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Educational and

Cultural Foundations

A Sea of Illiteracy. When West Virginia separated from Virginia in 1863, the Old Dominion had no statewide system of free schools. Illiteracy prevailed throughout the state and was appalling in mountainous sections. Robert Hager, a Boone County representative in the West Virginia constitutional convention of 1861, asserted that he knew men and women in his county who had never even seen a schoolhouse. An agent of the American Tract Society, who visited the hill country around Fairmont in 1845, declared that his experience was “like a translation from sunlight into darkness—from a high civilization into one of ignorance and superstition, with here and there a family of wealth and refinement.”¹

The educational climate in West Virginia probably reached its nadir in the two or three generations preceding the Civil War. Available evidence, which is extremely sketchy, suggests that the first generation of pioneers had greater concern for education than did their children and grandchildren. Before the end of the French and Indian War settlers established schools at Shepherdstown, in sparsely inhabited parts of the Greenbrier and South Branch valleys, and even in isolated sections of Pendleton County. Within a few years after settlers crossed the Alleghenies, schools existed in such widely scattered places as the Forks of Cheat, Buzzard's Glory near Pruntytown, West Liberty in the Northern Panhandle, and Cedar Grove on the Kanawha River.

The rising illiteracy stemmed partly from the exigencies of surviving in a wilderness. Because of the arduous and almost unending labor required, pioneers came to place greater value upon knowledge and skills gained in the home, on the farm, and in the forest than upon formal instruction. Book learning appeared to have less immediate usefulness, and in time a popular apathy toward schooling developed. In some parts of West Virginia these attitudes continued until well into the twentieth century.

Subscription Schools. For nearly three quarters of a century after settlement began in West Virginia, the only schools available were of the subscription type. These schools were established by a contract between a schoolmaster and subscribers, or parents who had the desire to provide education for their children and the means to pay tuition. School terms usually lasted about two months, and tuition ranged from two to three dollars per pupil per term. Some teachers were very competent, but others were barely literate and capable of only the lowest order of instruction. Statistics on enrollments of early subscription schools are meager, since few of them kept records. Probably not more than half the children of West Virginia attended these schools.

Convinced, like many other leaders, that education was the cornerstone of the new American republic, Governor Thomas Jefferson in 1779 called upon the legislature to authorize the division of each county into districts known as hundreds and the estabishment of a free school in each hundred. After the Revolutionary War, unfortunately, much of the enthusiasm for free schools abated.

The Literary Fund. The triumph of Jeffersonian democracy in the United States in 1800 excited renewed interest in public schools. During the first decade of the nineteenth century several states provided for instruction of children of indigent families. In 1810 Virginia joined their ranks by creating the Literary Fund. Western leaders resisted efforts of influential persons in the Tidewater and Piedmont to draw off part of the money for a proposed state university, and about $45,000 annually was set aside for the education of poor children.

Administration of the Literary Fund rested with the second auditor, who served as superintendent. The law also required that each county appoint from five to fifteen commissioners, who were charged with responsibility for determining the number of poor children eligible for benefits and given authority to construct buildings and employ teachers. The commissioners ordinarily used their limited funds to pay tuition for poor children at existing subscription schools. In some localities, where the number of paying children was insufficient for a school, the addition of those supported by the Literary Fund made schools possible for the first time.

School attendance remained low in spite of opportunities provided by the Literary Fund. Many parents considered the fund a form of charity and refused its benefits. Some desired to send their children to school but could not afford the clothing needed during winter months. Still others, untouched by formal education themselves, held schools in contempt and kept their children at home. Even where positive attitudes prevailed, the population, particularly in mountainous sections, was often too sparse to support schools.

Qualified teachers long remained scarce, and many counties employed almost any person professing an ability to teach if he gave evidence of good moral character, a criterion regarded as important as academic preparation. Perhaps a high percentage of the teachers, like those of Harrison County, could be described as “generally men of good moral character but not…men of high literary acquirements.”² By 1840 several counties had begun to employ women as teachers of small children.

