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The Quality of Mountain Life

The Mountain Environment Mountainous. regions of the world have always been conservative and slow to change. Isolation from the mainstream of national and world events entrenches within their people beliefs, attitudes, and customs that in more accessible places retreat under the pressure of new ideas and changing interests. West Virginia has been no exception to this pattern. Her confining mountains and lack of broadly unifying river systems discouraged easy communication in early times and fostered a high degree of particularism among her people. Pioneer characteristics long persisted, in some isolated areas even to the twentieth century. The essential features of life in bygone years therefore require some attention in order to understand West Virginians of today.

An Economy of Abundance. Nature lavished her bounties upon West Virginia. The vast forests that originally covered the state provided cover for a great variety of game animals, ranging from bears, deer, and elk to small quarry such as squirrels and wild fowl, including turkeys and pheasants. Reports of hunters who killed a hundred or more bears in a single season were not uncommon. From forest trees came walnuts, butternuts, hickory nuts, chestnuts, and hazelnuts, as well as such wild fruits as the cherry, plum, crab apple, and papaw. Smaller plants added blackberries, raspberries, blueberries, wild grapes, and other delicacies to the pioneer diet. Matching the forests in their abundance were the streams, which teemed with numerous kinds of fish.

Although most families began to clear land for crops immediately, they continued to rely on the forests and streams for part of their sustenance. Joseph Doddridge one of the most discerning observers of pioneer life, recalled a saying that hunting was good in every month that had an r in its spelling. François-André Michaux, a French traveler in the Ohio Valley in the early nineteenth century, declared that many residents had developed such a fondness for hunting that they neglected the cultivation of their crops.

The natural abundance and the difficulties in setting the plow to the land appear to have attracted to West Virginia a disproportionate number of the class of settlers that Frederick Jackson Turner, the great frontier historian, called “pioneer farmers.” These restless souls seldom remained in one place more than a few years. They lived chiefly by hunting and raising rangy cattle and razorback hogs, which they turned loose to feed upon natural grasses and the mast of the forests. They limited their agricultural production chiefly to corn and a few garden vegetables. They sought only the usufruct of the land and were prodigal of its seemingly unlimited resources.

The Permanent Settler. The casual observer often failed to distinguish between the “pioneer farmer” and the permanent farmer. The former usually left his wilderness home after a few years for greener pastures. The permanent settler had hopes of taming the wilderness and gazing upon his own teeming fields and hardy flocks and herds.

The first abode of the pioneer family, a crude cabin of unhewn logs, was a testimonial to the alliance between family and forest. The pioneer chinked the cracks of his dwelling with grass and mud, laid on a roof of clapboards held in place by heavy poles laid crosswise, and constructed a “cat and clay” chimney of stones held together with clay, sticks, and the down from cattails. Most cabins consisted of only one room and a loft, which was reached by means of a ladder and served as sleeping quarters for the children. Later the ambitious settler replaced the cabin with a house of neatly hewn logs, puncheon floors, a cut stone fireplace and chimney, glass windowpanes, and a neatly shingled roof.

Although many pioneer families long relied upon forests and streams for food, even to considering the breast of the wild turkey and venison as substitutes for bread, most turned increasingly to the produce of their lands. The very first year the pioneer cleared a plot for a cornfield by girdling trees, which he later cut, and removing the undergrowth. Even before he grubbed out the stumps, which might require two or three years, he planted a crop of corn. The very staff of pioneer life, corn was ground into meal for bread, including corn pone and journeycakes, and served as roasting ears, hominy, mush, and dozens of other dishes. It provided food for livestock and was the base of the common “hog and hominy” diet. The planting of wheat had to wait until stumps had been removed and the soil had lost some of the nutrients that caused the grain to mature without forming a head. Oats, rye, and buckwheat, the latter grown chiefly in Preston and Greenbrier counties, were other common grains. Potatoes, beans, squash, pumpkins, and other garden vegetables relieved some of the monotony of mealtime fare.

