The Ghost Town of THURMOND, WV - A Good Town Gone Bad

the

ghost

town

of Thurmond West Virginia a railroad

town

established in the late 19th century and prospered as the steam engines of the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad continued to arrive. It never had a large population, but the city's reputation grew over the years for both. And to make matters worse, the town of Thurmond was named after William Dabney Thurmond, who first moved to the area in 1844 and led a band of partisans in support of the Confederacy during the American Civil War. After the war, he was hired in 1873 for surveying work probably by the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad.

His payment was 73 acres of land along the newly completed railroad that wound through the valley along the new William River. Thurman didn't do much with the land he immediately built a house but it wasn't until 1883 when a freight station was built here and then Thurman became a stop on the CNO railroad in 1888 a post office was established and a year later the CNO He built a bridge to cross the new river. The bridge is not the same bridge we see today. The original bridge was damaged beyond repair in the city's great flood of 1908 and the current one was built around 1915.

The construction of the original bridge over the river at Thurmond in 1889 turned the city into a junction which increased the number of trains passing through. they passed Here, in a single day, Thurmond was growing in importance as the city began to expand. The Thurman Hotel was built downtown and a passenger and freight depot was built at the railroad crossing, both in 1891. Like the bridge that stands today, the railroad depot at the crossing is not the original depot that was built. built, a large fire devastated the city in 1899, burning the railroad depot and several other downtown buildings, including the Thurmond Hotel.

This was not enough to slow Thurmond's growth, however, in fact it was the rebuilding from that fire that the town saw its biggest boom. Downtown Thurman saw large new buildings emerge and instead of being made of flammable materials, they were primarily made of stone and brick. Behind me is the downtown Thurman district called Commercial Row. There were several buildings all in a row here, but the end of this one right here, the end of the building actually represents the original end from around 1900 of the Thurman town site, so the town actually ended here, without However, the city grew over the years and, in fact, expanded.

Now there are several buildings besides the ones we are in. Here on the commercial road only three survive today. They were all built between 1900 and 1920, the first of which I believe was in 1902. This first building here at the southeast end of Commercial Row is known as the Human Cox Building in 1904, Dr. J. Ward Mankin purchased this lot for four thousand dollars in 1904. Dr. Menken and his wife, who was a pharmacist, opened a pharmacy and office on the first floor of this building. I guess the upper floors were probably private residents or at least rooms that were rented, however, Humanity and his wife were surgeons and doctors for four different mining companies in the area, they would all come to town if they had any kind of problem and also They were surgeons for the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad, so if there was ever a problem.

There was a problem on the line or on one of their trains and that train was passing, they would stop here and unload whoever needed help and take them to Dr. Mankin or his wife. The Goodman Kincaid Building was built in 1906. It was a dry

good

s warehouse. The building and its upper floors were used for offices. The first floor housed several stores throughout its history and was a Thurmond haunt during the city's final years, as it was the home of Mrs. McClure's restaurant until the 1940s. Thurman National Bank . It is one of two banks that the town of Thurman and beyond would have once had.

It would have been a wooden structure. Thurmond Hotel. Thurmond Hotel was a high-end hotel. It was made of wood and built in 1902. Thurman National Bank operated out of the lobby. of the hotel until 1917, when this building was built to house the bank. The façade of the building was rebuilt in 1923 and that is what you see today. The Thurman Hotel was rebuilt in 1902 after the Great Fire. This new hotel had a movie theater where Western movies were favorites, 400 electric lights and steam heating, and according to local legend, the hotel was built so close to the railroad that guests could lean out the window and hit the trains. as they passed or spit them out in 1904 the new railway station was built which we see still standing and in use, the depot building which operated 24 hours a day served as a station and signal tower and the first floor could also store luggage with a ticket office, waiting rooms, a bathroom and even a lunch and news desk.

Due to the serene river and the towering mountains that surrounded it, the town of Thurman had taken on a second purpose of becoming a leisure destination. In the 1900s and 1910s there was a church and there were even schools, although high school students had to travel out of town by train every day to a high school somewhere else Thurman was truly civilized. Captain Thurman, now aging, strongly opposed alcohol and gambling and created rules prohibiting participation in them within the city limits in an effort to keep Thurman a decent city. This created demand. looking for a place where people could go where they could be the best way to say indecent in steps this enterprising guy called thomas mikel who opened a great hotel just across the

thurmond

bridge called the dun glen hotel and it rivaled the

thurmond

hotel this one hotel had completed 100 rooms, the ballrooms featured jazz and swing bands and all the drinking and gambling a Thurman type could handle with an unhealthy dose of prostitution thrown into high passions at the Dunn Glenn Hotel.

Murders became common and deaths from overindulgence led the owners to set up a morgue in the basement of the hotel. The long-

gone

hotel still holds the record for hosting the world's longest poker game, lasting 14 years. It would have lasted longer, but the hotel burned down, which interrupted the poker game even though the hotel tied. Much more business for Thurman Boy, this hotel dragged down the city and tarnished Thurmond's reputation. In fact, a CNO conductor wrote a poem about the town, although his description seems to refer specifically to the Dun Glen Hotel he has heard of. the california gold rush back in '49, but Thurman in New River will beat it every time there are people here from all over, colored and white, some mother's son bites the dust almost every night on payday , they come to Thurmond with a big wad of cash.

