Qualla: Nicholas County, West Virginia

Nicholas County, West Virginia: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kurt Tarvis, CC BY-SA 4.0. Somewhere in the official West Virginia gazetteer of 1872, a county commissioner wrote down the name of a new civil district: Mumble-the-peg. Nicholas County, in the central highlands, was one of those rare places where the bureaucratic record actually preserved a piece of childhood. Mumble-the-peg is a knife-throwing game played by farm boys with too much time and too few rules. For a year and a half, it was also the legal designation of a magisterial district in the West Virginia hills, until somebody decided that the name was undignified and changed it to Hamilton.

Image: Kurt Tarvis | CC BY-SA 4.0

Nicholas County, West Virginia: How the County Got Its Name

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tim Kiser (w:User:Malepheasant), CC BY-SA 3.0. The county was carved out of three older Virginia counties in 1818, when this part of the Allegheny Plateau was still nominally Virginia and would remain so until secession reshuffled the map in 1863. The new county took its name from Wilson Cary Nicholas, who had served as the 1...

Image: Tim Kiser (w:User:Malepheasant) | CC BY-SA 3.0

Nicholas County, West Virginia: Water as Industry

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ken Thomas, Public domain. The Gauley River cuts across the southern part of the county, and for six weeks each autumn when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers draws down Summersville Lake, that river becomes one of the most challenging stretches of commercially run whitewater in North America. Class V rapids...

Image: Ken Thomas | Public domain

Nicholas County, West Virginia: Carnifex Ferry

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Youngamerican at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0. On September 10, 1861, a Confederate force dug in along a bluff above the Gauley River near a place called Carnifex Ferry. A Union army under William Rosecrans attacked them. The fight ended in a tactical Confederate withdrawal that effectively secured western Virginia for the Un...

Image: Youngamerican at English Wikipedia | CC BY-SA 3.0

Nicholas County, West Virginia: Place Names

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nyttend, Public domain. The Nicholas County map reads like a poem written by someone who fell asleep with a Bible open on their lap. Mount Nebo, where Moses saw the Promised Land before dying within sight of it. Gilboa, where Saul fell on his sword. Mount Lookout, named for what it does. Then the secula...

Image: Nyttend | Public domain

Nicholas County, West Virginia: Summersville

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit DrWebMonkey, CC BY-SA 4.0. The county seat is a small town built around a courthouse square, but the dominant feature of the modern landscape is Summersville Lake, finished in 1966 when the Corps of Engineers dammed the Gauley to control floods downstream. The lake drowned farms, cemeteries, and the entire...

Image: DrWebMonkey | CC BY-SA 4.0