Pioneer dress was at first simple and unadorned. Men wore hunting shirts, breeches, coonskin caps, and moccasins. The hunting shirt, made of deerskin or linsey-woolsey, a homespun fabric, reached nearly to the knees and bloused over a belt to form a pocket for carrying food and other articles. Moccasins of deerskin were well suited to dry weather but were uncomfortable in rain and snow. Women made their dresses of linsey-woolsey, a material prized for durability rather than beauty. They ordinarily wore sunbonnets throughout the year, and in summer they frequently were barefoot. Children's attire was very much like that of their elders.

An Expanding Economy. Pioneers bore the hardships and privations of frontier life with considerable equanimity, but they aspired to leave behind the most primitive conditions and return to more sophisticated and comfortable ways as soon as possible. With industry and good fortune, their farms could be made to produce a variety of articles that might be sold for cash or traded for needed supplies or even luxuries. Bulky or perishable products could not be transported by packhorse or flatboats and canoes to distant towns, but corn and rye could be made into whiskey, peaches into brandy, and apples into cider. Ready markets existed for all of these, as well as for tallow, furs, hides, saltpeter, ginseng, and many native roots. Moreover, within a few years western residents annually began to drive thousands of livestock, chiefly cattle and hogs, to eastern markets such as Baltimore and Philadelphia.

Cash crops and various native products enabled the pioneer to acquire gunpowder, rifles, salt, and bar iron, the raw material of the blacksmith, but they also provided him and his family with their first luxuries. The records of an unidentified merchant in the Greenbrier Valley in 1784, only fifteen years after settlements were reestablished there after the French and Indian War, are instructive. To his customers the merchant provided fine linen, calico, holland, silk for bonnets, cambric, velvet, broadcloth, check, durant, stock mohair, scarlet cloaks, and apron strings; buttons, needles, and thread; salt, pepper, chocolate, ginger, and coffee; teapots, coffeepots, cruets, soup plates, cups and saucers, knives, tumblers, and pepper boxes; and guns, barlows, jackknives, padlocks, and saddles. The merchant took ginseng for seventy percent of his sales and farm and forest products for most of the remainder. His cash income amounted to only two percent of his sales.¹

Folkways. Frontier isolation subtly merged into rural life patterns that had an enduring effect upon the outlook and customs of the people. Lonely families welcomed social gatherings and visits from strangers who occasionally passed their way. Normal interest in other people sometimes took the form of excessive curiosity, and the unwary visitor was bombarded with questions about his or her personal circumstances, family, and reasons for travel. Travelers from that day to this, however, have commented upon the friendliness of the people of West Virginia.

Weddings were favorite social occasions. Very often they were held at the house of the bride's parents, who provided a feast as sumptuous as farm and forest could afford, with beef, pork, fowl, bear, venison, and fruits and vegetables that were in season. Some West Virginians indulged in the customs of stealing the bride's shoe or “running for the bottle.” A dance often climaxed activities and lasted through the night despite tired, aching feet and a weary fiddler. The infare, held by the bridegroom's parents the following day, continued the festivities.

Most social occasions combined pleasure with work best done through group effort. A prime example was the house-raising. Once the site for a dwelling had been selected, a “fatigue party” cut down trees, hauled the logs to a designated spot, made clapboards for the roof, and hewed puncheons for the floor. A knowledgeable and industrious work force could have the foundations laid before the end of the first day. The next morning four skilled cornermen notched and laid up the logs, while other men laid the floor and built the chimney. By the end of the third day, workers had the structure under roof and ready for occupancy. Churches and schoolhouses were commonly built by the same cooperative endeavor. The women ordinarily prepared meals and refreshments at such times.

Logrollings were common spring events. In preparation, the landowner felled the trees, cut off the branches, notched the trunks at about eight-or ten-foot intervals, and for several days burned dry limbs at each notch until the trunk had been reduced to manageable lengths. On the day of the logrolling, men with handspikes moved the logs to a large heap, where they burned them. Again women provided the meals, which often featured burgoo, a kind of potpie of vegetables and wild meats never reduced to a specific recipe.

