Contributor

The Hotel Thurmond was built at this site in 1891 as a simple frame construction. It contained twenty-five guest rooms and was the first lodging business to operate in Thurmond. Its role servicing those arriving by rail was evident in its placement directly abutting the tracks. In 1901, Hotel Thurmond was replaced with the Lafayette Hotel — pronounced “lay-flat” by locals. The Dun Glen Hotel, the first major hospitality competitor in Thurmond, was also completed in 1901, making it likely that the Lafayette was a response to the erection of the Dun Glen. The Lafayette boasted thirty-five guest rooms, seven bathrooms, steam heat, and four hundred electric lights. The ground floor also operated as a storefront for several businesses, including Thurmond’s post office. However, these amenities still paled in comparison to the one hundred guest room Dun Glen and its reputation for epicurean extravagance. The Lafayette outlived the Dun Glen, which burned to the ground in 1930. However, the Lafayette was subjected to the same fate when a 1963 fire ravaged the building and adjacent Armour and Company Wholesale Meat Plant. No trace of the Lafayette Hotel remains and the plot of land has sat empty for almost sixty years.

Hotel Thurmond/Lafayette Hotel (1891-1963)

Thurmond, also known as "The Heart of the New River Gorge" is a small town located along the New River in Fayette County, West Virginia. Captain W.D. Thurmond established the first buildings at this location in 1873 when he correctly anticipated the importance of the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway (C &amp; O). The town was incorporated in 1901 by Thurmond, thirty years after the captain had founded it. Due to the town’s massive output of coal, Thurmond became the center of commerce along the C &amp; O Railway. To supplement the town’s surging coal economy, houses, hotels, banks, businesses, and eateries began to line the hillside along the New River. At Thurmond’s peak, it boasted several restaurants, clothing stores, a jewelry store, and a movie theatre. The National Bank of Thurmond and the New River Banking and Trust Company provided financial services to the area. Lastly, the Thurmond Hotel (later the Lafayette Hotel) and the Dun Glen Hotel provided entertainment and lodging for locals and travelers alike. The reputation of the Dun Glen Hotel to provide enjoyment to the point of excess earned Thurmond the moniker, “Dodge City of the East.” W.D. Thurmond envisioned his town as a morally strict and religiously puritanical organization, but it quickly grew beyond his sole dominion.According to Sherman Cahall, “The growth was so great that during the first two decades of the 1900s, Thurmond handled more freight than Richmond, Virginia and Cincinnati, Ohio combined. 95,000 passengers utilized the depot yearly and over 150 people worked for the railroad in town as laborers, brakemen, or dispatchers.” [1] Upwards of eighteen train crews operated within Thurmond, along with supervising personnel, to make sure the trains operated efficiently and that coal was transported safely. The National Register of Historic Places states that “by 1910, Thurmond produced $4.8 million of freight revenue for the C &amp; O, which was almost 20% of C&amp;O’s revenue.” [2]. Thurmond was one of the richest coal producing areas of the state with many coal operators as patrons, including Henry Ford and his Fordson Coal Company.The First World War hindered Thurmond’s growth and set it on a downward trajectory. Not only did many men depart the area to serve, but reliance on coal actually waned during the war. The town’s heyday ended in earnest with the onset of the Great Depression. The local economy waned after several businesses closed, including the National Bank of Thurmond. Two large fires in the early 1930s also wiped out multiple buildings. By the 1940s, the C &amp; O Railway changed from steam to diesel locomotives. The National Park Service states that, “Thurmond had been a steam town, its rail yard and crews geared toward the short service intervals of steam locomotives. The switch to diesels left many of the railyard structures and jobs obsolete” [3]. This switch resulted in the final chapter of Thurmond’s remaining prosperity, as the railroad offices in the town closed in 1984. However, the entire town was included in a historical district that year and placed on the National Register of Historic Places. The Thurmond Depot still functions as a working stop on Amtrak's Cardinal Line. This route runs from Chicago to New York, right through the heart of the New River Gorge. It requires a reservation for the train to stop in Thurmond, otherwise it travels thirteen miles upstream to the station at Prince, West Virginia.Thurmond is but an echo of its former glory but still offers a rare experience. Tourism within the New River Gorge Park continues to attract people to the historic town. Thurmond has hosted the Guinness Book of World Records’ longest poker game and was voted as one of Travel &amp; Leisure's coolest ghost towns in America. In 1995, the Thurmond Depot was partially restored by the National Park Service and now serves as a visitor center and museum for people interested in learning about more the yesteryear of the New River Gorge region. The remaining five residents are also committed to revitalizing the town. In 2015, Thurmond made national news when the five residents unanimously passed a measure banning employment, housing, or public accommodation discrimination on the basis of gender or sexual orientation. Despite the tiny population, Thurmond hosts the Thurmond Triathlon, is a popular whitewater rafting put-in, and has ample outdoor tourism offerings. Thurmond truly lives up to the town motto: "Where the River meets History.”