Schools of West Virginia did not differ substantially from those in other parts of the United States. Most of them emphasized reading, writing, spelling, and arithmetic. Worn copies of the Bible and the New Testament served for textbooks in many classrooms. Both teachers and parents believed in rigid discipline, and the ability to keep order and maintain respect was considered the mark of a good teacher.

District Free Schools. Prospects for free schools brightened in 1829, when the General Assembly provided for the division of counties into school districts and the establishment of a free school in each district. Unfortunately, the legislation was permissive rather than mandatory, and few counties cared to tax themselves for free schools. The first West Virginia county to attempt the plan was Monroe, which established a free school at Sinks Grove in 1829, but it abandoned the system in 1836. Influential men still believed that free schools simply saddled “the liberal and just” with the burden of educating the children of the “parsimonious and niggardly.”³

An address by Governor David Campbell to the legislature in 1839 detailing widespread illiteracy and revelations of the census of 1840 that the problem was actually increasing galvanized advocates of free public schools into action. They held a series of educational conventions, the most important of which were at Clarksburg, Lexington, and Richmond.

The Clarksburg Convention, held September 7 and 8, 1841, attracted 114 persons, most of them from northern West Virginia. George Hay Lee, an eminent barrister of Clarksburg, served as chairman. The gathering drew wide support from political, religious, social, and journalistic leaders. Fourteen members were at the time or would soon become state legislators. Prominent newspapermen in attendance included Benjamin Bassel of the Clarksburg Scion of Democracy and Enos W. Newton, who founded the Charleston Kanawha Republican less than three months later.

Alexander Campbell and Henry Ruffner delivered two of the major addresses to the convention. Blending Jeffersonian liberalism and Christian idealism, Campbell called for an educational system based upon a “common Christianity” and stressing piety and morality. He branded the principles underlying the Literary Fund humiliating and proclaimed that “we do not want poor schools for poor scholars, or gratuitous instruction for paupers; but we want schools for all at the expense of all.”⁴ Ruffner, a prominent Presbyterian minister and educator, proposed public education financed through a general property tax and administered by a state superintendent. The convention urged rich as well as poor to support the free school movement as essential to the preservation of American democracy and appealed to the legislature to establish district free schools “good enough for the rich” in order that “they may be fit for the poor.”⁵

The Clarksburg Convention stirred interest in free schools as never before. West Virginians watched closely the conventions held in Lexington and Richmond later that year. The Richmond Convention, dominated by Thomas Ritchie, editor of the Richmond Enquirer, rejected Ruffner's plea for a general property tax and the creation of state normal schools for the training of teachers, but it endorsed free public schools for all white children of school age and support for academies and colleges. Western leaders feared that inclusion of academies and colleges might divert attention from the pressing need for elementary schools, but they conceded that the agitation would at least keep the free school issue alive.

Responding to mounting public clamor, the legislature in 1846 provided methods whereby the counties might institute the district free school plan either through action of the county courts or petition of their citizens. The lawmakers did not mandate the plan, however, and left financing at the county level. Kanawha County adopted the district free school plan in 1847, Jefferson and Ohio soon followed suit, and at least six others were contemplating it when the Civil War came.

Most West Virginians, unfortunately, remained apathetic toward education. The thousands of petitions addressed to the legislature emphasized material interests, such as roads, bridges, ferry franchises, tax relief, and other mundane matters, and relatively few mentioned education. Moreover, some Virginians took advantage of statistics on crime, illiteracy, and economic fluctuations in the northern states, including New York and Massachusetts, to reflect favorably upon conditions in their own state and to foster a deadening complacency that counteracted efforts at reform.

