BAILEY HOUSE – 1832 — P. M. HALE BUILDING

Introduction

Text-to-speech Audio

From 1777 until 1795, this site was occupied by a log building used by the Indian Spy Service of the Virginia Melita. Two buildings have succeeded it: The original Bailey House hotel, where the future Stonewall Jackson took the examination for admission to West Point. The building burned in 1877 and was replaced by the current structure build in 1885 by PM Hale and the home of the Lewis County Bank in the first quarter of the 20th century. It is now occupied by the West Virginia Museum of American Glass. The side of the West Virginia Museum of American Glass has a mural which illustrates the communities rich history in the glass industry. Each piece of glass painted on the side of the building is available to view at the museum. This mural was completed in 2020 by West Virginia artist, Jesse Corlis.

Images

Backstory and Context

Text-to-speech Audio

In 1822, when Weston was just four years old, early merchant Weeden Hoffman erected on the same spot a 40' by 60' log and frame building of two stories to house his businesses: an established general store (that he had originally operated on the adjacent southern lot but that had burned down around 1821) and a new ordinary, or inn. Ownership of the ordinary passed to Major Thomas Bland in 1825, and from him to surveyor Minter Bailey, in 1832. Although the business name was Weston Hotel, the establishment became called the Bailey House. In 1851, Bailey built a new, three-story brick hotel on the opposite side of Second Street, where the Citizens Bank now stands. The old frame building came again to house a general store, and finally burned down in a business section fire on November 1, 1877.

In 1885, Presley Marton Hale, a man of many talents and trades (hat maker, boot and shoe seller, butcher, building contractor, brick maker, and one of several godfathers to the State of West Virginia), erected this present three-story structure. (Note the combination keystone-datestone on the front façade.) Initially, the first floor was his butcher shop. For most of the first quarter of the 20th century, the ground floor was occupied by the Lewis County Bank, Weston’s third bank, organized in 1902. (In April 1927, that bank was absorbed by the town’s fourth such institution, the Bank of Weston, founded in 1908 and located directly across Main, on the southeast corner. The Bank of Weston became the first of the city’s banks to fail, on September 28, 1931, a victim of the Great Depression and the bank panic). Following the Lewis County Bank in the room were two drug stores, Tierney’s and, lastly, Cain’s (early on called Cain & Mylius). The upper floors had numbers of different tenants, including the offices of physicians Mortimer D. Cure and Edwin A. Trinkle, dentists Ralph McWhorter and Charles Wagoner, and the meeting room of the Weston Lion’s Club (organized in May 1927; first president was John W. Farnsworth).

More recently, the former storeroom functioned as a glass museum commemorating Lewis County’s extensive past and present glass manufacturing industry, and today is the location of the realty business, The Property Shop. (The glass museum relocated and remains today in the former J. C. Penney building.)

Sources

Smith, E. C. (2010). History of lewis county, west virginia. Place of publication not identified: Nabu Press.

Gilchrist-Stalnaker, J., & Oldaker, B. R. (2010). Lewis County. Charleston, SC: Arcadia Pub.