The main line of the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway was completed in 1873. This same year, Captain W.D. Thurmond procured 73 acres along the main line, which was a strategic purchase given the importance of the railroad, resulting in the ideal place to develop a town. Thurmond, WV quickly became one of the leading depots in the state, and from 1900 until the 1920s, the town prospered immensely; the depot saw fifteen passenger trains a day and 95,000 passengers a year. As the coal and timber industry accelerated, Thurmond became one of the boom cities within West Virginia, served as the “heart” of the New River valley, and became the chief railroad center of the C&O Railway main line by 1910. Thurmond was home to two hotels, two banks, restaurants, clothing stores, a jewelry store, movie theater, dry-goods stores and business offices. During the town’s era of prosperity, coal barons contributed to the success of Thurmond’s banks which, at one time, were the richest in the state of West Virginia. Unfortunately, the town began to decline after diesel locomotives were invented and the importance of coal mining dwindled. This decline caused many of the local businesses to close, resulting in the emigration of residents. Moreover, the Great Depression produced yet another economic strain on the community, causing several other businesses and the National Bank of Thurmond to close. Two major fires in the town took out several prominent businesses causing even more difficulty and hardship for the community. These days, Thurmond is all but abandoned. However, a dedicated group of the few remaining citizens are attempting to revitalize the community.

The Chesapeake and Ohio Coaling Tower was used to refill the coal reserves of steam engines passing through Thurmond. Trains could pull directly under the structure, at which point a series of gates opened and coal poured into the train via redirectable chutes. In addition to a five hundred ton coal capacity, the coaling tower was also equipped to unload wet sand and replace it with dry sand. The sand was used in the engine along with the coal to keep everything running smoothly. The Fairbanks, Morse, and Company from Chicago designed the structure. An unrecorded New York construction firm built the tower in 1922. The total cost of the coaling station was about $85,000. At seventy feet tall, it would have likely been the tallest building in Thurmond. The Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad (C&O) continued using the cooling tower well towards the middle of the twentieth century, even after other railroads had quit coal entirely. C&O’s continued reliance on coal was due in part to how much of the product the railroad transported. However, the coaling tower was eventually abandoned in 1960. Though the physical appearance of the tower has deteriorated, it remains in stable condition, and is one of the most iconic extant structure from Thurmond’s heyday.

Chesapeake and Ohio Coaling Tower

The Chesapeake and Ohio Engine House in Thurmond, West Virginia was built in 1905, two years after Thurmond was officially incorporated by its founder W.D. Thurmond. The engine house was built to service train engines that arrived at the Thurmond Station carrying coal or passengers. The original building measured one hundred fifty feet by sixty-six feet, making the square footage of the building 9900 square feet.  This was enough space for two trains to be simultaneously serviced. A 1921 addition to the structure expanded the length to two hundred forty-five feet. This enlargement made it possible for four trains to be serviced at once. Sixty to one hundred engines were serviced daily by fifty to seventy workers. The building was mostly made of wood. The Chesapeake and Ohio Engine House was a major employer in Thurmond and had boilermakers, machinists and various other mechanical professionals on its payroll. The C&O Engine House remained in operation, serving and maintaining engines for the next fifty years after its construction. Then, from 1963 to 1985, the building served as a local repair shop until it was abandoned. In 1993 a fire devastated the building. The remains were not worth saving and even the tracks leading into the building were removed. There is no longer any evidence of the pivotal Thurmond structure.


