The journey Watters Smith made in 1796 was the standard journey of his generation: down the wagon road from New Jersey to Pittsburgh, then southwest into the back country of western Virginia. Land was cheap; population was thin; the political situation, with the recent Treaty of Greenville pushing the Native nations of the Ohio Valley back toward the west, allowed white settlement to expand into territory that would have been dangerous a decade earlier. Smith chose a spot on Duck Creek for the same reasons settlers always chose creek bottoms: reliable water, fertile alluvial soil, easy to defend, with timber for cabin and fuel close at hand. The first cabin went up that summer. The Smith family expanded the farm steadily over the following decades, adding outbuildings, livestock pens, and fields cleared from the surrounding hardwood.

What makes the Watters Smith site distinctive among West Virginia historic farms is that the Smith family stayed put. The land passed from Watters and Elizabeth to their children, then to grandchildren, then through six generations of descendants without ever leaving the family or being broken up by sale. The 1876 family house, built by Watters's grandson and now restored as a museum, sits on essentially the same footprint as the original cabin location. The continuity of occupation is the reason so many farm artifacts have survived: tools, household goods, photographs, account books, and the kind of accumulated material culture that disappears when properties change hands. When the family finally deeded the place to the state in 1949, they were preserving not just a homestead but a single family's hundred-and-fifty-year-long material record of how an Appalachian farm actually worked.

The park interprets the homestead in two layers. The 1876 main house, restored as a museum, represents the later nineteenth-century version of the farm, with parlor furniture, kitchen, and tools of that era. A reconstructed log cabin (similar to the original 1796 cabin, which has not survived) and associated farm buildings represent the earlier frontier period. A separate museum building holds local farm artifacts from across the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries - hand tools, harness equipment, kitchen implements, farm machinery. Guided tours run from Memorial Day weekend through Labor Day. The park also offers swimming, picnicking, hiking trails, and horseback riding on the broader acreage outside the historic core. The Watters Smith Farm was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1974.

The park's surprising second life as a mountain-biking destination has developed since the 2000s. More than twelve miles of single-track trail thread the wooded ridges of the larger park acreage, with sections rated from beginner to expert. There are technical rock gardens, fast descents, and enough elevation gain to make the climbs serious work. The park maintains a bike wash and basic maintenance area at the trailhead, and the trails are well-marked and well-mapped. Cyclists come from Morgantown, Pittsburgh, and Clarksburg for the day or the weekend, and the park has become a regular venue for organized rides and small competitive events. The pairing of a quietly maintained nineteenth-century farm and a fast modern mountain-bike network on the same 532 acres is the kind of small unforeseen evolution that has kept a great many state parks relevant into a new century.