This Month In W.Va. History: A turning point for the town of Thurmond

It is a common tale throughout West Virginia: an industry booms, a community flourishes, the industry leaves the area and the community left behind struggles.

In fact, you don’t have to drive far in West Virginia’s coalfields to see this story playing out in real life. The ghost town of Thurmond is an example of what happens when residents leave a community as well.

Spurred by the completion of the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway mainline, as well as the growth of the coal and timber industries in the New River Gorge area, Thurmond became one of the top rail towns on the C&O line. At its peak, it had two hotels, two banks, restaurants, clothing stores, a jewelry store, movie theater, several dry-good stores and many business offices.

Since alcohol was banned in Thurmond, Dunglen Hotel owner Thomas McKell expanded the limits of his town on the other side of the river, Glen Jean, to include his hotel, which offered a stark contrast to the Thurmond Hotel. The Dunglen threw lavish parties, had a nonstop bar, a casino, as well as stores and a bank. It was essentially little Vegas on the New River. 

Thurmond was home to more than 400 people, but would often have many hundreds more in town due to the railway, the parties and the hotels in general. In July 1930, with the Great Depression just beginning to show how damaging it would be, an arson at the infamous Dunglen all but signaled the area’s demise.

Eight years after a fire burnt through part of Thurmond, an arson destroyed the Dunglen. Little Vegas was now gone. The 300-bed structure where anything went was no more, and not too long after that, Thurmond’s crown as one of the top rail towns would disappear as well.

While the Dunglen’s demise was not the only contributing factor to Thurmond’s demise -- shoot, it wasn’t even the biggest -- the fact that the town lost the one place where coal barons and anyone else with money could go to have fun did not help matters. It was, however, one of the first dominoes to fall in Thurmond’s fate.

Shortly after the Dunglen was destroyed, the depression began to erode the town’s business district. Soon, most business in town was gone or burnt to the ground and the C&O’s switch from steam to diesel -- Thurmond specialized in steam locomotives -- as well as the shift from trains to automobiles for travel all but drove the final nail in Thurmond’s coffin.

The town’s population would drop by more than 350 over the next four decades and fall all the way to five -- yes, five people -- during the 2010 Census. Thurmond, still recognized as a town, is the least populated municipality in the state. Without doing research, I imagine it is one of the smallest municipalities in the country, if not the smallest.

Knowing what it used to be, it’s not hard to walk around Thurmond with its handful of remaining structures and imagine what it used to be, a bustling rail town that has since been forgotten by the industry that put it on the map.

Nowadays, Thurmond gets visitors driven by the New River Gorge’s rising popularity. It has some trails and a river access point that is used by local rafting companies. Occasionally, trains roll through the town, reminders of what it once was.