Unique Places in West Virginia

Built in 1854, the Anna Jarvis House was the birthplace of Anna Jarvis, the founder of Mother's Day, and also served as the field headquarters of General George McClelland during his 1861 western Virginia campaign during the American Civil War. His troops were encamped across the road in what is now known as the Ocean Pearl Felton Historic Park. During the time General McClelland occupied the house, it remained the focal point of the entire civil war.

The two-story frame house was built by Granville Jarvis, the father of Anna Jarvis, and was occupied by the family for 11 years until they moved to nearby Grafton. Anna Jarvis was born in the house in 1864.

Anna's mother, Ann Jarvis, had established Mother's Day Work Clubs in five cities. The purpose of these clubs was to improve sanitary and health conditions for women who were mothers. During the American Civil War, the clubs remained neutral and also treated wounds and fed and clothed both Union and Confederate soldiers.

On May 12, 1907, two years after her mother's death, Anna Jarvis held a memorial service for her mother and launched a campaign to make Mother's Day a recognized national holiday. Her hopes were realized in 1914 as Mother's Day was established as a holiday to be celebrated on the second Sunday in May. Nowadays, Mother's Day is celebrated in many countries around the world.

By 1920, however, Anna Jarvis had become disillusioned by the commercialization that she felt ruined the spirit of Mother's Day. She was especially against the sending of greeting cards and candy and said: "A printed card means nothing except that you are too lazy to write to the woman who has done more for you than anyone in the world. And candy! You take a box to mother--and then eat most of it yourself. A pretty sentiment."

Anna Jarvis spent her inheritance campaigning against what Mother's Day had become. When she died, she was penniless and had done nothing to prevent the commercialization of the holiday.

Nowadays, the Anna Jarvis House is preserved by a nonprofit organization that runs the Anna Jarvis Birthplace Museum. The house and museum are located in the tiny unincorporated village of Webster, about four miles (six kilometers) south of Grafton on U.S. Route 119/250.

The Anna Jarvis House has been listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Located a few miles northwest of Philippi in Barbour County, the Adaland Mansion is a former farmhouse that has been restored with strict attention to authenticity. The building features homemade bricks and walnut woodwork. The grounds contain extensive flower gardens, an herb garden, and a barn dating from the 1850s that has displays of antique farming equipment and tools.

The house was built by in 1870 by a prosperous farmer, Augustus Modisett, to replace a double log cabin in which three generations of Modisetts had lived. The construction work was done by emancipated slaves who had stayed on the farm after slavery was abolished. The mansion acquired its current name in 1920 when Judge Ira Robinson, the Chief Justice of the West Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals, bought the house and named it and the grounds after his wife, Ada Sinsel Robinson.

Nowadays the mansion is open for tours and special events throughout the year. Especially popular are its Christmas tours in which every room is richly decorated in Victorian and Edwardian Christmas decorations. Four types of formal tea events are also well attended. Sunday afternoon teas feature fresh-baked scones, assorted sandwiches, and desserts. Buffet teas offer finger sandwiches, fruit, sweets, and desserts. High teas feature individual selections and formal presentations of tea menu items. And royal teas consist of a four-course menu of finger sandwiches, scones, sweets, desserts, and a large selection of teas. Royal teas also include a presentation of tea history, etiquette, and brewing techniques, and are concluded with a glass of champagne.

The Adaland Mansion has been listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Located in the small town of Mannington in Marion County, the Hamilton Round Barn is only one of five round and polygonal barns in West Virginia. It was built between 1911 and 1912, and served as a dairy barn on the Hamilton farm, which was the first farm in the county to use electric milking machines. The barn accommodated from 20 to 25 cows on the ground floor, and up to seven tons (6,350 kilograms) of hay could be stored on the upper floor.

The wooden barn is 66 feet (20 meters) in diameter and its cupola is 75 feet (23 meters) tall. It features a slate gambrel roof topped by a six-sided cupola.

Nowadays, the barn is operated as a museum by the West Augusta Historical Society. The museum contains a collection of antique farming equipment, a carriage, a sleigh, early mining tools, and other farm-related artifacts.

The Hamilton Round Barn has been listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Located in the small town of Barrackville in Marion County, the Barrackville Covered Bridge is a 146-foot (45-meter) single-span modified Burr truss bridge that crosses Buffalo Creek just north of the town. The bridge was built in 1853 by local bridge builder Lemuel Chenoweth. Siding was added 20 years after its completion.

The bridge was saved from destruction during the Jones-Imboden Raid by the Ice family and nearby mill owners. The Jones-Imboden Raid was a campaign led by Confederate generals William Jones and John Imboden to destroy bridges and other infrastructure in western Virginia (now West Virginia) during the American Civil War.

A permanent bypass bridge was constructed in 1991 next to the Barrackville Covered Bridge, which was retired at that time. The new bridge was needed to preserve the covered bridge, and because the old bridge had become inadequate for modern traffic needs.

The Barrackville Covered Bridge has been listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Located near Fairmont in northern West Virginia, Pricketts Fort State Park was established in 1975 to preserve the site of an eighteenth-century fort that had been built to protect nearby settlers from attacks by American Indians.

The 22-acre (nine-hectare) park features a visitors' center with a museum shop, an outdoor 400-seat amphitheater, a picnic area, nature trails, and a boat ramp on the Monongahela River.

The centerpiece of the park, however, is a historically accurate reconstruction of the original Prickett's Fort. Prickett's Fort was built in 1774 on a small rise overlooking the confluence of Prickett's Creek and the Monongahela River to serve as a refuge from American Indian war parties. At the first sign of a threat, up to 80 families from the surrounding area would converge on the fort to take refuge within its walls until the danger passed.

