Qualla: Quiet Dell, West Virginia

Quiet Dell, West Virginia: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The name is a promise the place could not keep. Quiet Dell - the words conjure a sleepy hollow somewhere in the Appalachian folds, a place where the loudest sound is birdsong over a creek. The community five miles southeast of Clarksburg fit that description for most of its history. Then, in the summer of 1931, a man named Harry Powers turned a garage on a back road outside town into a killing room, and the name Quiet Dell became national news for all the wrong reasons. The town has spent the better part of a century since trying to be quiet again.

Quiet Dell, West Virginia: A Crossroads in Harrison County

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Quiet Dell sits at the junction of Interstate 79 and West Virginia Route 20, in the rolling country of Harrison County. It has never been incorporated. There is no mayor, no city limit sign with a population figure. What is here is what most West Virginia communities have: a 7-El...

Quiet Dell, West Virginia: The Murders of 1931

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In the summer of 1931, federal investigators dug into the soft earth of a property at Quiet Dell and uncovered the bodies of a Park Ridge, Illinois widow named Asta Eicher, her three children, and another woman, Dorothy Lemke. The man responsible was Herman Drenth, who used the a...

Quiet Dell, West Virginia: What the Town Built Instead

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The community has long since outlived its dark summer. The historic Quiet Dell United Methodist Church, dating to 1896, still gathers worshipers in a building older than the crime by a generation. The Quiet Dell School, built in 1922 and added to in 1953, was listed on the Nation...

Quiet Dell, West Virginia: The Weight of a Name

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Place names carry their history whether towns want them to or not. Quiet Dell was named for its terrain - a dell is a small wooded valley - and the word quiet described the sound of the place before anyone famous lived or died there. The killings of 1931 added another layer to th...