Pioneers also relieved the tedium of life with corn shuckings, molasses making, quilting parties, and other common endeavors. Equally exciting were court days, when men gathered to hear both civil and criminal cases, transact necessary business at the county seat, and engage in such tests of dexterity as marksmanship, throwing the tomahawk, and wrestling with no holds barred. Funerals also had their social aspects, with friends and neighbors participating in the “wake” and accompanying the departed to the grave.

Ailments and Their Treatment. A common assumption invests pioneer men and women with robust health and great physical vigor. Actually, they suffered acutely from privation, exposure, disease, and debilitating seasonal ailments. Often without access to doctors and lacking scientific knowledge of anatomy, they relied upon experimentation, the advice of others who had borne similar afflictions, and superstition in the treatment of their ailments. Their folk remedies leaned heavily toward specifics, and they combed the hills and valleys for roots, barks, and herbs, the major ingredients of their medicines. Some proved efficacious, but as Joseph Doddridge, himself a pioneer physician, observed, others did wonders in all cases in which there was nothing to be done.

Fevers and rheumatism caused untold suffering. Treatment of fevers, commonly classified as intermittent, remittent, and ague, consisted of an assortment of drinks, particularly those made from cherry, dogwood, or poplar bark. In 1803 Dr. Gideon Forsythe introduced calomel and Peruvian bark into the Wheeling area. Victims of rheumatism bathed the affected parts with oil, including that of rattlesnakes, geese, wolves, bears, raccoons, groundhogs, and skunks. Some rheumatics favored crude petroleum, often called Seneca oil. Others preferred to bathe in water dipped from an open stream before sunrise on Ash Wednesday or to turn their shoes upside down before going to bed.

Cough remedies were numerous. Many made use of spikenard and elecampane. Virginia snakeroot was considered effective for coughs of all kinds. Another remedy consisted of a mixture of Indian turnip and honey, but many users believed that the Indian turnip must be scraped from the top down to be of any benefit. Also useful were teas, particularly those made from horehound or bear's-foot, the latter a superlatively bitter concoction that required a “good nerve” on the part of the consumer. Favorite treatments for inflammation of the chest included demulcent liquids and rubefacients. Comfrey, spikenard, sassafras pith, and slippery elm bark provided soothing drinks, and horseradish and mustard the poultices used to relieve difficulty in breathing.

Many pioneers considered childhood diseases inevitable and exposed their children to milder ones, such as chickenpox, as early as possible in the belief that the younger the victim the less severe the disease. Smallpox, however, held terror for old and young alike. Vaccination was used in some areas by the 1820s, but most sections lacked that protection, and many residents would have rejected it had it been available.

Annoying skin problems elicited remedies reflecting both common sense and superstition. The itch, a common affliction, usually responded to a mixture of sulfur and lard. Chapped lips might be cured, so it was said, by kissing the middle rail of a five-rail fence.

Pioneers often recognized that good health was related to proper diet, pure water, and clean air. They noted that flooding in the Ohio and its tributaries brought fever, probably typhoid. Never suspecting the mosquito, residents along the West Fork of the Monongahela opposed the erection of locks and dams in the stream in the early nineteenth century on the ground that they would create ponds of stagnant water that would exude vapors harmful to health. Henry Ruffner, president of Washington College, returned to a mountaintop farm in his native Kanawha Valley where pure air and physical activity might repair “a constitution broken by 30 years of constant labor in a literary institution.”²

Early doctors ranged from woefully ignorant and unprincipled quacks to men whose knowledge and skill matched those of the most advanced areas of the country. Wheeling, Charleston, Clarksburg, Morgantown, and populous towns of the Eastern Panhandle drew some of the most capable practitioners. Even the best physicians engaged in bleeding, a practice recommended by no less an authority than Dr. Benjamin Rush, the eminent Philadelphia physician and teacher. Joseph Doddridge declared that in many ailments the danger was not that the lancet might be used too freely, but too sparingly. Most communities lacked doctors but had men or women possessing some skill in the medical arts.

