Historic Markers in West Virginia

Monongalia County, WV

In 1779 the western Virginia backcountry—today's West Virginia—was a raw and violent borderland, caught up in the frontier fighting that raged alongside the Revolutionary War. Isolated cabins at settlements like Dunkard Creek stood exposed to sudden raids, and defense often fell to whoever was home when trouble arrived. This marker preserves one such account: a settler woman, Mrs. Bozarth, who by tradition seized an axe and fought off attackers in a desperate hand-to-hand struggle at her own door. Whether burnished by retelling or not, the story captures the peril that defined daily life on the far edge of American settlement.

Charleston, WV

This monument preserves the memory of Andrew Donnally Jr. and a cemetery once rooted in Kanawha City before being relocated here. Born in 1778 at Fort Donnally, a fortified frontier station in Greenbrier County during the era of the American Revolution, Donnally belonged to one of the pioneering families who pushed into western Virginia's Kanawha Valley and made their homes along the river opposite the salt-making community of Malden. When his old burying ground was moved, these stones came with it, carrying a family's story from the frontier generation into the settled 19th-century valley.

Elizabeth, WV

This West Virginia town traces its beginnings to 1796, when William Beauchamp settled here in the years just after the Revolution and named the place for the wife of David Beauchamp. But the ground held older significance: in 1752, the frontier scout Christopher Gist passed through on behalf of the Ohio Company, a land venture that dreamed of planting British colonies across the trans-Allegheny west. That dream collided with French claims on the same territory, and the resulting French and Indian War froze the company's plans before they could take root.

Harpers Ferry, WV · est. 1963

Brown and 21 men captured the federal arsenal at the confluence of the Potomac and Shenandoah. Cornered by U.S. Marines under Robert E. Lee, Brown was captured, tried, and hanged — becoming a martyr to abolitionists and a warning to the South.

Wayne County, WV

On the rainy night of November 14, 1970, a chartered jet carrying the Marshall University football team, coaches, boosters, and crew home from a game in North Carolina struck a hillside on its approach to the Tri-State Airport near Huntington, West Virginia. All 75 people aboard were killed, wiping out nearly the entire Thundering Herd program in an instant. The disaster shattered the surrounding community, and the university rebuilt its team almost from scratch the following season with a roster of freshmen and walk-ons known as the 'Young Thundering Herd.'

Morgantown, WV

Standing in Morgantown, the seat of Monongalia County, this memorial gathers three generations of the county's soldiers under a single tribute. It remembers the Union men who marched off during the Civil War of the 1860s, the volunteers of the brief 1898 Spanish-American War that pushed the United States onto the world stage, and the doughboys who shipped to France during World War One. Communities across West Virginia raised such monuments in the early twentieth century, turning a courthouse lawn or town square into a permanent roll of local service.