Qualla: Tucker County, West Virginia

Tucker County, West Virginia: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Antony-22, CC BY-SA 4.0. On a summer day in 1893, an armed mob from Parsons, West Virginia marched on the town of St. George and took the county records by force. The Tucker County Seat War had been brewing since 1889 over a question that mattered intensely locally: which town would be the seat of county government. The dispute eventually ended with Parsons keeping the records and the title. Nobody was killed. But the episode tells you something about Tucker County in the late nineteenth century - a place where political fights could be settled with rifles, where two small communities cared enough to risk violence over a record book, and where the geography of the Allegheny ridges made every neighboring town feel like a different country.

Image: Antony-22 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Tucker County, West Virginia: Tucker, the Judge, the County

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Antony-22, CC BY-SA 4.0. Tucker County was created in 1856 from a portion of Randolph County, while the area was still part of Virginia. The name honors Henry St. George Tucker, Sr., a judge and US Congressman from Williamsburg, Virginia who served on the Virginia Court of Appeals and represented the sta...

Image: Antony-22 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Tucker County, West Virginia: Burned to Bare Rock

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Famartin, CC BY-SA 4.0. In 1907, the Babcock Lumber Company of Pittsburgh began clear-cutting the mountain ridges throughout Tucker County, operating out of Davis. The lumber boom that Henry Gassaway Davis's railroads had opened a generation earlier accelerated into something close to a final harvest. B...

Image: Famartin | CC BY-SA 4.0

Tucker County, West Virginia: Three State Parks and a Wildlife Refuge

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Antony-22, CC BY-SA 4.0. What followed the fires was a slow restoration of land use that had less to do with extraction and more to do with recreation. Today, Tucker County contains three state parks: Blackwater Falls State Park, with its famous 62-foot tannin-dark cascade; Canaan Valley Resort State Par...

Image: Antony-22 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Tucker County, West Virginia: Towns Along the Rivers

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tim Kiser (w:User:Malepheasant), CC BY-SA 2.5. The county's two cities - Parsons (the county seat) and Thomas - each carry their own history. Parsons sits at the confluence of the Cheat River's Black Fork and Shavers Fork, a regional commercial center since the late nineteenth century. Thomas, just upstream from Davis, grew a...

Image: Tim Kiser (w:User:Malepheasant) | CC BY-SA 2.5

Tucker County, West Virginia: The Bellwether County

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Antony-22, CC BY-SA 4.0. Tucker County was politically divided at the 1861 Virginia Secession Convention and has remained a statewide political bellwether ever since. The county has voted for the winner of West Virginia's electoral votes in every presidential election since the state's formation, with on...

Image: Antony-22 | CC BY-SA 4.0