William Archer: 35 books

Originating almost a quarter of a century prior to the Civil War, Mercer County, West Virginia was namedfor General Hugh Mercer, a Revolutionary War hero. The county has been a crossroads for many events, including the Civil War and the establishment of an industrial economy after the war ended. When...

The remarkable story of Bluefield represents a unique combination of geology, geography, and opportunity. Once just the confluence of a handful of family farms in southern West Virginia, Bluefield was put on the map, literally,in the 1880s, when the Norfolk & Western Railway came to town. The company�s...

For sheer havoc, there is no gale like a good northwester, when it roars in, through the long winter evenings, driving the spindrift before it between the rocky walls of the fjord. It churns the water to a froth of rushing wave crests, while the boats along the beach are flung in somersaults up to the...

McDowell County was established by an act of the Virginia General Assembly in 1858, two years before the start of the American Civil War. In 1863, the county was one of the 55 that separated from the Old Dominion to form West Virginia, thus earning the nickname �the Free State.� Long before this,...

Almost every American city enjoys a magical time in history when all the tumblers of fate, luck, hard work, and good fortune seem to fall into place, and the city enjoys a golden era. The 1940s were just such a time in the city of Bluefield. At the dawn of the decade, the United States was on the verge...

After the Civil War, Capt. Isaiah Welch, a Doddridge County, West Virginia, native, took a job as a surveyor with Maj. Jed Hotchkiss of Staunton, Virginia. Hotchkiss had served as Gen. Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson's mapmaker and charted Jackson's famous Valley Campaign, and Welch had been an officer of...

Bland County is one of the smallest counties of the Old Dominion, yet it is filled with spectacular, unspoiled, scenic vistas that rival any rural area on the North American continent. Bland County is a tree-covered paradise with no incorporated towns, and about one-third of the county�s 369 square...