Academies. Education for most West Virginians ended with the common school. Only the middle and upper classes could afford attendance at academies, with their tuition and costs, for many students, of boarding and lodging away from home. Motivated by patriotic and religious ideals, founders of academies believed that middle class virtues and moral principles constituted the underpinning of the American republic. They did not subscribe to a social leveling theory of education, and they believed that the republic itself would be in jeopardy if the middle classes sank to the status of the poor. Education should assure political, social, and economic opportunity; uphold property rights and class distinctions; provide enlightened leadership; and produce knowledgeable and responsible citizens.

Although academies served youths with diverse interests, many emphasized the training of ministers. Protestant churches, particularly Presbyterian and Episcopalian, were active in their establishment. Outstanding clerical leaders included Alexander Campbell, the founder and benefactor of Buffalo Academy at Bethany; Henry Ruffner, the chief promoter and first instructor at Mercer Academy at Charleston; John McElhenney of Lewisburg Academy; Gordon Battelle of Northwestern Academy at Parkersburg; Alexander Martin of Preston Academy at Kingwood and later first president of West Virginia University; and Dr. Henry Foote of Romney Academy.

Between the founding of Shepherdstown Academy about 1784 and the Civil War, some sixty-five academies were established in West Virginia. The first ones were mostly in the eastern and northern parts of the state at such places as Shepherdstown, Martinsburg, Charles Town, Romney, Morgantown, Clarksburg, Wheeling, West Liberty, and Wellsburg. Stable academies in the more thinly populated southern sections included Mercer, Lewisburg, Marshall at Huntington, and Union at Alderson.

Except for granting charters, authorizing lotteries for fund-raising, and extending occasional aid from the Literary Fund, the legislature of Virginia gave little support to academies. Randolph Academy, founded at Clarksburg in 1787, was an important exception. The legislature anticipated that in time it would become the state-supported college for the Allegheny section of the state, just as the College of William and Mary served the Tidewater and Piedmont and Transylvania Seminary served the Kentucky area. Despite its distinguished board of trustees and diversion of part of the surveyors' fees from several counties to its use, Randolph Academy never fulfilled its promise, and by 1830 its days were numbered.

Most academies offered English grammar, ancient languages, history, natural philosophy, moral philosophy, and mathematics, and several added practical subjects such as geography, surveying, navigation, and astronomy. The Wheeling Lancastrian Academy, founded in 1814 and later renamed Linsly Institute, made use of a monitorial system on the premise that more effective teaching could be combined with economies in operation. Financed by a bequest from Noah Linsly, it may have been the first private institution chartered in a slave state for the education of the poor.

Higher Education. With their stress upon the availability of education for all children, many West Virginians were downright hostile toward expenditure of state money for higher education, which they considered elitist. Few West Virginia youths attended either the University of Virginia or Virginia Military Institute, the nearest state institutions to them. Those from northern counties generally preferred Dickinson College at Carlisle or Allegheny College at Meadville, both in Pennsylvania. Those in southern counties usually attended colleges in Ohio or Kentucky, with Ohio University at Athens a favorite.

Several academies in West Virginia aspired to collegiate status. As early as 1823 Mercer Academy advertised that its courses were taught “by lecture precisely in the mode adopted in the College of William and Mary.”⁶ In 1824 it added chemistry, political economy, and natural, national, and municipal law to its curricula and in 1826 other “Collegiate branches.” By mid-century, Monongalia Academy at Morgantown contemplated elevation to collegiate rank. Already, in 1846 Romney Academy had become Romney Classical Institute and Brooke, at Wellsburg, in 1852 had merged with Meade Collegiate Institute. Emerging from the trend were Weston College at Weston, Union College at Union, Levelton Male and Female College at Hillsboro, Allegheny College at Blue Sulphur Springs, and Marshall College at Huntington, all chartered from 1858 to 1860.

