Tour of Old Malden

Larry L. Rowe's Walking Tour of Old Malden

Virginia and West Virginia
Boyhood Home of Booker T. Washington and The Great Families Who Enabled Him To Become a Great Statesman, Author and Educator

WV Archives

From 1808 while Thomas Jefferson was President until the Civil War, the salt works in the Kanawha Valley made this region western Virginia's most industrialized and wealthy. Notably it was built on the labor of enslaved African Americans during the Horror of Slavery. King Salt created a major economic power base for new American heavy industries of Coal, Oil, Natural Gas and Chemicals. It also made possible the move of our state capital from Wheeling to Charleston. King Salt is the reason little Booker came here. But it is the remarkable stories of the families of Malden and their principles of fair play which make us proud to live and educate our children here.

BIENVIDOS, BIENVENUE, WILLKOMMEN, SHALOM

Welcome to Old Malden
Center of the Kanawha Salines in Antebellum Western Virginia

Booker T. Washington's African Zion Baptist Church Circa 1872

BOOKER'S CABIN (Sister Amanda in Doorway) Circa 1880's WV Archives

TODAY'S CABIN Cabin Prototype Built in 1998 Behind Zion Church

In 1865, little Booker, at age 9, walked with his family 225 miles from Hales Ford, Virginia, near today's Roanoke, to his freedom home in Malden. Here he worked in the salt works and a coal mine with his stepfather and then he began work as a garden helper for the wealthy Ruffner family which encouraged his early education. It was obvious that this special boy would become a man of substantial intelligence, energy and success. But no one could imagine he would be known at his death in 1915 as the most important leader of any race to come out of the South between the Civil War and World War I. This tribute was paid by his most noted critic, W.E.B. DuBois.

A prototype Cabin was built to match a photograph of his home, just behind the Church where Booker learned to read in Malden while working for Viola Ruffner. He was with her for 1 and ½ years as she taught him the social graces of the day. Booker used her strict example of character building and hard work for his new college in Tuskegee, Alabama, where at age 25 he created the first vocational college and the nation's premier black college. He is buried there.

Up From Slavery by Booker T. Washington is a good fast read today. In print today, it was selected as America's third best nonfiction book of the 20th Century, making little Booker our most noted author and only international figure.

The Norton House

NORTON HOUSE
Circa 1840
Restored 1994

Norton House is the oldest frame house in Malden. During the Civil War, soldiers for the North and the South slept here.

The home was built by Moses Norton and James G. Norton. They were father and son businessmen in Malden. James' daughter Llewellyn married Robert Peel Shrewsbury of the prominent saltmaking family.

Norton House was renovated in 1994 by Cabin Creek Quilts and its director James Thibeault, with federal and state highway grant funds. It has murals painted in 1998 by the artist Remy Cabrera showing the unique history of the home.

Fannie Norton Smith married Booker T. Washington and her connection to the Nortons here is uncertain.

One of its 20th Century residents was Mary Frances Norton. She was a school mate and best friend of the mother of Pearl S. Buck, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature for her book The Good Earth.

Llewellyn Shrewsbury, granddaughter of Robert Peel Shrewsbury, married John Cole, a well known civil and mining engineer who surveyed land throughout the Kanawha Valley and southern West Virginia. He designed a conveyer belt used in local mine operations. Their daughters are Malden's most renowned educators.

Martha Cole was selected the 1980 State Teacher of the Year and she received the prestigious 2002 Celebrate Women Awards from the State Women's Commission. Llewellyn Cole is renowned for her teaching of area leaders including former Governor Gaston Caperton who has attributed his success in public school to Llewellyn Cole. The Cole sisters are local historians and they have a powderhorn used by Daniel Boone, who lived in a cave in Malden while trying to develop a salt business before 1795. He walked to Richmond to represent this area in the Virginia Assembly. As children, the Cole sisters helped dedicate a monument to him located now at Daniel Boone City Park.

The Hale House

HALE HOUSE
Circa 1838
Home of Cabin Creek Quilts

The Malden home of Dr. John P. Hale is now the retail home of Cabin Creek Quilts. Dr. Hale was a physician from Hales Ford, Virginia, who became the area's best known salt industrialist and early coal entrepreneur. He built Charleston's first elegant railroad hotel, Hale House, which burned and was replaced by the Ruffner Hotel.

Dr. Hale helped move the state capital from Wheeling to Charleston. He financed the world's first brick street on Summers Street in Charleston.

In 1871, he became mayor of Charleston, succeeding Henry C. Dickinson, a co-founder of former Kanawha Valley Bank and a Confederate War hero who was part of the prominent Dickinson saltmaking family. Their ancestor was Revolutionary War Colonel John Dickinson, whose 10th generation descendants reside here.

