Philippi, West Virginia

• 1. Introduction

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  Philippi, West Virginia sits along the Tygart Valley River in Barbour County, and for most of its history it has been a small, quietly industrious American town. But on the morning of the 3rd of June, 1861, it became something else entirely. Two columns of Union soldiers, perhaps 3,000 men in total, arrived just before daylight after marching all night through a heavy rainstorm. They found roughly 800 Confederate recruits still asleep. What happened next would echo through the entire Civil War. The Confederates scrambled out of their bedrolls and ran. Some were still in their nightclothes. The retreat was so panicked, so absolute, that newspapers immediately dubbed it the "Philippi Races." A town of under three thousand people had, in a single morning, hosted what is considered the earliest notable land action of the American Civil War. But how did a remote settlement on a bend in the Tygart Valley River come to carry that distinction? And what kind of place was Philippi before, and after, that morning? The answers begin more than eighty years earlier, with a man named William Anglin and a simple river crossing.

• 2. A Settlement Takes Shape

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  William Anglin arrived on the section of bottomland that would one day become Philippi as early as 1783 or 1784, when the area was still part of western Virginia and counted within Monongalia County. Daniel Booth followed in 1787, and by 1789 a ford existed here that served a road recently surveyed between Beverly and Sandy Creek. The location was practical: a natural crossing point on a river, sitting at the mouth of Anglin's Run, with bottomland flat enough to farm and hills rising steeply on all sides. In the 1790s, Booth ran a commercial ferry at the site, and the town picked up his name in common usage. Booth's Ferry and Anglin's Ford were both in circulation for decades. William Friend Wilson, who married Booth's daughter, built a wool and grain mill on the river in 1818, stitching the community's commercial life tighter to the water that defined it. The first post office in what would later become Barbour County arrived in 1825, established by Henson Lewis Hoff, who had come from Loudoun County and settled just west of the current city limits at a spot called Cherry Hill. For the better part of two decades the settlement was known as Hoffsville. The name would not hold for long.

• 3. A Name With a Complicated Origin

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  In March 1843, Harrison and Randolph Counties were divided into smaller political units, and Barbour County emerged from that carving. The county took its name from Philip P. Barbour, a Virginia lawyer and jurist. When officials chose a name for the new county seat, they intended to honor Barbour's given name while following Latin convention: the feminine of Philip is Philippa. The historian Hu Maxwell recorded what actually happened when he described the founding in 1899. On the 5th of April, 1843, the third day of the first county court, an order was entered that the county seat "be known and called PHILLIPPA" - spelled with an extra "l". Maxwell noted that the form was almost correct by the original intention, but misspellings and a widespread confusion with an ancient city called Philippi gradually warped the name into its current form. St. Paul's Epistle to the Philippians and the ancient Battle of Philippi were likely behind that drift. Philippi was established by charter in 1844. The transition from Booth's Ferry to Philippi was also marked by a physical landmark. In 1852, an Appalachian architect and carpenter named Lemuel Chenoweth built a covered bridge across the river to link a turnpike running between Beverly and Fairmont. That bridge ended Booth's commercial ferry operation and became the town's most recognized structure. It remains so today.

• 4. The Philippi Races

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  Col. George A. Porterfield commanded the roughly 800 Confederate recruits camped in Philippi on the night of the 2nd of June, 1861. They were poorly armed and had no expectation of attack. Before daylight on the 3rd, two Union columns descended on the town, having marched through the night in heavy rain. Col. Benjamin Franklin Kelley led one column, Col. Ebenezer Dumont the other. The Union force struck from the heights of "Battle Hill" to the northwest, pressing down onto the sleeping encampment. The Confederates fired a few shots and then dissolved. The retreat was frantic and total, soldiers running south in whatever they happened to be wearing. The battle was effectively bloodless and brief, yet its consequences reached far beyond Philippi. Major General George B. McClellan, then a relatively obscure young officer, saw his reputation transformed by the Union victory. He was soon placed in command of all Union armies. In western Virginia, the battle intensified opposition to the ordinance of secession that the rest of Virginia had passed. A few days after the fight, the Wheeling Convention nullified that ordinance and named Francis H. Pierpont governor. That sequence of events eventually produced the separate statehood of West Virginia. Today the town reenacts the battle every June during an event called the Blue and Gray Reunion.

• 5. Railroads, Floods, and Education

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  Philippi was incorporated by act of the West Virginia Legislature on the 1st of February, 1871. The first railroad, the Grafton and Greenbrier, a narrow-gauge line, arrived on the 25th of January, 1884. Three years later it extended to Belington, and in 1891 it was acquired by the B&O and converted to standard gauge. Rail activity peaked in the 1920s, when as many as six passenger trains, along with mail and freight, passed through daily. The automobile eroded that traffic steadily, and the final passenger train made its last stop in Philippi in 1956. In 1901, Broaddus College relocated to Battle Hill, the same ridge from which Union forces had launched their surprise attack forty years earlier. In 1932 it merged with Alderson Academy to become Alderson-Broaddus College, a Baptist institution that renamed itself Alderson Broaddus University in 2013. On the 31st of July, 2023, the West Virginia Higher Education Policy Commission revoked the university's ability to confer degrees, citing its rapidly deteriorating financial condition and ordering it to stop admitting students. The board of trustees voted to close the institution that same day. Flooding has been a persistent threat throughout Philippi's history, given how much of the town sits on low bottomland near the river. The worst flood on record struck in November 1985, submerging parts of the town and damaging the Barbour County Historical Museum's unusual collection, which includes embalmed remains known as the Philippi Mummies, preserved in 1888 by local physician Graham Hamrick.

• 6. Notable Figures From a Small Town

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  Ann Maria Reeves Jarvis, born in 1832, lived in Philippi for several years both before and after her 1850 marriage. Along with her daughter Anna Marie Jarvis, born in 1864, she is credited with founding Mother's Day. Ted Cassidy, born in 1932, grew up in Philippi and graduated from Philippi High School around 1950 before going on to play Lurch and "Thing" on the 1960s television show The Addams Family. William Waddell, born in 1907 and a member of the Buffalo Soldiers, became the first African-American veterinarian to practice in West Virginia when he arrived in Philippi around 1950. Jim Fridley, born in 1924, played outfield for the Cleveland Indians, Baltimore Orioles, and Cincinnati Reds between 1952 and 1958 after starring in football at the University of West Virginia. The Peary brothers also trace their childhoods to Philippi: Gerald, born in 1944, lived there from 1948 to 1952 and went on to become a film critic and documentarian; his younger brother Danny, born in 1949, wrote the influential Cult Movies series and biographies of baseball figures including Ralph Kiner and Roger Maris. The Philippi Covered Bridge that Lemuel Chenoweth built in 1852 holds a distinction of its own: it is the only twin-barreled covered bridge on a federal highway in the United States, sitting today at the junction of U.S. Routes 250 and 119.