In spite of the tendency to upgrade academies, collegiate education in West Virginia was limited before the Civil War. Bethany, founded in 1840 by Alexander Campbell, was the strongest college in the state. Its preeminence stemmed from its ability to attract students from areas outside West Virginia, its affiliation with the rapidly growing Disciples of Christ Church, and, perhaps most of all, the devoted leadership of Campbell, who gave it much of his time and personal fortune. Rector College, a Baptist institution founded at Pruntytown in 1839, also flourished for a time. The Reverend Charles Wheeler, its principal, lavished attention upon it, but his death in 1851 accelerated a decline that had already set in.

Even before the Civil War West Virginians evinced an interest in practical education. John Cook Bennett, an educator of questionable principles, tried in vain during the 1830s to persuade the legislature to establish Wheeling University, with a medical college as its main component. Efforts to establish an agricultural college in western Virginia had the support of Professor Robert Richardson of Bethany College, who advocated a broad curriculum that included chemistry, geology, botany, natural science, zoology, and bookkeeping. Richardson pioneered activities that led to the Morrill Act of 1862, which provided for land grant colleges to teach agricultural and mechanical arts. In southern West Virginia, several residents, including the author Thomas Dunn English, incorporated Aracoma Polytechnic College, at Aracoma, now Logan, for instruction in agriculture, mining, and other useful arts, as well as languages, literature, arts, and sciences.

Except for Bethany, West Virginia's oldest surviving institution of higher learning, and Marshall, now grown into a university, antebellum colleges of West Virginia were generally weak and unstable. Poor transportation, arrested economic development, and inadequate financing combined with popular indifference to higher education to keep enrollments low and operations tenuous. Flourishing colleges were almost impossible in a milieu so inimical to higher education.

Literary Societies and Libraries. Often working in close association with academies and colleges were literary societies. At Harpers Ferry, Romney, Lewisburg, Charleston, Wheeling, and Wellsburg they served as sponsors or patrons of academies. The Buffalo Creek Farmers Library Company, in operation by 1812, and the Morgantown Circulating Library, chartered in 1814, may have been instrumental in the founding of Monongalia Academy at Morgan-town in 1814.

Perhaps no literary society did more to affect the cultural climate of a community than that at Romney. Organized in 1819 and incorporated in 1822, it accumulated more than three thousand books and scientific apparatus by 1860. It provided public lectures on agriculture, manufacturing, mechanical arts, ethics, and political philosophy and until 1846 operated Romney Academy.

More impressive than the small subscription libraries found in many towns were the college collections. One of the finest libraries was that of Alexander Campbell, which became the nucleus of the Bethany College holdings. Rector College had about two thousand volumes when it closed, part of which were evidently from the large collection of Charles Wheeler.

Men of learning and refinement were to be found in nearly every part of West Virginia. John G. Jackson of Clarksburg, a member of Congress and federal judge, left a collection of 725 books at his death in 1825. A man of catholic interests, Jackson owned works on law, politics, eloquence, and medicine, as well as novels, textbooks, and miscellaneous titles. John Hite of Berkeley County owned a modest ninety-three books, but they included works of Pope, Milton, Congreve, Addison, and Steele and titles in ancient, medieval, and modern history.

Families not of the professional classes seldom possessed more than a few books. Most depended upon the stocks of merchants in the towns and country crossroads, whose selections seldom extended far beyond Bibles, Testaments, almanacs, and school textbooks. For most literate families the two most common possessions were the Bible, very likely well worn, and an almanac, almost certainly tattered from use.

Newspapers and Periodicals. Interest in political issues and events led to a rapid expansion of newspapers in the United States during the late colonial and early national periods. The press made its entry into West Virginia in 1790, when Nathaniel Willis, a Boston newspaperman who had participated in the famous Tea Party, moved to Shepherdstown and founded the Potowmac Guardian and Berkeley Advertiser; later known as the Potomak Guardian. Aware of agreements between Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton regarding the ultimate location of the United States capital, Willis probably expected Shepherdstown to become the seat of government of the new nation. When the District of Columbia was chosen, Willis moved his press to Martinsburg, where he remained until 1810.