The players get their money and sneak back into the hills, although they are close to returning, unfortunately, and encounter a thug. We find them on the railroad tracks or in Thurmond's jug, where blackjack is handy and the price of living is low at Thurmond in New River. along c and o, where men are often missing after the drinking fight and the crime committed on the river and the trains that pass in the night, I really feel sorry for Captain Thurman, all things considered, who wanted to do what he thought he would keep his city standing. only to see that reputation destroyed by the shady hotel across the river, Captain Thurman died in 1910 and his family sold the town site five years later;

However, the town and the railroad's presence only continued to grow, the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad was the lifeblood of Thurmond, kept it alive and gave the town a purpose, and Thurman had become one of the most important arteries along the way. along rural areas of the main line. In 1910 alone, 75,000 passengers passed through Thurman along the coast and that same year Thurman set the company record. with top revenues of almost $5 million then or $150 million today and handling about 4.3 million tons of freight today, there are four railroads here in Thurmond, there is one that runs into the valley and the town and then it splits into a siding right there near the coal tower and then there are two tracks right here, in fact, trains over two miles long, where two that were over two miles long passed, in They actually stop here and wait for the others to pass, so those are those two lines.

They are owned by CSX, but Amtrak also stops by here a couple days a week and Amtrak actually stops here at this station. There is no ticket office, but you can go up or down and I imagine that attracts quite a bit of hikers. in fact i'm a little tempted to do it later this year, this line over here is a branch line owned by rnj, once every two days an empty train goes up to a coal mine and hauls out a bunch of coal that came through here this morning and then this fourth line here that I'm standing on is down, in fact the rails are just falling apart down there, so I'm standing here not caring, it's four lines at Thurman's. high there were 18 different lines running through this city, it was the only place along a 73 mile stretch where trains could stop and refuel.

The doctor. Mankin and his wife were the only real surgeons during this stretch in case anyone was injured on the line and it was decided to turn Thurman into a repair stop where engines and equipment could be repaired. A large roundhouse was built in 1905 as a repair shop and service center for cno line locomotives and was significantly expanded in 1921. The building remained preserved. until relatively recently, when it burned down in 1993. I would have loved to explore its remains for this video and, fortunately, somehow we can, it was explored and documented in these photos after its abandonment, a personnel office and the office of the foreman with files. crates taken out and scattered around the room the engine workshop with an old boiler still present the tool hut inside the engine workshop and having been built on uneven ground along the slope of the river bank, we can see in a from the photographs a support beam that supported the workshop above we are walking right now in what would have been the Thurman train depot, there are two lines immediately here, but spread throughout this area there would have been several more lines separating from the main line and this would have been a work area in In fact, there would have been a huge engine warehouse to my left to the right of the frame and this is one of the places where the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad would have put aside their locomotives or any other machinery that needed work and repairs before it could be returned.

Back to service and that was actually one of the main functions of the city of Thurmond. These concrete foundations below, behind me, were actually the foundations of the water towers that can be seen in an old photograph from across the river. two tall water towers side by side, one of these massive water towers was capable of holding up to one hundred thousand gallons of water and another built in 1927 could hold 210,000 gallons. These water towers were not intended to supply the city's residents. but instead they were for the steam engines below if they were for the residents of the city they would be much further up the hill now a train is coming I have to take that photo this coal tower was built by fairbanks and morse of chicago in 1922 to the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad would have brought in coal, the coal hoppers would come into this track, they would stop dumping the coal into this chute and it would be collected at the bottom, crushed and put on a conveyor belt. and then the buckets would lift it through there to a raised staging area and then they could make out the slope of the roof here when it's ready and when the cars are ready to pick it up they would dump it down the sides and into another hopper to be transported oh, It's cold here, I'm not going down there, it's a steep drop, I want to see what's left under the receiver, oh, it's very cold there, we can really just see the hoists, these would collect the cold from the bottom down and take it to the storage area. reserve in the tower above this is one of the conveyor belts that is not exactly a belt but it is a coal transport that is dropped here, wait there is a drop down menu below where it is crushed.

Hey, this is still working fine. That's as far as I'm going. However, I saw another YouTube video where an explorer went to the bottom. It's worth seeing if you want. to see what's down there, I'll link it below oh, we've got some multi-piton fans here, that would be the carbon shoots up there, look at all these plates, there's a ton of these here, more than a ton of these, I'm I'm sure for those of you wondering, these are the plates, they would be placed on top of the railroad ties and spikes would be driven into them andThey would hold the rail down.

