Qualla: Pocahontas County, West Virginia

Pocahontas County, West Virginia: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tim Kiser (w:User:Malepheasant), CC BY-SA 3.0. When Andrew Lewis came up the Greenbrier valley in 1751 to survey land for the Greenbrier Company, he found a man named Stephen Sewell living inside a hollow sycamore tree. Sewell and his cabin-mate Jacob Marlin had come down from Frederick, Maryland in 1749, the first European settlers in what would become Pocahontas County. Their cabin sat where Marlin Run met Knapp's Creek - now between Eighth and Ninth Avenues in downtown Marlinton. The county that grew up around that hollow sycamore is, today, one of the strangest pieces of geography in the eastern United States: 942 square miles, average elevation 3,219 feet, home to the world's largest steerable radio telescope, and the place where eight separate rivers begin.

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

Pocahontas County, West Virginia: Hunting Ground, Borderland, Treaty Land

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Brian M. Powell (user Bitmapped on en.wikipedia), CC BY-SA 3.0. The Iroquois Confederacy claimed these mountains as a hunting ground - by right, the Confederacy said, of their conquest of earlier nations who had lived here. A British treaty of 1758 confirmed the land west of the Allegheny Mountains to the Native nations and forbade the Crown'...

Image: Brian M. Powell (user Bitmapped on en.wikipedia) | CC BY-SA 3.0

Pocahontas County, West Virginia: The Civil War on Mountain Roads

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nyttend, Public domain. When the Civil War came, Pocahontas County voted to secede from the United States by 360 to 13. About 700 of the county's 907 men of military age served in the Confederate army. The county levied $15,000 for armaments. Farming became difficult as men left for the front, and many ...

Image: Nyttend | Public domain

Pocahontas County, West Virginia: Railroads and the Lumber Boom

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Brian M. Powell (user Bitmapped on en.wikipedia), CC BY-SA 3.0. The railroads came late to Pocahontas County. Building track over the Alleghenies was difficult and expensive enough that construction did not begin until 1899. Once the line was in, the change was startling. The Chesapeake and Ohio Railway opened the great virgin forests of the ...

Image: Brian M. Powell (user Bitmapped on en.wikipedia) | CC BY-SA 3.0

Pocahontas County, West Virginia: The Birthplace of the Rivers

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Geoff Gallice from Gainesville, FL, USA, CC BY 2.0. The county sits at the crown of the central Appalachians. Its mean altitude of 3,219 feet makes it the sixth-highest county east of the Mississippi River and the highest in the eastern U.S. outside western North Carolina. Eight rivers begin in Pocahontas County: the Cherry, Cranb...

Image: Geoff Gallice from Gainesville, FL, USA | CC BY 2.0

Pocahontas County, West Virginia: Where Cell Service Vanishes

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jarek Tuszyński, CC BY-SA 3.0. Today the county's most unusual claim to fame is its silence. Pocahontas County is the heart of the United States National Radio Quiet Zone, a 13,000-square-mile area centered on the Green Bank Observatory where radio emissions are heavily restricted to protect the world's larges...

Image: Jarek Tuszyński | CC BY-SA 3.0