The staunch Jeffersonian position of the Potomak Guardian made a rival organ in the lower Shenadoah Valley, where Federalists were strong, almost a certainty. In 1799 John Alburtis founded the Berkeley Intelligencer at Martinsburg. The paper continued, under at least ten different titles, until the Civil War. Seven other newspapers, most of them short-lived, were established at Shepherdstown by 1830. Other noteworthy publications of the Eastern Panhandle and the dates of their establishment were the Martinsburg Republican Atlas, 1800; Charles Town Patriot, 1803; Harpers Ferry Free Press, later the Virginia Free Press, 1821; and the Romney Hampshire and Hardy Intelligencer; later the South Branch Intelligencer; 1830.

In trans-Allegheny West Virginia thirty-five years elapsed between the beginnings of settlement and the founding of the first newspaper. In 1804 Joseph Campbell and Forbes Britton began publication of the Monongalia Gazette and Morgantown Advertiser at Morgantown. Britton and his brother gave Clarksburg its first newspaper, the Bye-Stander, in 1810. By 1830 four other newspapers had been founded at Morgantown and six others at Clarksburg. Gideon Butler introduced the press at Weston, with the Western Star, in 1820 or 1821.

Wheeling initially proved less hospitable to newspapers. The Wheeling Repository, started in 1807, lasted less than two years, and for about a decade the town had no newspaper. In 1818, the year the National Road was completed to Wheeling, Thomas Tonner founded the Va. North-Western Gazette, later the Wheeling Gazette, which dominated the Wheeling press for the next quarter of a century. It had no rival until the establishment of the Virginia Statesman and the Compiler in 1828 and 1829, respectively. Wellsburg supported the Charlestown Gazette, later the Wellsburg Gazette, begun in 1814, and its successors.

The press took root slowly elsewhere in West Virginia. In 1820 Herbert P. Gaines, who later became principal of Mercer Academy, founded the Kenhawa Spectator at Charleston. Its four successors and the Lewisburg Palladium of Virginia, and the Pacific Monitor, begun in 1823, were the only newspapers in the southern part of the state before 1830. Because of widespread illiteracy, circulation problems arising from poor transportation, and scarcity of money, most of the forty-five newspapers attempted in West Virginia prior to 1830 were short-lived. The social ferment between 1830 and 1860, however, provided fertile soil for the press. By 1860 at least thirty-nine towns, ten of them in the southern counties, had established at least one newspaper.

Religious journals enjoyed considerable popularity. The Lay-Man's Magazine, founded at Martinsburg in 1816, was an organ of the Protestant Episcopal Church. The Christian Baptist, published by Alexander Campbell at Bethany from 1823 to 1830, and its successor, the Menial Harbinger, which continued to 1870, expounded Disciples of Christ views and were among the most widely read religious periodicals in the country. Between 1850 and 1861, seven other religious journals, most of them by Methodists and Baptists, were published at Morgantown, Charleston, Parkersburg, Fairmont, and Harrisville. The Mountain Cove Journal and Spiritual Harbinger, begun in Fayette County in 1852, was the voice of a millenialist group that had migrated from New England and the Burned-Over District of western New York a few years earlier.

Agricultural periodicals naturally appealed to rural West Virginians. The Charles Town Farmers' Repository; established in 1808, was the first agricultural newspaper west of the Virginia Blue Ridge. It was followed by the Martinsburg Farmers' Museum and Berkeley and Jefferson Advertiser in 1827; the Morgantown Monongalia Farmer in 1833; the Brandonville Silk Culturist and Farmers' Manual in 1839; and the Union Farmers' Friend, and Fireside Companion in 1853. Later publications coincided with a growing interest in scientific agriculture.

