West Virginia. Otis K. Rice
Wheeling, Moundsville, Follansbee, Morgantown, and Clarksburg. The nuclei of the congregations often consisted of well-to-do members whose families had historic ties with the
Episcopal Church and its Anglican antecedents. An example was Judge George W. Summers, who provided a little church, Saint John's in the Valley, at his farm at Scary on the Kanawha River. Others owed their existence to some devoted minister, such as Joseph Doddridge, who founded three of the churches in the Northern Panhandle.
The Disciples of Christ. Although the Disciples of Christ had relatively few members in West Virginia before the Civil War, Alexander Campbell, one of its founders, spent most of his adult life in the state. Born in County Antrim, Ireland, Campbell studied at the University of Glasgow. In 1809 he migrated to America, where his father had assumed charge of a church in Pennsylvania. Young Campbell deplored the spirit of intolerance that he found among American churches and tried to promote a more ecumenical approach to religion through the Christian Association of Washington (in Pennsylvania). Believing that the manners and morals of the people needed reform, the Campbells and their followers organized a full-fledged church at Brush Run, Pennsylvania. Campbell's acceptance of congregational government of each church and infant baptism enabled his church to become a member of the Redstone Baptist Association, but the Baptists did not consider Campbell rigid enough in his Calvinism to qualify as a minister.
Campbell continued his battle against sectarianism after his removal to Buffalo Creek, present Bethany. He held that the simple language of the Bible could explain all the basic aspects of Christianity and unite all who accepted its teachings. In a successful publication, the Christian Baptist, founded in 1823, he attacked missions, Sunday schools, and sectarian societies. When in 1826 Baptist associations began to cut off the Campbellites, they, ironically, formed a new denomination, the Disciples of Christ.
In time Campbell made Bethany a center of religious influence in America. In 1816 he founded Buffalo Academy, and in 1840 he established Bethany College, which he nourished with devotion and financial support. He founded a press, from which he issued the Christian Baptist and its successor, the Millenial Harbinger; as well as dozens of religious books and tracts. Campbell himself wrote many of the works he published and translated a new edition of the English Bible. Widely traveled and skilled as a debater of theological issues, Campbell was in many respects the greatest religious leader residing in West Virginia in the early nineteenth century.
Enduring Patterns of Life. The modes of life established in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries set patterns that endured in many parts of West Virginia for well over a century. Religious affiliations in 1990, for instance, show striking similarities to those of 1850 or earlier. Many beliefs, folkways, and speech forms common in the early nineteenth century survived well into the twentieth and may even yet be encountered in parts of the state. The essential rurality of life until comparatively recent times explains the persistence of older patterns. For many areas the pioneer heritage has even yet an unusual vitality.
1 Unidentified Private Account Book, 1783-1785, Monroe County Court Records, Union, W.Va. (Microfilm in West Virginia University Library, Morgantown).
2 Quoted from Henry Ruffner, “The Kanawha Country,” in the Henry Ruffner Papers. Historical Foundation of the Presbyterian and Reformed Churches, Montreat, N.C.
3 Wesley M. Gewehr, The Great Awakening in Virginia, 1740-1790 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1930), 26-27.
4 John B. Finley, Sketches of Western Methodism: Biographical, Historical, and Miscellaneous, Illustrative of Pioneer Life, ed. W.P. Strickland (Cincinnati: Methodist Book Concern, 1855), 250.
5 Francis Asbury, The Journal and Letters of Francis Asbury, ed. Elmer T. Manning, J. Manning Potts, and Jacob S. Payton, 3 vols. (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1958), provides details on Asbury's journeys to West Virginia.
8
Educational and
Cultural Foundations
A Sea of Illiteracy. When West Virginia separated from Virginia in 1863, the Old Dominion had no statewide system of free schools. Illiteracy prevailed throughout the state and was appalling in mountainous sections. Robert Hager, a Boone County representative in the West Virginia constitutional convention of 1861, asserted that he knew men and women in his county who had never even seen a schoolhouse. An agent of the American Tract Society, who visited the hill country around Fairmont in 1845, declared that his experience was “like a translation from sunlight into darkness—from a high civilization into one of ignorance and superstition, with here and there a family of wealth and refinement.”1
The educational climate in West Virginia probably reached its nadir in the two or three generations preceding the Civil War. Available evidence, which is extremely sketchy, suggests that the first generation of pioneers had greater concern for education than did their children and grandchildren. Before the end of the French and Indian War settlers established schools at Shepherdstown, in sparsely inhabited parts of the Greenbrier and South Branch valleys, and even in isolated sections of Pendleton County. Within a few years after settlers crossed the Alleghenies, schools existed in such widely scattered places as the Forks of Cheat, Buzzard's Glory near Pruntytown, West Liberty in the Northern Panhandle, and Cedar Grove on the Kanawha River.
The rising illiteracy stemmed partly from the exigencies of surviving in a wilderness. Because of the arduous and almost unending labor required, pioneers came to place greater value upon knowledge and skills gained in the home, on the farm, and in the forest than upon formal instruction. Book learning appeared to have less immediate usefulness, and in time a popular apathy toward schooling developed. In some parts of West Virginia these attitudes continued until well into the twentieth century.
Subscription Schools. For nearly three quarters of a century after settlement began in West Virginia, the only schools available were of the subscription type. These schools were established by a contract between a schoolmaster and subscribers, or parents who had the desire to provide education for their children and the means to pay tuition. School terms usually lasted about two months, and tuition ranged from two to three dollars per pupil per term. Some teachers were very competent, but others were barely literate and capable of only the lowest order of instruction. Statistics on enrollments of early subscription schools are meager, since few of them kept records. Probably not more than half the children of West Virginia attended these schools.
Convinced, like many other leaders, that education was the cornerstone of the new American republic, Governor Thomas Jefferson in 1779 called upon the legislature to authorize the division of each county into districts known as hundreds and the estabishment of a free school in each hundred. After the Revolutionary War, unfortunately, much of the enthusiasm for free schools abated.
The Literary Fund. The triumph of Jeffersonian democracy in the United States in 1800 excited renewed interest in public schools. During the first decade of the nineteenth century several states provided for instruction of children of indigent families. In 1810 Virginia joined their ranks by creating the Literary Fund. Western leaders resisted efforts of influential persons in the Tidewater and Piedmont to draw off part of the money for a proposed state university, and about $45,000 annually was set aside for the education of poor children.
Administration of the Literary Fund rested with the second auditor, who served as superintendent. The law also required that each county appoint from five to fifteen commissioners, who were charged with responsibility for determining the number of poor children eligible for benefits and given authority to construct buildings and employ teachers. The commissioners ordinarily used their limited funds to pay tuition for poor children at existing subscription schools. In some localities, where the number of paying children was insufficient for a school, the addition of those supported by the Literary Fund made schools possible for the first time.
School attendance remained low in spite of opportunities provided by the Literary Fund. Many parents considered the fund a form of charity and refused its benefits. Some desired to send their