Martinsburg, West Virginia

“ Those who went to Pennsylvania received grants of land in the western mountain region. The policy of the government was to interpose them as a buffer between the expanding colony and the Indian frontier. Once planted in the Alleghany region, they spread rapidly and in large numbers toward the southwest along the mountain country through the Shenandoah Valley and into the Carolinas. At a later time they formed almost the entire population of West Virginia, and they were the men who chiefly built up the commonwealths of Kentucky and Tennessee. ”

“ In the proposed settlements, for many years, Virginia and West Virginia have consistently adhered to the Fairfax stone as a starting point for the disputed boundary. When West Virginia passed the act of 1887, ratifying the Michler line, it was upon condition that Virginia titles granted between the Michler line and the old Maryland line should be validated. Maryland, in the act of 1852, recognized the same starting point. ”

“ To create the State of West Virginia by the consent of two states, one of which was dead, and the other one of which lived in Ohio? By what authority have you appointed military governors in the ‘sovereign’ States of Virginia, Tennessee, and Louisiana? Why trim the hedge and lie about it? We, too, are revolutionists, and you are our executive. ”

“ On the north side of the county road from Cranesville, West Virginia, to Oakland, Maryland, and is about 3 miles south of Cranesville, 100 yards east of house of Eugene Teets, and west of Muddy creek, and on the edge of Pine swamp, which has here been drained. ”

“ On the 26th of July, we moved to Martinsburg, the cavalry going to the Potomac. The 27th and 28th were employed in destroying the railroad, it having been repaired since we passed over it at the beginning of the month. While at Martinsburg it was ascertained, beyond all doubt, that Hunter had been again indulging in his favorite mode of warfare, and that, after his return to the Valley, while we were near Washington, among other outrages, the private residences of Mr. Andrew Hunter, a member of the Virginia Senate, Mr. ”

“ We wanted to cross the towering Cumberlands of West Virginia early, before it got hot and the cañons and rivers and woods and rocks made the air too bumpy.
Early as we were, however, a parade of cars followed us out. The residents of Boundville considered eleven A. M. the middle of the night, and four was the fashionable breakfast hour. As our Ford bumped into the field, leading a miscellaneous collection of vehicles, I spotted Marston reclining in his blankets under a wing. ”

“ It is 1/4 mile northerly from the summit of the Western Maryland Railroad, which is here the highest point on that line between Cumberland, Maryland, and Elkins, West Virginia.
The stone is easily reached by a trail from Fairfax station, which is 1/2 mile to the southeast. The large timber all around has been cut by mill men and fire has destroyed the balance, so that the immediate spot is now largely covered by brush and briers. ”

“ IV. The traveller crossing the continent in a Pullman car is convinced that West Virginia is one continuous mountain. He has no desire to do other than to hurry past with all the rapidity of which the iron horse is capable. He can have no idea that in its central portion is a stretch of rolling blue-grass country, as fertile and as valuable as the stock-farm lands of Kentucky; with a civilization, too, distinctly its own, and not to be met with in any other country of the world. ”

“ A true soldier strives and lives to win it. A martinet is an unhappy, worthless creature, wretched and mischievous, too. The only consolation is that he is more unhappy than he makes other people.
While the hills and swamps about West Point were fairly good shooting-ground for ruffled grouse (pheasants in Virginia, partridges in New York and Pennsylvania) and woodcock, all of the little mountain streams thereabouts had trout in them. One day, Fitz John Porter, McClellan, and I hired a boat to go a-fishing for perch on the Hudson. ”

“ It is 300 yards northwest of house of Joseph Thomas and 1/2 mile south of Pennsylvania state line.
Monument No. 34.
At the intersection of the Md.-W. Va. boundary line from the south with the Pennsylvania state line. It is 2 miles southwest of Markleysburg, Pennsylvania, 1/4 mile east of point where the pike to that place crosses the Penna. line, and 1/4 mile northeast of house of M. M. Thomas. It is 1,051 feet westward from the Mason & Dixon mound in which a stone monument marked, '55.2 M 1885,' was set by survey made in 1885 by the states of Pennsylvania and West Virginia. ”

“ What is now West Virginia had squatters here and there.
Virginian pioneers had also betaken themselves southwestward to the head
of the Tennessee. North and South Carolina were inhabited as far west as
the mountains, though the population was not dense. In Northern
Kentucky, along the Ohio, lay considerable settlements, and in
Tennessee, where Nashville now is, there was another centre of
civilization. In the Northwest Territory, Detroit, Vincennes, Kaskaskia,
Prairie du Chien, Mackinac, and Green River were outposts, at each of
which a few white men might have been found. ”

“ A commodious building of brick and sandstone, unchristened as to style of architecture, has been erected for the home of the law-makers; and henceforth the city which started around the little log fort built in 1786 by George Glendermon to afford protection against Indians will be the seat of government for the great unfenced State of West Virginia. Its business enterprise and thrift, its excellent geographical and commercial position, its healthiness notwithstanding its bad drainage, or rather no drainage, have induced a growth almost phenomenal. ”

“ Glancing at the map of West Virginia, one can readily see that the Eastern Panhandle is geographically a part of Maryland and Virginia, states which have not as yet been converted to the wisdom of making appropriations to Negro education equally as large as those providing for the education of the whites. The ardor of the successors of these early enthusiastic workers in that section, therefore, was dampened, and the results which they obtained fell far short of the aspiration of these pioneers to remake these freedmen that they might live as the citizens of a free republic. ”

“ West Virginia resists the granting of the execution on three grounds: (1) 'Because the state of West Virginia, within herself, has no power to pay the judgment in question, except through the legislative department of her government, and she should be given an opportunity to accept and abide by the decision of this court, and, in the due and ordinary course, to make provision for its satisfaction, before any steps looking to her compulsion be taken ”