Persons whose means permitted patronized the numerous mineral springs of the state, including White Sulphur and Old Sweet Springs. Drinking or bathing in their waters may or may not have been efficacious, but the social seasons must have proved powerful psychological restoratives. Most residents, however, continued to rely upon familiar home remedies and patent medicines purchased at the country stores. They retained an honored place on many home medicine shelves long after other sources of medical attention had become available.

Superstition. Most pioneers brought into the mountains with them an accumulation of superstitions, many of them of European origin. Such beliefs long continued to influence the thinking and fire the imaginations of people in isolated sections, and some still survive. Given to the stories of love and tragedy, early settlers were almost inevitably attracted to tales of witchcraft and the supernatural. They often blamed strange happenings and incurable diseases, especially those of children, upon witchcraft. Accused persons never paid the supreme penalty, such as New England leaders meted out a century earlier, but some suffered sorely for their alleged activities.

Many superstitions concerned everyday occurrences. A black cat crossing one's path meant that bad luck would follow, but it could be averted by walking backward across the cat's path. Breaking a mirror entailed seven years of bad luck, unless the pieces were placed under running water, in which case the bad luck would last only seven days. A bird flying into the house was an omen of death. Such superstitions, as well as a belief in the special importance of dreams, served as constant reminders of the influence of supernatural forces. Far more exciting were reports of ghosts, and scarcely a family escaped some alleged experience with the occult.

The Role of Churches. Often closely related to belief in supernatural intrusions was the influence of religion in the daily lives of pioneers. Most accepted the basic tenets of Christianity and acknowledged the value of Christian principles, even though they might violate them in their own conduct.

Throughout the colonial period and until 1786, when the legislature accepted the principle of separation of church and state, the Anglican or the Protestant Episcopal Church, was the official religious establishment of Virginia. Yet for more than half a century, religious toleration had been extended to the trans-Allegheny country in order to promote settlement of the backcountry. There a variegated religious complexion prevailed. Along with Anglicans were large numbers of Presbyterians, Lutherans, German Reformists, Quakers, and Dunkers and scatterings of other denominations.

Isolation and the exigencies of prolonged frontier life eroded old denominational ties. Before the Revolutionary War few settlements had resident ministers, and most pioneers depended upon infrequent and uncertain visits by itinerant preachers for marriage, baptism, and funeral services. Recognizing their neglect, Moravian missionaries began as early as 1747 to visit settlers along the South Branch of the Potomac and Patterson Creek. There they emphasized the bounties of God's love and preached a doctrine of free grace that “tasted well” to their listeners. They usually refused, however, to perform marriages and baptisms for persons whom they did not know and thereby denied them two of the services they most desired of the church.

The weakening of existing church ties in West Virginia coincided with the Great Awakening, a religious revival that began in New England in the 1720s and swept southward during the following decades. The revival, which affected most denominations, stressed the importance of emotions and personal conversion over ritual and ceremony, the need for evangelical work in religiously neglected regions, and more itinerancy among ministers. Disruptive though it was, the movement proved highly invigorating by infusing new zeal into older denominations and providing the impetus to others that until then had attracted but few adherents. Already prepared by a profound piety and a blurring of doctrinal differences, West Virginians formed “the plastic material for the revivalist who found them receptive to a gospel which taught a direct personal relationship between Christ and the believer.”³

The Revolutionary War era gave religious dissent a respectability that it had not previously enjoyed in Virginia. Beginning in the 1770s, Methodists and Baptists especially, in successive waves of revivalism, reached out to the frontiers and gathered a harvest of souls. Within the next half century they gained a preeminence in West Virginia that they have never lost. In 1850 Methodists had 281 and the Baptists 115 of the 548 congregations in West Virginia. The Presbyterians trailed far behind with 61 congregations and the Protestant Episcopal, formerly the Anglican, Church had only 22. Older denominations such as the Quakers, Lutherans, German Reformists, and Dunkers were reduced to very small fractions of church members in the state.