Chesapeake  and Ohio Engine House (1905-1993)

The National Bank of Thurmond served a town that grew quickly in the early 1900s as the region became a leading exporter of coal. At Thurmond’s peak it had two banks, with one being the National Bank of Thurmond — the other was the New River Banking and Trust Company. The National Bank of Thurmond was initially housed in Hotel Thurmond before relocating to this 1917 constructed building in 1923. The bank oversaw $4.8 million a year in the late 1920s, primarily from the railroad. The financial institution also offered safety deposits boxes, saving accounts, and was the Fayette County and Ford Motor Co. depository. A relatively short-lived venture, the bank served local businesses and the residents until 1931, when a series of fires devastated the town. After many businesses closed due to the fires the bank was forced to close as well. The National Bank of Thurmond building was home to retail stores and apartments until 1959. With the exception of the period between 1975 and 1988, when it was home to a hotel and restaurant called the Bankers Club, the building has been empty.

National Bank of Thurmond 

This three story, cut stone structure is the oldest and longest - with a 75 foot front - of the three remaining buildings that make up Thurmond's Commercial Row. The historic storefronts are framed with a cast iron column and beam system and a tulip motif decorates the column capitals. Constructed in 1901, the building housed at various times the Standard Dry Goods Company, the Chesapeake and Potomac Telephone Exchange Company, the offices of Dr. C. F. Ridge, and a Greek restaurant. The building’s two upper levels have also been used as apartments. The southern portion of the structure has caved in and only the exterior walls remain. The northern portion, accessible by a side stairway in the adjacent National Bank of Thurmond, was rehabilitated prior to the building’s listing on the National Register of Historic Places in 1984. The property is now under the stewardship of the National Park Service, and houses an interpretive display on the history of Thurmond.

Goodwin-Kincaid Building

The Mankin-Cox Building was completed in 1904, making it the first structure in Thurmond’s commercial district. The building is a simple three-story brick construction with storefront space on the ground floor and offices and living spaces on the second and third floors. For much of the building’s history, the first floor was separated into two commercial spaces. Dr. J.W. Makin funded construction of the building. He maintained his medical office on the second floor, while his wife, a pharmacist, operated a drug store on the right side of the first floor. The second floor was also shared with Dr. Young, Thurmond’s dentist in the early twentieth century. The first floor storefront on the left appears to have remained vacant until 1911, when the New River Banking and Trust Company moved from the Dun Glen hotel to the space. The Cox Building Company acquired the Mankin-Cox Building in the 1920s. Following calamitous fires, the New River Banking and Trust Company shut down in the 1930s, along with much of Thurmond’s commercial activity. The Mankin-Cox building was rarely used commercially in the latter half of the twentieth century, though the top floors remained in residential use. The structure was rapidly deteriorating at the turn of the twenty-first century, though National Park Service efforts have largely stabilized it. 

Mankin-Cox Building

A crucial component of steam engine operation was water. A pre-1900 wooden water tower was constructed to supply trains stopping in Thurmond. By 1914, it was no longer sufficient and a supplementary steel tower was built by the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad. The steel tower had a capacity of 100,000 gallons. The wooden water tower was razed in 1927 and replaced with a cylindrical steel tank. The new tank had a capacity of 210,000 gallons. A nearby pumphouse moved water from the New River into the towers. As rail travel waned in Thurmond, so did use of the water towers. The structures were officially unused by the 1970s. CSX Railroad (formerly Chesapekae and Ohio Railroad) demolished the water towers in 1998 over fears of structural instability.

Water Towers

This building was constructed around the turn of the twentieth century by D.D. Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald entered an agreement with the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad to lease the property and construct his own structure on it. The completed building is one-story and primarily steel. Beginning in 1929, Fitzgerald operated a commissary and provided supplies for railroad workers passing through Thurmond. The building became vacant sometime in the mid-twentieth century. When the Lafayette Hotel, home of the post office, burned down in 1963, the post office moved to this building. In the latter half of the twentieth century, the post office shared the space with the last business in town, Thurmond Supply. The post office ceased service in 1995, and Thurmond Supply followed suit soon after. 

