Wilson-Wodrow-Mytinger House
Romney, Hampshire County, West Virginia
Marker Inscription
Wilson-Wodrow-Mytinger House
The Story
This brick residence stands in Romney, one of the oldest towns in what is now West Virginia, laid out in the 1760s along the South Branch of the Potomac in the mountainous eastern panhandle. Homes like this one anchored a community that grew from a colonial-era frontier settlement into a county seat, their walls witnessing generations of family life and the upheavals that swept the region. During the Civil War, Romney sat astride contested ground and famously changed hands many times between Union and Confederate forces, and its older houses endured occupation and hardship on the war's shifting border.
Why it matters
Surviving homes in a town this old carry the layered story of the American backcountry — from Virginia's colonial frontier to a bitterly divided borderland during the Civil War — in the fabric of a single building.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
This brick house stands in Romney, a town laid out in the 1760s along the South Branch of the Potomac in the mountainous eastern panhandle of present-day West Virginia. When it was settled, this was the far western frontier of colonial Virginia — a valley of good bottomland reached by hard travel, where families built for permanence in a still-unsettled country.
By the nineteenth century that frontier outpost had matured into an established county seat, with brick homes replacing the first rough cabins. A masonry house was a statement of rootedness: it meant a family expected to stay, and had the means to build in something more lasting than logs.
Then came the Civil War, and Romney's location turned from an asset into a hazard. Sitting on contested ground near the border between North and South, the town became a place armies wanted to control — and the older houses that had stood for generations found themselves inside a war zone.
People & events
A house carrying three family names, as this one does, tells its own story of continuity: it passed through the hands of successive households across long stretches of the town's life. Each name marks a chapter — a family that lived, worked, raised children, and eventually gave way to the next within the same walls.
During the war years, Romney became notorious for changing hands repeatedly between Union and Confederate forces. For the townspeople, that meant living under occupation that could reverse with little warning — soldiers quartered nearby, supplies requisitioned, daily life bent around the movements of armies. Sturdy brick homes like this one were exactly the kind of structure that endured such upheaval while lighter buildings did not.
The precise wartime experiences of this particular house — who lived here then, what they saw — are the kind of local detail that belongs to Romney's own records rather than to general history. What the marker preserves is surer and no less moving: a home old enough to have witnessed the whole arc, from frontier settlement to a bitterly divided borderland.
Its place in the American story
The Civil War is often remembered through its great battles, but much of its hardship was borne in ordinary towns caught on the seam between the two sides. Romney's repeated changes of hands make it a vivid example of what it meant to live on contested ground — where loyalty, safety, and even the flag over the courthouse could shift more than once.
West Virginia itself was born of that division. The western counties of Virginia broke away during the war to remain in the Union, making this whole region a place where the national rupture ran straight through communities and families. A house that stood through those years embodies that larger fracture at the scale of a single front door.
Homes like this connect the backcountry frontier to the nation's defining crisis. They remind us that the American story did not only happen at Gettysburg or in Washington; it happened in brick houses on mountain-town streets, where families endured whatever the war brought to their doorstep.
If you visit
Take a moment with the brickwork and proportions. A house that has stood since the era this marker recalls often shows its age in honest ways — settled lines, hand-laid masonry, the particular character of old materials. These are the fingerprints of the generations named on the marker.
Then widen your gaze to the town around it. Romney is one of the oldest settlements in West Virginia, and its historic streets carry the layered feel of a place that has been continuously lived in for more than two and a half centuries. This house is one thread in that fabric.
Remember as you stand there that this quiet street was once fought over. Romney's Civil War history gives an ordinary-looking block an extraordinary past, and a visit here rewards the traveler who likes to imagine the same ground under very different circumstances. Please respect that it may be a private residence, and enjoy it from the street.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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