Exactly how many early newspapers were partisan political journals is difficult to determine, but probably very few remained neutral on the burning questions of their times. Between 1840 and 1850 Wheeling, Charleston, Clarksburg, Brandonville, and Moorefield each had one or more prominent Whig journals. The Wheeling Intelligencer remained for years the leading organ of the Republican Party in the state. Staunch Democratic newspapers included the Buffalo Star of the Kanawha Valley, founded in 1855 and known after its move to Charleston in 1857 as the Kanawha Valley Star; and the Morgantown Shield, begun about 1843. The Morgantown American Union, established in 1855, expressed the views of the American Party.

Athough the press of antebellum West Virginia was generally Unionist and antislavery, most sections also had pro-Southern newspapers. The Kanawha Valley Star upheld Southern views, as did the Point Pleasant Independent Republican, the Philippi Barbour Jeffersonian, and the Pruntytown Family Visitor, all established between 1854 and 1858. The most vehement antislavery newspaper in southern West Virginia was the Ceredo Crescent, founded in 1857 in connection with Eli Thayer's attempt to make Ceredo a pilot antislavery community in a slave state.

The western terminus of the National Road, a thriving river port, and an industrial town, Wheeling had the most cosmopolitan population and the most diversified press in antebellum West Virginia. It was the only town to support a daily newspaper before the Civil War. Its first daily, the Gazette, appeared in 1835, but seven others, some short-lived, were launched by 1860. In 1829 William Cooper Howells, the father of William Dean Howells, founded the Eclectic Observer and Working People's Advocate, a journal devoted to the rights of labor and free schools, and The Gleaner, or Monthly Miscellany, with Ann Cooper Howells as its editor. Ann Cooper Howells took up her editorial labors two years before Anne Newport Royall, regarded by many as the first woman newspaper editor in the country, established Paul Pry in Washington, D.C. The Arbeiter Freund, a German-language newspaper, appeared at Wheeling in 1848 to meet the needs of German residents and transients, some of whom may have been refugees from the German revolutions of that year. In 1860, as the Virginische Staats-Zeitung, it became the first German-language daily in West Virginia.

Books and Pamphlets. In addition to newspapers and journals, 168 other items, mostly books and pamphlets, issued from West Virginia presses prior to 1830. Nearly one thousand more appeared between 1831 and 1863. Many of these early imprints were of a religious nature. The first book printed in the state, Christian Panoply; Containing an Apology for the Bible in a Series of Letters Addressed to Thomas Paine, published at Shepherdstown in 1797, attacked Deism and defended the Bible. Between 1823 and 1861 Alexander Campbell published more than sixty-five titles at Bethany, most of them religious tracts and sermons.

In the early nineteenth century, Wheeling became a center of some importance for the publication of school textbooks. The firm of Davis and McCarty produced the Murray English Readers, widely used in West Virginia schools. Albert and Edwin Picket published readers, spellers, and grammars, of which their father, a prominent educator, was the principal author.

West Virginia Writers. Works of more than ordinary literary, historical, and scientific value emanated from the pens of early West Virginia writers. A Short Treatise on the Application of Steam by James Rumsey was published somewhere in Virginia in 1787 and reprinted in Philadelphia the following year. Both it and A Plan Wherein the Power of Steam is Fully Shown, published by Rumsey in 1788, were attacked by John Fitch, who was also interested in steam navigation, and led to “a war of pamphlets” between Fitch and Rumsey.

Nineteenth century West Virginians took immense pride in their ancestors who had conquered a wilderness and sustained a new nation. The Journal of the Lewis and Clark Expedition by Patrick Gass, a resident of Wellsburg and the last survivor of the expedition, naturally excited interest. The journal was first published at Pittsburgh in 1807 and later in Philadelphia and London. Aware of interest in Gass himself, John G. Jacob, editor of the Wellsburg Herald, published Life and Times of Patrick Gass at Wellsburg in 1859.