“ The early history of West Virginia is filled with the same stories of privation, suffering, and horrors experienced by the settlers in Tennessee, Kentucky, and North Carolina. The privations of that time necessitated women taking upon themselves the hardest labors. ”

“ In addition to mining areas producing more soft coal than any other state, plus our varied manufactures, we have fertile valleys and slopes from which ... an increasing harvest is reaped. The State’s diversity of activity should, in the fullness of time, make West Virginia the most progressive, the most socially balanced, and therefore the most truly civilized State in the Union. ”

“ To this day only one in sixteen of the population of West Virginia is colored, and it is still largely native white, despite the coal mines, which in other regions have come to depend largely on the labor of Slavs. In the 10 per cent of its foreign-stock population West Virginia has a scattering of Slavs, as also of almost every other people, but the largest element is British, the next German. ”

“ By his own account, he enabled a great number to reach Canada.
All this while it was well known that in Western Virginia the landowners, — farmers living on high table-land, — had always found slavery injurious, and had for many years petitioned and struggled for some form of emancipation. It was notorious also that the frontier State of Maryland could no longer retain its slaves, who were always running away: and that the Courts were inflicting the most ferocious punishments on seamen and others who were supposed to have favoured the escape of negroes. ”

“ Indeed from the very origin of the settlement of West Virginia, which had made but little progress when the Federal Constitution was adopted, its citizens were in large degree alienated from the Eastern and older section of the State. The men of the West were hardy frontiersmen, a majority of them soldiers of the Revolution and their immediate descendants, without estates, with little but the honorable record of patriotic service and their own strong arms, for their fortunes. ”

“ There is never peace in West Virginia because there is never justice. Injunctions and [Pg 235] guns, like morphia, produce a temporary quiet. Then the pain, agonizing and more severe, comes again. So it is with West Virginia. The strike was broken. But the next year, the miners gathered their breath for another struggle. Sometimes they lost their battle through their own crooked leaders. And once it was my duty to go before the rank and file and expose their leaders who would betray them. And when my boys understood, West Virginia’s climate wasn’t healthy for them. ”

“ These 14 simple, earnest crusaders, animated by pure and unselfish motives, would visit on a single tour of a thousand miles the principal German settlements in Maryland and Virginia (including the present West Virginia) . Sometimes they would make an extended circuit through North Carolina, South Carolina, and even Georgia, everywhere bearing witness to the truth of the gospel and seeking to carry the most elemental forms of the Christian religion, preaching and prayer, to the primitive frontiersmen marooned along the outer fringe of white settlements. ”

“ Just as in other times of national peril the human and 298 material resources of this region figured indispensably, so today its great strength will be used against the Hitler menace.... West Virginia, with its industrial development and strategic isolation from attack, may become the Defense Hero of a war in which states little and large have fallen before the juggernaut of tyranny. ”

“ In process of time the marks became obliterated, and conflicts of title and litigation arose between the holders of Maryland and the holders of Virginia patents for lands in the debatable territory. So in May, 1852, the Maryland legislature passed an act reciting these facts, and requesting the governor to open a correspondence with the governor of Virginia about the matter ”

“ During the war an unusually large part of the population was in arms, and 32,068 men were furnished to the Federal Army. Slavery was entirely abolished February 3, 1865, in advance of the adoption of the Thirteenth Amendment. The return of the Confederate soldiers to the southern and eastern counties threatened the Republican control, and in 1866 an amendment was added to the Constitution disfranchising all who had given aid and comfort to the Confederacy after June, 1861. ”

“ The glad news of the rich valleys beyond the mountains early lured such adventurous pioneers as Andrew Greer and Julius Cæsar Dugger to the Watauga country. The glowing stories, told by Boone, and disseminated in the back country by Henderson, Williams, and the Harts, seemed to give promise to men of this stamp that the West afforded relief from oppressions suffered in North Carolina. During the winter of 1768-9 there was also a great rush of settlers from Virginia into the valley of the Holston. ”

“ No account of the system of land tenure in Virginia in the seventeenth century would be complete without some reference to the regulations in force in the Northern Neck. All that portion of the Colony situated between the Potomac and Rappahannock Rivers, extending as far towards the west as the heads of these important streams and towards the east as Chesapeake Bay, was in 1661 granted by the King to Lord Hopton, Earl of St. Albans, Lord Culpeper, Lord Berkeley, Sir William Morton, Sir Dudley Wyatt, and Thomas Culpeper. ”

“ She still lives to continue a noble work well begun and to complete a useful career in the same county where she cast her lot years ago.
For almost a generation earlier than this, Negro education had been launched with much better beginnings in the county of Kanawha. There were no free schools in West Virginia until 1866, but as in the case of several other settlements in the State, private schools were conducted for Negroes immediately after their emancipation. ”

“ John, all brothers and each at one time governor of Virginia, were established here. Two persons were killed at each of their plantations, "at Westover, about a mile from Berkley Hundred." In the Assembly of 1624 Westover sent its representative to the Assembly at Jamestown in the person of Samuel Sharpe. This being the case, it is difficult to explain the absence of the plantation from the list of 1624 and the muster of 1625. In the May, 1625 land tabulation, there is a single entry which reads "Att Westover 500 acres claymed by Captaine Francis West." ”

“ Consent to be sued was given when West Virginia was admitted into the Union, and it must be assumed that the legislature of West Virginia would, in the natural course, make provision for the satisfaction of any decree that may be rendered. ”

“ E. in a manner to follow the property lines, as acknowledged by the citizens of the two states; passing over the center of a planted stone property corner, which marked the beginning of the Maryland tract called Mount Pleasant, surveyed in 1774. ”