginia. Official county deeds, marriage licenses, and courthouse records. https://www.waynecountywv.org/countyclerk.php
Wayne County Assessor. “Assessor.” Wayne County, West Virginia. Land books, assessment records, maps, and property information. https://waynecountywv.org/assessor.php
West Virginia Archives and History. “West Virginia Vital Research Records.” Historic birth, marriage, and death records, including Wayne County. https://archive.wvculture.org/vrr/
United States Census Office. A Compendium of the Ninth Census, June 1, 1870. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1872. https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/decennial/1870/compendium/1870e-17.pdf
United States Census Office. Statistics of the Population of the United States at the Tenth Census, 1880. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1883. https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/decennial/1880/vol-01-population/1880_v1-12.pdf
White, M. Wood. White’s New County and District Atlas of the State of West Virginia. Grafton, WV: M. Wood White, 1873. “Counties of Cabell, Wayne, Lincoln, Logan.” David Rumsey Map Collection. https://www.davidrumsey.com/maps1120365-28431.html
“Survey of a Tract of Land on Twelve Pole Creek, Wayne County, West Virginia.” ca. 1880s. Manuscript map. Hotchkiss Map Collection, Geography and Map Division, Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/resource/g3893w.cwh00328/
Krebs, Charles E., and D. D. Teets Jr. County Reports and Maps: Cabell, Wayne and Lincoln Counties. Wheeling, WV: West Virginia Geological Survey, 1913. https://books.google.com/books?id=ePNLAAAAMAAJ
West Virginia Geological and Economic Survey. “Cabell, Wayne, and Lincoln Counties.” Publications, Maps, and Digital Data Catalog. Includes Wayne County topographic, geological, and agricultural soils maps. https://downloads.wvgs.wvnet.edu/pubcat/docs/WVGES_Publication_Catalog.pdf
West Virginia State Road Commission. “State Road Plans, Union District, Wayne County.” 1934–1935. West Virginia Department of Transportation historical plans collection. https://mapwv.gov/DOTLivePlans/Scanning/ProjectBookFolders/P_50_3_0152_00_000_1934_S06487/PDF/P_50_3_0152_00_000_1934_S06487.pdf
West Virginia. West Virginia Blue Book, 1921. Charleston, WV: State of West Virginia, 1921. https://www.wvlegislature.gov/legisdocs/publications/bluebook/WVS_Bluebook_1921.pdf
West Virginia Legislature. Acts of the Legislature of West Virginia, 1920. Provisions concerning Wayne County High School and the district boards, including Union District. https://www.wvlegislature.gov/legisdocs/publications/acts/Acts_1920.pdf
West Virginia Legislature. “House Bill 144.” 1933 Regular Session. Legislation concerning the Union District Board of Education. https://code.wvlegislature.gov/signed_bills/1933/1933-RS-HB144-ENR_signed.pdf
West Virginia Adjutant General. “Wayne County Union Militia Records, 1861–1865.” West Virginia Archives and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/ag/militia/militiabox28f05.html
United States War Department. The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies. Records concerning military operations at and around Wayne Court House, West Virginia, during the Civil War. West Virginia Archives and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/sesquicentennial/18640127.html
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. https://www.archives.gov/research/post-offices/postmasters-1832-1971.html
National Archives and Records Administration. Post Office Department Reports of Site Locations, 1837–1950. Microfilm Publication M1126, Records of the Post Office Department, Record Group 28. https://www.archives.gov/research/post-offices/locations-1837-1950.html
West Virginia and Regional History Center. “Newspaper Microfilm Collection.” Includes the Wayne News and Wayne County News. West Virginia University Libraries. https://wvrhc.lib.wvu.edu/collections/newspapers/microfilm
West Virginia and Regional History Center. “Public Records Collection.” West Virginia University Libraries. Federal census, county court, deed, survey, tax, election, school, road, probate, and vital records. https://wvrhc.lib.wvu.edu/collections/public-records
West Virginia and Regional History Center. “West Virginia Historical Records Survey.” Reels 252–253, including Wayne County history and county office record inventories. West Virginia University Libraries. https://wvrhc.lib.wvu.edu/collections/public-records/historical-records-survey
Lambert, Fred B. “Notebook 26: Union District Spurlocks, Bowens, Bryans, etc.; Walnut Grove School.” Fred B. Lambert Papers. Marshall University Special Collections. https://mds.marshall.edu/lambert_papers/49/
Hardesty, H. H. Hardesty’s Historical and Geographical Encyclopedia: Special History of Wayne County, West Virginia. Chicago and Toledo: H. H. Hardesty & Co., 1884. Wayne County Genealogical and Historical Society. https://waynewv.com/wcghs/wayne_county_hisotry.php?thisPage=wayne_county_hisotry
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
West Virginia Archives and History. “Districts and Place Names in West Virginia.” Based on historical state mapping and district records. https://archive.wvculture.org/hiStory/communities/districtplacenames.html
West Virginia Archives and History. “Wayne County History Sources.” Bibliography of books, manuscripts, newspapers, government records, and other Wayne County materials. https://archive.wvculture.org/History/archives/counties/wayne.html
West Virginia Humanities Council. “Wayne County.” e-WV: The West Virginia Encyclopedia. https://www.wvencyclopedia.org/entries/897
Author Note: Union District’s history reaches far beyond the county seat at Wayne, connecting generations of families, farms, schools, roads, and smaller communities throughout the Twelvepole Valley. I hope this article helps preserve the story of the district as a whole and encourages readers to explore the records left behind by the people who called it home.