No early West Virginia writer has received more acclaim than Joseph Doddridge. Nearly every historian of the American frontier has acknowledged a debt to his Notes, on the Settlement and Indian Wars, of the Western Parts of Virginia & Pennsylvania, published at Wellsburg in 1824. Theodore Roosevelt, known for his Winning of the West, pronounced Doddridge's Notes “the most valuable book we have on old-time frontier ways and customs.”⁷ Born at Friend's Cove, Bedford County, Pennsylvania, in 1769, Doddridge grew up in southwestern Pennsylvania and later moved to Wellsburg. His own frontier experiences, vivid memory, and integrity enabled him to depict faithfully the life and folkways of the trans-Allegheny region. An Episcopal minister and physician, Doddridge also wrote a noted Treatise on the Culture of Bees (Wellsburg, 1813) and Logan, the Last of the Race of Shikellemus (Buffaloe Creek [Bethany], 1823), the latter a drama in which he sought to immortalize a much-wronged Mingo Indian chief.

Another work of importance to trans-Allegheny frontier history has been Chronicles of Border Warfare by Alexander Scott Withers. Based upon tradition and upon writings and notes of generally reliable antiquarians, including Hugh Paul Taylor, Judge Edwin S. Duncan, Noah Zane, and John Hacker, the Chronicles, published at Clarksburg in 1831, inspired Lyman C. Draper to undertake the immense task of gathering source materials for trans-Appalachian history at the State Historical Society of Wisconsin. Withers lived in Clarksburg from 1827 to 1861 and died at the home of a daughter in Parkersburg in 1865.

Colonel John Stuart of Lewisburg was the most important chronicler of pioneer history in southern West Virginia. One of the first permanent settlers of the Greenbrier region, Stuart was an organizer of Greenbrier County and a major figure in its political, social, and religious life. In 1799 he wrote Memoir of Indian Wars, and Other Occurrences, with details of Greenbrier history and the battle of Point Pleasant. His Memoir was first published in 1833.

Anne Newport Royall left perceptive but sometimes biting descriptions of life in the Greenbrier and Kanawha valleys in Sketches of History, Life and Manners in the United States (New Haven, Connecticut, 1826). A survivor of the famous Hannastown, Pennsylvania, massacre, Anne married Major William Royall and lived for several years at Sweet Springs, Monroe County, and later in Charleston. Left in straitened circumstances after her husband's death, she turned to writing and published several works, including Paul Pry, a gossipy Washington newspaper.

Two other prose works merit note. Philip Pendleton Kennedy provided a vivid picture of life in the West Virginia mountains in the Blackwater Chronicle (New York, 1853). His cousin David Hunter Strother, like Kennedy a resident of Martinsburg, illustrated his work. Strother, with the nom de plume of “Porte Crayon,” was also well known as an essayist and illustrator for Harper's magazine. Of unknown authorship, Young Kate (New York, 1845) has been attributed to John Lewis. Reissued ten years later as New Hope, or the Rescue: A Tale of the Great Kanawha, its sketches of pioneer characters, leading families, dealings in land, and modes of life reveal intimate knowledge of the early Kanawha Valley.

A few West Virginians wrote poetry of merit. Joseph Doddridge was the author of “A Dirge,” inspired by the death of George Washington, and “An Elegy on the Family Vault” (Wellsburg, 1824), a successful imitation of Thomas Gray's more famous elegy. Margaret Blennerhassett, the wife of Harman, published The Widow of the Rock and Other Poems (New York, 1824) in the hope of providing income for her needy family. “The Deserted Isle” portrayed her life at Blennerhassett Island. Thomas S. Lees of Wheeling stressed the beauty of the Ohio River in Musings of Carol (Wheeling, 1831). Perhaps the best of antebellum West Virginia poetry was Froissart Ballads and Other Poems (New York, 1847) by Philip Pendleton Cooke, whose “Florence Vane” was one of the most popular love songs in the English language.

The literary endeavors, the increasing diffusion of the press, the establishment of academies and colleges, and the acceleration of the free school movement during the early nineteenth century were evidences that the light of knowledge had begun to penetrate the mountain darknesses. They inspired hope that illiteracy and ignorance might be dispelled from those regions where they yet prevailed.