The recreated fort was built in 1976. Each of the four walls is 100 feet (30 meters) in length and 12 feet (four meters) in height, and there is a blockhouse on each corner. Sixteen small cabins, some with earthen floors, line the inner walls, and a meeting house and storehouse fill the common area in the center.

The fort serves as a living history site, where interpreters recreate life of the late eighteenth century through period costumes and demonstrations of a variety of colonial crafts. Visitors can watch blacksmiths, spinners making cloth, weavers, and a gunsmith, the state's only public demonstration of the gunsmith's craft as carried out in the eighteenth century.

Originally called the Weston State Hospital, the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum was built to house and treat the mentally ill from throughout the region. The building was designed by architect Richard Andrews, who followed the Kirkbride plan for mental institutions. This plan called for long wings in staggered formation which assured an abundant supply of therapeutic light and fresh air. The building is the largest hand-cut stone masonry building in the United States, and the second-largest in the world, after the Kremlin in Moscow.

Construction began in 1858 and was completed in 1881. However, patients were first admitted into finished sections of the building in 1864.

During the American Civil War, Weston was seized by Union troops. The unfinished asylum was converted to Camp Tyler, an important military post which controlled the roads in the area. The completed south wing was used as barracks, and the main foundation served as stables.

Originally designed to house 250 patients, by the 1950s the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum had over 2,400 patients, who lived in overcrowded and terrible conditions. By the 1990s, advances in the treatment of the mentally ill made the asylum obsolete, and it was closed in 1994. The closure of the asylum seriously affected the economy of Weston, since most of the small town's inhabitants worked there or otherwise relied on it economically in some way.

Nowadays, the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum is becoming a tourist attraction. Historic tours are offered, but the most popular tours by far are nighttime ghost tours and hunts. Since the building closed, there have been numerous sightings of apparitions and reports of unexplained voices and sounds. This prompted four popular televisions programs, Ghost Hunters, Ghost Adventures, Paranormal Challenge, and Ghost Stories to film episodes here, making the asylum a must-see destination for those interested in the paranormal.

Located in the Allegheny Mountains of Grant, Randolph, and Tucker counties in eastern West Virginia, the Dolly Sods Wilderness consists of a high-altitude plateau characterized by ecosystems more commonly found farther north in Canada. The plateau is the largest of its kind east of the Rocky Mountains. Elevations within the wilderness area range from about 2,700 feet (820 meters) to 4,770 feet (1,454 meters). Its name originates from a corruption of Dahles, the name of an eighteenth-century German family who homesteaded in the area, and "sods", a term used in the Appalachian region that means a mountaintop meadow.

The Dolly Sods Wilderness is part of the larger and older Monongahela National Forest. It was created in 1975 as part of the National Wilderness Preservation System. Over the years, more acreage was added to the original protected area so that it now totals 17,371 acres (7,030 hectares). It protects unique ecosystems that include stunted spruce forests, rocky cliffs and boulder-strewn ground, heath barrens, grassy meadows (created during the nineteenth century by logging and fires), and sphagnum bogs. Lower elevations are made up of hardwood deciduous forests.

Because the Dolly Sods Wilderness is a protected wilderness area, any human activities have to impact the land as little as possible. Outside of the camping areas, camping is allowed, but all traces of the campsite must be removed. Hunting and fishing are also allowed, but off-road vehicles are prohibited. Although it is possible to hike anywhere through the forests and meadows, visitors are encouraged to stay on the wilderness area's 19 hiking trails that total 47 miles (76 kilometers) and pass through the various ecosystems. Many of the trails follow old logging roads or railroad grades. Another popular summertime activity is picking blueberries and huckleberries that grow in abundance in the heath barrens.

The high altitude of the Dolly Sods Wilderness means that it receives a lot of snow from late autumn through early spring. The roads are not maintained in the winter, so the area is closed for the season whenever the roads become impassable.

The 1,174-acre (475-hectare) Cranesville Swamp Preserve is mostly located in eastern Preston County in northeastern West Virginia. However, a small portion of the bog and preserve is also situated in Garrett County, Maryland. (The "swamp" is technically a bog). The land was purchased by the Nature Conservancy in 1960 to protect the bog's unique environment. In 1964, the Cranesville Swamp Preserve became one of the first National Natural Landmarks in the nation.

The Cranesville Swamp Preserve contains one of the few boreal muskeg bogs in the southern United States, a habitat type that is more generally found in northern New England and southern Canada. The muskeg bog can only exist in such southern latitudes because of what is called a "frost pocket." The area's topography and weather combine to create a microclimate similar to that found much farther north. The bog sits in a natural "bowl", or valley, that collects moisture and cooler temperatures. The surrounding hills channel the prevailing westerly winds into the bowl which deposit a great deal of precipitation, making the bog one of the wettest and coolest places in West Virginia.

A muskeg bog is mostly made up of peat, which is formed as sphagnum moss (a type of plant abundant in muskeg bogs) dies and decays. Peat forms an acidic, nutrient-poor soil that can only support acid-tolerant trees such as eastern hemlock, red spruce, and tamarack (also called larch). In fact, the Cranseville Swamp Preserve is home to the world's southernmost stand of tamarack. Other plants commonly found in the preserve include alders, various sedges, cranberry, and round-leafed sundew, a type of carniverous plant that thrives in acidic soil.

Many species of birds and animals that are generally found farther north can be seen in the bog, including northern saw-whet owl, nashville warbler, black bear, porkupine, and snowshoe hare.

Visitors to the Cranesville Swamp Preserve can take a self-guided tour along the preserve's five miles (eight kilometers) of trails that pass through upland deciduous and evergreen forests, and closely examine the muskeg bog from the 1,500-foot (457-meter) boardwalk.