The Baptists. Of the major denominations in present West Virginia, the Baptists were the first to gain a solid foothold. In 1743 they established the Mill Creek church at Gerrardstown, which was broken up during the French and Indian War but later revived and took the lead in forming the Ketocton Regular Baptist Association in 1765. Two New England ministers, Shubal Stearns and Daniel Marshall, who visited the Eastern Panhandle in 1754 with the intention of establishing a base for spreading the ideas of Separate Baptists throughout the South, encountered a chilly reception. Most listeners objected to their “animated” preaching, and they moved on to Sandy Creek, North Carolina, which in time became a center of Baptist influence in the South.

During the Revolutionary War Baptist ministers crossed the Alleghenies to exposed and isolated settlements. In 1774 John Sutton founded the Simpson Creek Church at Bridgeport, and the following year John Corbly established the Forks of Cheat Baptist Church. John Alderson took up residence in the Greenbrier Valley in 1777 and organized the Greenbrier Baptist Church at Alderson in 1781. The courage of such ministers, who braved great personal danger and hardships in the midst of a raging war to plant their faith, did much to win converts.

Another strength of the Baptists lay in their democratic organization. Their heroic struggle for separation of church and state, stoutly resisted by authorities during the colonial era, was vindicated by postwar legislation. The Baptists extended concepts of democracy to the congregation, which selected its own minister and established its rules of decorum. Baptist churches could not be accused of elitism, since their often uneducated farmer-preachers came from the same elements as the congregations, which in early years were likely to represent the poorer economic classes of society.

The Baptists suffered two disadvantages, particularly with respect to the Methodists. Partly because of the lack of a strong central authority capable of resolving doctrinal issues, Baptist congregations often split on relatively minor matters. Divisive issues in the early nineteenth century included missions, education, temperance, and Freemasonry. Another handicap was the Calvinistic doctrine of predestination, and as time passed, the Baptists began to emphasize a doctrine of general atonement.

The Methodists. In contrast with other denominations, the Methodists had an organization ideally suited to conditions in West Virginia and to the needs of an expanding frontier. Like the Baptists, they had a strong grass roots base. Small congregations were served by a lay reader, or lay leader, who lived in the community and conducted services. Periodically, however, they received visits from a circuit rider, a regularly appointed minister whose charge included several churches. In the organizational pyramid, circuits were grouped into quarterly conferences, which in turn formed annual conferences. The entire structure was capped by the authority and prestige of the bishop. As settlements expanded, new congregations were added to existing circuits, which could be rearranged to accommodate shifting populations. With the best features of both centralization and decentralization, the Methodists remained close to the people but escaped many of the disruptions that plagued the Baptists.

In some respects the circuit riders were the key figures in the Methodist organization. These dedicated men traveled hundreds of miles each year over arduous mountain trails, braved the perils and hardships of storms and freezing weather, faced dangers from ferocious animals, and suffered great physical discomfort. The rewards for their labors were most often spiritual rather than monetary. They belonged, “like the early founders of Christianity, to the toiling classes of the community. They were taken from the plow, the loom, the bench, the anvil.” They proved singularly effective in setting forth “those soul-saving truths which brought the sinner to dust, and raised the fallen to the blessings of pardon and salvation.”⁴

Complementing the work of the circuit riders was that of the indefatigable Bishop Francis Asbury, who frequently left the beaten paths “to seek the outcasts of the people.”⁵ Between 1776 and 1815 Asbury made at least thirty-four journeys to the frontiers, setting out from Baltimore and swinging westward to the outer fringes of settlement. His close association with the people themselves does much to explain the vitality of early West Virginia Methodism.

