The decision to build a Virginia state lunatic asylum at Weston was made in the 1850s, in the period when American states were embracing the European-influenced theory that mental illness could be treated humanely through structured institutional care. The Kirkbride Plan - named for Philadelphia physician Thomas Story Kirkbride - dictated a specific architecture: long, narrow, multi-story wings extending from a central administration building, every room with a window, broad lawns and gardens surrounding the structure. Weston was chosen for the location partly because the surrounding hills could supply sandstone and partly because of the political clout of local officials. Construction began in 1858 with quarries opened in the immediate area. The Civil War interrupted the work; Union troops occupied the half-built shell during 1861; construction resumed afterward; the first patients were admitted to the completed sections in 1864. The clock tower and final wings were not finished until 1881.

At its capacity peak in the 1950s, the Weston State Hospital - as it was renamed in 1913 to reduce stigma - housed about 2,600 patients. The institution had been designed for 250. The overcrowding was severe and the conditions deteriorated steadily through the mid-twentieth century. Patients slept in hallways; staffing was inadequate; treatments included lobotomies, insulin shock therapy, and electroshock. Investigative reporting in the 1950s revealed conditions that prompted state intervention; reform came slowly. By the 1980s, deinstitutionalization had reduced the population dramatically. The hospital finally closed in 1994. The building was sold to a private owner in 2007, who renamed it the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum - reviving the original mid-nineteenth-century name - and opened it to the public as a museum and tour destination. Day tours, history tours, and overnight ghost-hunting tours run year-round, and the site has become one of the most-visited paranormal destinations in the eastern United States.

Weston has more to offer than the great building on the hill. Downtown has a substantial collection of late nineteenth-century commercial architecture along Main Avenue, much of it being progressively restored. The Museum of American Glass in West Virginia - housed in the former JCPenney's at 230 Main - preserves the history of the Lewis County glass industry. The Weston Colored School, a brick one-room schoolhouse from 1882, served the African-American community until desegregation. Just north of town, Jackson's Mill - the boyhood home of Stonewall Jackson and the country's first state 4-H camp - sits on the West Fork River. To the south, Stonewall Jackson Lake State Park and Stonewall Resort offer a luxury hotel and an Arnold Palmer-designed golf course around an Army Corps reservoir.

Weston sits at the crossing of US-33 (east-west) and US-19 (north-south), with Interstate 79 a few miles east of town at Exit 99. The town is about thirty minutes south of Clarksburg, twenty minutes west of Buckhannon, forty minutes north of Sutton, and forty minutes east of Glenville. The Mid-Ohio Valley Regional Airport at Parkersburg lies fifty miles to the northwest; the Clarksburg airport (KCKB) is closer. Lodging in Weston includes the Quality Inn on US-33 East and the Jackson Lodge at Jackson's Mill, where rooms range from motel-style to dormitory-style cottage housing. The town is small enough to walk across in twenty minutes - the asylum on its hill, the river through downtown, the museum on Main Avenue all within easy reach of one another.

Whatever else a visitor to Weston might do here, the asylum holds the imagination. Standing on Main Avenue and looking up the hill at that long sandstone facade is to face an unusually pure example of a nineteenth-century institution preserved at full scale. The intent of the building - the assumption that the mentally ill could be cured by being placed in a beautiful, ordered structure - is legible in every detail of the architecture. The failures of the institution are equally legible. So is the ongoing question of what to do with such a building once its original purpose is gone. Weston has settled on a mixture of memorialization, paranormal tourism, and architectural appreciation that keeps the building maintained and the story circulating. There is no consensus on whether the result is dignified or exploitative, but the building stands; the tours run; the people who passed through it across thirteen decades are at least, in some imperfect way, being remembered.