Post Office/Commissary

In 1904, the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway Company built a freight station in Thurmond, and soon after, a railroad bridge was completed across the river to connect the local coal mines. Known as the Thurmond Depot, the two-story building had board and batten siding, a bracketed shed roof, and a signal tower. The ground floor served as a waiting area and news center for passengers, but the upper section of the building was reserved for railway operators and their offices. The Depot was the heart of the community as it welcomed railroad workers, coal operators, and tourists into the booming coal town. The National Park Service has almost completely restored Thurmond Depot to how it once looked. The station continues to function as a working stop on Amtrak's Cardinal Line. This route runs from Chicago to New York, right through the heart of the New River Gorge. It requires a reservation for the train to stop in Thurmond, otherwise it travels 13 miles upstream to the station at Prince, West Virginia.

Thurmond Depot

As the town of Thurmond grew in the late nineteenth century, rail lines brought thousands of travellers and workers through the area. Thomas G. McKell, a wealthy land-owner saw a business opportunity in the booming area and funded construction of the Dun Glen Hotel. The four and a half story building was almost better described as a complex. The basement contained a grocery and bank vault, while the main floor held dining rooms, ballrooms, a perpetually operational bar, ice plant, barber shop, laundry, post office and an enormous gambling hall. $2.50 was enough to cover a room in one of the one hundred guest rooms that occupied the top three floors. The basement was brick while the rest of the building was constructed of wood, an ominous portend of the building’s fate. The building’s opening night was characterized by an enormous crowd who gathered to hear a symphony from Cincinnati, Ohio.The Dun Glen Hotel was an infamous site of sin due to the amount of gambling, drinking, dancing, and prostitution that occurred behind its doors. In fact, the building single handedly gave rise to two sayings about Thurmond: “no Sunday west of Clifton Forge and no God west of Hinton” and “the only difference between Hell and Thurmond is that a river runs through Thurmond.” Dun Glen’s never closing bar drew particularly fierce ire from Thurmond founder, W.D. Thurmond. Thurmond founded his town with the ideals of a puritanical religious society in mind. In 1901, alcohol was completely banned from Thurmond, perhaps as a response to Dun Glen Hotel, though perhaps the hotel was a response to the alcohol ban. However, if anything the ban only served to further encourage patronage of the Dun Glen Hotel, which was conveniently located across the river and just outside of the Thurmond city boundary. Thurmond’s growth and the growth of the Dun Glen Hotel were inextricably linked. The booming economy brought more workers, investors, and coal owners to the area, while the hotel made Thurmond the place to be. Thurmond quickly acquired the nickname, “Dodge City of the East,” thanks to Dun Glen Hotel.  A number of notable events occurred at the hotel in the early twentieth century. The largest coal mine transaction to ever occur in the New River region was brokered in Dun Glen Hotel. After some deliberation, a representative for the Berwind-White Coal Mining Company delivered a $1,250,000 check to the room of W.P. Rend, as payment for Rend’s coal mine at Minden. Another significant event was the world’s longest poker game. According to Ripley’s Believe It or Not and the Guinness Book of World Records, a fourteen year-long continuous poker game took place at the hotel.Though Thomas McKell was briefly able to appreciate the success of his venture, he died in 1904, three years after Dun Glen Hotel opened. Upon McKell’s death, his son William McKell took possession of the hotel. On August 11, 1904, McKell added a bank to the hotel, the New River Banking and Trust Company. However, the First World War was hard on Thurmond and the hotel never fully recovered. When disaster struck in the 1930s, the Dun Glen Hotel was already a rapidly declining shadow of its former self. On July 23rd, 1930 at around 10:30 PM, the hotel caught fire. None of the hotel occupants were injured, though two firefighters were while battling the fire. The fire proved uncontrollable and the hotel burned to the ground. Losses were estimated at $100,000. Initial news reports claim that the fire was caused by a charged electric wire which fell on the building. Several theories that the fire was the result of arson have also been promulgated. When he passed away in the mid-1930s, leaving no immediate heirs, William McKell’s land went to cousins. The fall of the hotel hurt Thurmond’s already faltering economy and no major structure was ever rebuilt on the land. Since that time, much of the property has been purchased by various companies. Several businesses such as a grocery store, gas station, and whitewater rafting company built structures in the area and often incorporated the foundation or materials from Dun Glen Hotel. Currently, the National Park Service has a maintenance facility, ranger station, and dormitory on the property. These buildings continue the tradition of incorporating physical components of the once pivotal Glen Dun Hotel into modern structures.

