Fayetteville's history runs deeper than the buildings that survive in the district today. Two Civil War-era earthwork forts once stood here - Fort Toland and Fort Scammon - built by Union forces to defend the high plateau above the New River Gorge during the 1862 Confederate offensive that drove them briefly out of the Kanawha Valley. The sites of both are within the modern historic district, though the earthworks themselves are mostly gone. The Old Fayetteville Cemetery, also a contributing site, holds graves that predate the Civil War. The McClung House at 1850 is the oldest standing building of the district, a Greek Revival structure that anchored the town's earliest civic life and survived the Confederate occupation in September of 1862.

Most of the district's buildings come from the period between 1900 and 1940 - the years when Fayetteville served as the administrative center for one of the most productive coal districts in Appalachia. The 1907 Fayette County Jail was built to hold the prisoners that a rough coalfields economy produced. The 1920 Old Post Office and the 1938 U.S. Post Office, eighteen years apart, show how the federal presence kept pace with the town's growth. The Bank of Fayette opened as a financial institution in 1921 and later became the Fayetteville Town Hall. The Theatre Building from 1935 brought Hollywood pictures to coalfield families. Jack's Garage at 1934 marks the moment when the automobile finally crossed the mountains in serious numbers. Every one of these buildings still stands on the same streets they were built on.

Three Fayetteville buildings carry their own individual National Register listings inside the broader district. The Fayette County Courthouse, completed in 1895 and remodeled several times since, is the architectural and political heart of the town - the place where coal-era murder trials and modern land disputes have both played out. The E. B. Hawkins House is a fine example of late-nineteenth-century domestic architecture, built for one of the town's leading citizens. The Altamont Hotel served visitors arriving by train and later by car at the height of the coal boom, when Fayetteville drew operators, lawyers, and traveling salesmen. The grouping of three separately listed buildings within a larger historic district is a sign of how rich the architectural fabric here is, and how many distinct stories the streets can hold.

Many West Virginia coal towns thinned out or vanished entirely after the seams played out. Fayetteville did not. The town held its population, kept its courthouse, and reinvented itself in the late twentieth century as the staging point for the New River Gorge - first as a national river under the National Park Service, then, after 2020, as the country's 63rd national park. The historic district was listed on the National Register in 1990, just as the recreation economy was beginning to take hold. Walk Court Street today and you see the same brick storefronts that lined it a hundred years ago, but the awnings now belong to outfitters and brewpubs and rafting companies. The War Memorial Building from 1949 still stands. The old Methodist Church from around 1905 is still there. The county jail still hosts hearings. The town that grew up around coal has grown into something the coal era never imagined.