This piece here is the perfect cross section to see how this would look. You have to make the point stuck into it to hold the rail down, there's no way around it. Thurman really was as big a railroad town as it is in 1920, the population was almost 300 and in 1930 the population was approaching 500 people and about 40 percent of them. people working for the thurman railroad saw a sharp decline just after the census was taken in 1930 the cd hotel across the river the dun glen hotel burned down in 1930 and thurman's first national bank failed in 1931. the The community continued for a few more decades in slow decline as the railroad needed its boilers repaired, but in the 1950s the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad transitioned completely to diesel engines, rendering much of the works on it obsolete.

Thurman, the town was no longer a destination and the Thurmond Hotel now called the Lafayette burned down in 1963. The town was never completely abandoned, however, the population dwindled to dozens in the 1970s and 1980s and by 2000 had fallen to less than of 10 people at the time of filming. Five people are reported to live here in Chesapeake. and the ohio railroad eventually became what it is today csx and csx trains still pass the Thurmond ruins frequently right at the time we were there to film this video which was a single full day, eight trains All the CSX freight trains passed by us, some of them exceeding two miles in length.

According to a park ranger, Amtrak also stops here a couple of times a week, although there is no ticket agent, this stop is certainly popular with campers who come to visit the park behind the railroad yard and there are about two dozens of houses on commercial row up the hillside for Thurmond residents now almost completely abandoned let's explore what remains of these houses this house is the Charles Well house built in 1900 it was built by William Thurman himself it has one and a half stories and It hasn't changed much since it was built. Named after Charles Wells, who came to Thurmond with his wife Dorothy in the 1920s to play with the Dunglend Hotel dance band, it was in pretty

good

shape 20 years ago, as we can see. in this surveyor's photograph, but it has deteriorated significantly since then, the porch has collapsed and the wood siding is falling off behind the house there is an old shed that was open, so we took a quick look, let's see, wait, maybe not, that is bolted down and doesn't open in front of Charles Wells' house.

There was another shed, this one resting on stilts on uneven ground. On the ground, this structure was open but seemed terribly unstable, so I didn't enter beyond reaching the chamber inside and standing at the door. This is May Begosky's house, unfortunately I couldn't find anything about who she was. The house appears to be structurally sound. sounds, but the elements and vegetation are taking their toll, the side door was open, so we entered with caution and went down to a basement. Yes, the basement of this building is simply a coal heater. The United States Radiator Corporation, Detroit, Michigan, I see it branch off into all the different rooms, this one may not have been abandoned long ago, so as soon as people would have entered the front door, they would They would have found a staircase going up to the right, a bathroom in the front with a bathtub and to the left. probably a living room or dining room with a nice fireplace, the kitchen has been ripped out and gutted, let's take a quick look upstairs, skin care classes, check out this skin care classes workbook, two exercise books, one, there are people up here learning to be beauty stylists with baby shoes and old belt, that's old, there's just been a little landing right here before you enter the room on the right or the left , these would have been bedrooms, I imagine they might have had a small table or something, there's an extra crawlspace there, I can't get to it, well, Harold Smith's house seemed well preserved, but it was completely boarded up.

The Wedzel Young House, built in Sirk in 1900 by William Thurman, is also not known much here, but the structure is in better condition than most. completely bricked up but I was able to peek the camera through some of the cracks. I know this is coming more from the point of view of American nostalgia, but I'm thinking about what it must have been like to live here and you Constantly hear the old steam whistles down there, the locomotives coming and going and the cold, passenger trains that They pass by here several times a day, all against the backdrop of the sound of the river below, it must have been such a wonderful life it must have been.

I know, of course, the reality is that you're going to get tuberculosis, everyone breathes cold, uh , that's where your lungs go, people get shot in the city all the time, it's not really the good peaceful life we ​​might think about looking back at Homer and Charles Ashley's house. It was built at the end of the game, actually the last house in Thurmond in 1930. It was built for a teller at the bank. A man named Joe Stone. Joe was the brother-in-law. law of the bank's largest shareholder and it was ended shortly before the bank went bankrupt this is a cold shot this was a big coal town so coal probably wasn't that hard to get and it certainly wasn't expensive you would open this chute and dump the coal in They would go down to the basement and there they would put it in the boiler and heat your house all winter.

The chimney has collapsed. You see the sunlight coming in. Shattered window frames on the ground. Access to the attic. There's a radiator up there. I'm not putting my weight on that hot water tank. Homer Nicely was born in 1922 and recently died in 2019. I can't find any solid connection to him and the house, however, I can assume that he lived here and perhaps even was born here. Sydney Ward House was built by William Thurmond around 1900 again. Unfortunately I found almost nothing about this house. This is James Humphrey's house. The date of construction is unknown, but it was before 1920.

Not much is known about it, but the basement was open. and inside there was an oven. Thurman Union Church was built in 1927 and was used during the city's heyday by Methodist Baptists and Presbyterians. Nothing of importance remains of the Dun Glenn Hotel. A National Park Service facility was built over the remains and supposedly incorporates some of the hotel's original foundation, if you visit Thurman be warned, many of the buildings are unstable, plus this is a historic site that deserves care and respect. The park service that began restoring the city in 2003 continues efforts to restore it. and keep the park, buildings and historic elements here and hope this

ghost

town lasts for future generations to come see and explore.

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