The Dun Glen Hotel (sometimes spelled Dunglen or Dunglenn) was one of the two hotels located near Thurmond, WV. Thomas G. McKell was given 12,500 acres in Fayette County, WV when he married Miss Jean Dun of Chillicothe, OH by her father as a wedding present. Here, he erected the Dunglen Hotel at the turn of the twentieth century. The hotel and Thurmond had their fates inextricably linked: the economy in Thurmond drew people in and the hotel provided them reason to stay, even if only for a brief time. With the hotel’s reputation for good times — often to the point of excess — it was not difficult to attract local and national visitors who dubbed the attraction, “Dodge City of the East.” The area’s largest coal mine transaction, and the world’s longest continuous poker game at fourteen years, both occurred in Dun Glen Hotel. Despite its reputation and impact on the community, the building was only extant for twenty-nine years. In 1930, it burned to the ground and was never rebuilt. Over the next few decades, Thurmond followed ruinous suit and quietly subsided into a ghost town.

Dun Glen Hotel (1901-1930)

A small community of African Americans developed in the Dun Glen, and they established a literary society that held meetings in the employees’ living quarters of the Dun Glen Hotel. The success of the literary society led to the organization of a Sunday School, and then an informal church by 1914. As the congregation grew, Black community members realized they needed a more formal space for religious services. In the early 1920s Black residents of the area were given property by the McKell heirs (one of the area’s original landowners was T. G. McKell, the other being W. D. Thurmond) and upon that they built the structure standing today. The First Baptist Church of Thurmond was likely a source of social joy and community togetherness when it had an active congregation. Wedding, funerals, and regular religious services brought Black residents together. The First Baptist Church of Thurmond is one of the remaining structures portraying segregation in the New River Gorge, and it is the only structure remaining in Thurmond of its kind. Jim Crow laws (built upon the state sanctioned Black Codes) were passed by southern Whites following the Civil War to maintain segregation. These laws determined labor wages, housing and school districts, segregated public spaces, and created a race-based caste system stacked against People of Color. As the American economy following the Civil War shifted towards industrial development, development emphasized connectivity between states and extractive industries.Coincidentally, the railroad and coal industries in the Appalachian region brought forth new opportunities for southern Blacks seeking to escape Jim Crow violence and barriers. The dramatic incline of "non-white"* residents to the coal fields of Appalachia is directly related to the constant need for labor in the mines. In Fayette County, the Black population more than tripled from 1890 to 1920 (from 3,054 Black residents to 9,636 residents).Even through discriminatory laws based on race were not present in the coalfields of West Virginia, racism was experienced at the company and local levels. Most company towns were segregated by race, including housing, schools, medical centers, and churches. Housing for African-Americans in West Virginian coal camps was often located on the outskirts of the camp or in a different hollow all together. Institutional racism was enacted by companies rather than the state via segregation.Despite racial inequities and physically demanding work, the wage-based labor of the coal mines provided an avenue for Blacks to accumulate wealth like never before. A miner could earn 2 to 4 times the amount a sharecropper or farmer could in a days work. With a 6-day work week common in some mines, Sunday church offered an arena for visiting relatives and networking with neighbors. Church was the center of civic life for Black coal miners and their families. Pastors were often shared between churches (travelling via local railroads) so neighboring communities would sometimes pool their resources for larger religious and communal events (such as a choir competition or guest speaker). Baseball was a common post-church community event.*Non-white is in quotations because the construct of the "white race" at the time excluded most non-Anglo Europeans; new European immigrants also found opportunity in coal mines during the late 19th and early 20th centuries

The First Baptist Church of Thurmond, managed by the New River Gorge National Park and Preserve, is a church located on the Dun Glen side of the river historically associated with the area’s Black population. Today, the church can be accessed through the Church Loop Trail, off of the Rend Trail. Black residents of Thurmond, Dun Glen, and other nearby communities made up the former congregation.

Thurmond, West Virginia

Hotel Thurmond/Lafayette Hotel (1891-1963)

Introduction

Images

Sources