LOGAN COUNTY, WV (LOOTPRESS) – An official state highway marker commemorating the Logan, Raleigh and Monroe (LR&M) Turnpike—commonly referred to as the Logan Turnpike—will be dedicated on Tuesday, May 17, at 1 PM. The marker is located beside the Trap Hill Volunteer Fire Department building, at the junction of W, Va. 99 and the access road to Fairdale Elementary School in Fairdale.
For additional information about the event, contact Delbert Bailey at 304-934-6338 or by email at tdbailey59@suddenlink.net.
The Logan Turnpike was one of the county’s earliest roads, part of a small network which served to open for European settlement and development the remote, backwoods region Alfred Beckley described as “a perfect wilderness” in 1837. Settlers were few and far between, and negotiable trails even scarcer in Fayette County, Virginia, from which Raleigh County was carved in 1850. The Virginia General Assembly authorized construction of the Logan Turnpike on March 17, 1849.
County historian Jim Wood describes the Logan Turnpike as starting “on the Big Sandy River in Logan County, passed by Logan Court House and connected with the Giles, Fayette and Trace), which ran in Raleigh from Skinned Poplar Gap on the present Wyoming line, via Bolt, Glen Daniel, Trap Hill, and Harper to Beckley.”
The predecessor Farley’s Trace may well be considered the “granddaddy” of Raleigh County highways. The road (“actually a bridle path”) was cut in 1797-1798 by Francis Farley, “noted woodsman and Indian fighter.” The trace “passed northward through Beckley at the Twenty-three Mile Tree, where the Memorial Building… stands on South Kanawha Street, and there turned west.”
During the American Civil War, the Logan Turnpike’s junction with the Giles, Fayette and Kanawha Turnpike at Beckley, provided the contending armies with a route from extreme
southern West Virginia (a Confederate stronghold), extreme southwest Virginia and eastern Kentucky.
The marker was obtained by the Raleigh County Historical Society (RCHS) and funded by a Beckley Area Foundation (BAF) Community Grant. RCHS president and Ward One councilman Tom Sopher praised BAF for its continuing support of Society educational programs, not just its historical marker projects.