Although Methodism continued to appeal to the masses, it also drew support from the natural aristocracy of the areas into which it advanced. It began as a movement within the Church of England in 1739 under the spirited leadership of John Wesley. The first three Methodist missionaries arrived in the colonies in 1766, but during the Revolutionary War all except Francis Asbury returned to England. Asbury remained and took the lead in establishing the ecclesiastical independence of American Methodists from their English counterparts. Yet American Methodism retained a measure of the prestige that had attached to the Anglican Church. Locally prominent families, such as the Zanes, McMechens, McCulloughs, Doddridges, and Wellses in the Northern Panhandle and Edward Keenan in the Greenbrier region, could readily become Methodists without feeling alienated from all previous spiritual values.

Other advantages of the Methodists derived from their own hymnody, the social qualities of their class meetings, and their effective use of the camp meeting. The origins of the camp meeting are usually traced to the famous Cane Ridge revival in Bourbon County, Kentucky, in 1801, and to techniques used by James McGready, a Presbyterian minister. The quarterly meetings of West Virginia Methodists, however, had long been marked by assemblages of circuit riders, local preachers, class leaders, and communicants, often numbering in the hundreds, and by an emotional uplift produced by spirited preaching, love feasts, and the singing of Methodist hymns. It was but a short step from the quarterly gathering to the camp meeting, which in Methodist hands assumed the flavor of a great religious crusade.

The Methodist Protestant Church. Although West Virginia Methodists did not experience the fragmentation of the Baptists, they did not entirely escape disruption within their ranks. As early as 1792 discontent was voiced over the power and life tenure of the bishops, the lack of lay representation in the General Conference, and the arbitrary assignment of ministers and other church officials. Years later, several reformist ministers circulated a petition called Mutual Rights and were expelled from the church. At the Baltimore Conference in 1827 discontented elements drew up a new petition for presentation to the Pittsburgh Conference the following year and called for reinstatement of the expelled ministers.

Despite eloquent pleas by such leaders as Henry Bascom, who had begun his ministry on the rugged Guyandotte Circuit of West Virginia, and Asa Shinn, a prominent Methodist leader in the northern part of the state, differences between church authorities and reformers remained unresolved. Several congregations dominated by reformers severed their connection with the Methodist Episcopal Church and in November 1830 officially established the Methodist Protestant Church. In West Virginia support for the reformers centered largely in the Monongahela Valley. The chief congregations were at Fairmont, under Thomas Barns, a brother-in-law of Shinn, and at Hacker Valley, under John Mitchell and David Smith. In 1855 West Virginia members numbered 3,036 of whom more than half were in the Morgantown, Pruntytown, Evansville, Jackson, and Braxton circuits. The Greenbrier Circuit, the largest in southern West Virginia, had seventy members.

The Presbyterians. Considering the fact that about half of the five hundred Presbyterian churches in the colonies in 1776 were in areas from which West Virginia settlers were drawn, the state might well have become predominantly Presbyterian. In fact, during the early 1780s Presbyterianism seemed to take on new life in the Eastern Panhandle. Moreover, Presbyterians were in the vanguard of intrepid ministers who crossed the Allegheny Mountains to carry the gospel to the frontiers. In 1775 John McMillan visited the Greenbrier and Tygart Valley settlements. In 1783 John McCue organized three congregations in the Greenbrier region. Other missionaries began to appear in the Kanawha, Monongahela, and upper Ohio valleys.

Unfortunately, the structure and philosophy of the Presbyterian Church was ill adapted to the requirements of frontier areas. Lacking both the flexible organization of the Methodists and the local orientation of the Baptists, it suffered a distinct disadvantage. In 1800 nearly all of its twenty-two congregations were in the Eastern Panhandle, the Northern Panhandle, and the Greenbrier Valley. As late as 1830, ten large counties of northcentral West Virginia, with a population of sixty thousand, had no settled Presbyterian minister with the exception of Asa Brooks, the pastor of the church at French Creek.

Without doubt, the greatest handicap to the Presbyterians in increasing their numbers lay in their insistence upon an educated ministry. Men such as John McElhenney at Lewisburg, Henry Foote at Romney, and Henry Ruffner at Charleston also had to spend as much time in teaching and administering academies in their respective towns as in strictly religious endeavors. Encumbered with educational baggage as well as insistence upon trained ministers, the Presbyterian Church found itself unable to keep pace with advancing settlements in the manner of the Methodists and Baptists.

The Episcopal Church. Even less a proselytizing denomination than the Presbyterians was the Episcopal Church. In 1840 West Virginia had only eleven Episcopal churches west of the Allegheny Mountains. Most of them were in larger towns such as Charleston, Wellsburg, Wheeling, Moundsville, Follansbee, Morgantown, and Clarksburg. The nuclei of the congregations often consisted of well-to-do members whose families had historic ties with the

Episcopal Church and its Anglican antecedents. An example was Judge George W. Summers, who provided a little church, Saint John's in the Valley, at his farm at Scary on the Kanawha River. Others owed their existence to some devoted minister, such as Joseph Doddridge, who founded three of the churches in the Northern Panhandle.

The Disciples of Christ. Although the Disciples of Christ had relatively few members in West Virginia before the Civil War, Alexander Campbell, one of its founders, spent most of his adult life in the state. Born in County Antrim, Ireland, Campbell studied at the University of Glasgow. In 1809 he migrated to America, where his father had assumed charge of a church in Pennsylvania. Young Campbell deplored the spirit of intolerance that he found among American churches and tried to promote a more ecumenical approach to religion through the Christian Association of Washington (in Pennsylvania). Believing that the manners and morals of the people needed reform, the Campbells and their followers organized a full-fledged church at Brush Run, Pennsylvania. Campbell's acceptance of congregational government of each church and infant baptism enabled his church to become a member of the Redstone Baptist Association, but the Baptists did not consider Campbell rigid enough in his Calvinism to qualify as a minister.

Campbell continued his battle against sectarianism after his removal to Buffalo Creek, present Bethany. He held that the simple language of the Bible could explain all the basic aspects of Christianity and unite all who accepted its teachings. In a successful publication, the Christian Baptist, founded in 1823, he attacked missions, Sunday schools, and sectarian societies. When in 1826 Baptist associations began to cut off the Campbellites, they, ironically, formed a new denomination, the Disciples of Christ.

In time Campbell made Bethany a center of religious influence in America. In 1816 he founded Buffalo Academy, and in 1840 he established Bethany College, which he nourished with devotion and financial support. He founded a press, from which he issued the Christian Baptist and its successor, the Millenial Harbinger; as well as dozens of religious books and tracts. Campbell himself wrote many of the works he published and translated a new edition of the English Bible. Widely traveled and skilled as a debater of theological issues, Campbell was in many respects the greatest religious leader residing in West Virginia in the early nineteenth century.

Enduring Patterns of Life. The modes of life established in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries set patterns that endured in many parts of West Virginia for well over a century. Religious affiliations in 1990, for instance, show striking similarities to those of 1850 or earlier. Many beliefs, folkways, and speech forms common in the early nineteenth century survived well into the twentieth and may even yet be encountered in parts of the state. The essential rurality of life until comparatively recent times explains the persistence of older patterns. For many areas the pioneer heritage has even yet an unusual vitality.

¹ Unidentified Private Account Book, 1783-1785, Monroe County Court Records, Union, W.Va. (Microfilm in West Virginia University Library, Morgantown).

² Quoted from Henry Ruffner, “The Kanawha Country,” in the Henry Ruffner Papers. Historical Foundation of the Presbyterian and Reformed Churches, Montreat, N.C.

³ Wesley M. Gewehr, The Great Awakening in Virginia, 1740-1790 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1930), 26-27.

⁴ John B. Finley, Sketches of Western Methodism: Biographical, Historical, and Miscellaneous, Illustrative of Pioneer Life, ed. W.P. Strickland (Cincinnati: Methodist Book Concern, 1855), 250.

⁵ Francis Asbury, The Journal and Letters of Francis Asbury, ed. Elmer T. Manning, J. Manning Potts, and Jacob S. Payton, 3 vols. (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1958), provides details on Asbury's journeys to West Virginia.