Dr. Hale's TransAllegheny Pioneers is a major history of the Kanawha Valley. It chronicles the 1755 captive journey and escape of his great grandmother, Mary Draper Ingles, later made famous by a best seller, Follow the River. This area was a hunting ground in that century and home to mound builders and ancients centuries before.

Cabin Creek Quilts' Hale House was built in the Ruffner family's 1830s "Saltborough Subdivision" development, now known as Old Malden, during the peak years of the salt industry. Dr. Hale's home is across from "Women's Park" site of the home of Booker T. Washington's beloved sister, Amanda Johnson.

Cabin Creek Quilts' retail outlet is open daily for tours and sales of America's finest handmade quilts. (For tours call ahead 304 925-9499.)

The Putney House

Where America's Heavy Industry Began

THE PUTNEY HOUSE
Circa 1836
Private Law Office

The Putney House is an unspoiled mansion built in 1836 by a physician, Richard E. Putney, who had married Ann Ruffner, David Ruffner's daughter. It is the finest saltmaker home remaining in Old Malden.

Dr. Putney practiced medicine in Malden for over 50 years. He laid out the subdivision we know as Old Malden today, between the Ruffner property at today's Port Amherst and the Dickinson property to the east where the Dickinson farm and Terra Salis are today. He called the subdivision "Saltborough," and developed it on a New England style design with yards in back and the homes set closer to the street. This home has not been renovated and it is today used as the law offices of James Coleman and James Jeter. These men deserve great credit for saving this historic gem.

For America's best quilts made the old fashioned way call CABIN CREEK QUILTS 304-925-9499

The Women's Park

WOMEN'S PARK
1970's

Some 40 years after his barefoot trek to Malden, Booker T. Washington had his beloved sister Amanda Johnson living in a fine 2 story brick house on Malden's main street, located across from today's Cabin Creek Quilts. The quilt store had been the home of John P. Hale after he too had come from Hale's Fort, Virginia in the 1830s. He came here from near little Booker's childhood dirt floor cabin. A beautiful women's park rests on the site of her home, celebrating women linked to Malden's history. The old bricks are from her home.

Amanda Johnson was the best friend of Martha Sullivan Wayne, mother of Minnie Wayne Cooper who lived in the Wayne Cottage for 82 years. As a child, Mrs. Cooper knew Booker T. Washington before he died in 1915. She proudly recounted to your author Malden stories about "my 'Uncle Booker' who always brought me a present when he visited Aunt Amanda." Through Mrs. Cooper's stories this author feels a personal link to this great man and Malden's historic past.

It was here at Amanda Johnson's homeplace that Mrs. Cooper, Mary Price Dickinson Ratrie, a seventh generation Dickinson heir, the Cole sisters, James Thibeault and local historic groups first worked to save Malden's historic sites. They helped create a park at Amanda Johnson's homeplace which was sadly in ramshackle condition. Inspirational James Thibeault came to West Virginia as a Vista worker in 1970 and started Cabin Creek Quilts, America's premier cooperative for authentic handmade quilts. After Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis had a Cabin Creek quilt, the fashion world began using patchwork design in the 1970s.

Kanawha Salines Presbyterian Church

KANAWHA SALINES PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH
Circa 1840

The Old Kanawha Salines Presbyterian Church is a beautiful antebellum church, organized in 1819 by the wealthy Ruffner family, Malden's first salt industrialists. The current building was constructed in 1840 in the Ruffners' "Saltborough" subdivision near the Dickinson property line. It had a balcony used by African Americans. Its first minister became an abolitionist, Dr. Henry Ruffner. Dr. Ruffner was President of Washington College, which was renamed Washington and Lee College, after its most famous president Robert E. Lee. In 1847, Dr. Ruffner published a controversial, pragmatic paper known as "The Ruffner Pamphlet" to advocate for abolition of the Horror of Slavery in America. It is the first publication known to suggest the new name "WEST VIRGINIA."

River Lawn & Wayne Cottage

RIVER LAWN & WAYNE COTTAGE
Circa 1905

MOTHER JONES' DOORS in THE ALMA LEE
1998 Reconstruction of Private Home

The Wayne cottage, now reconstructed, was the home of Minnie Wayne Cooper, a prominent African American civic leader and educator who was a local favorite of Booker T. Washington when she was a young girl. For 82 years, until 1989, Mrs. Cooper lived here, first with her parents and then with her husband "Coop" Cooper and parents.

In 1905 the property was conveyed to her respected parents by the Dickinson family. Her family helped organize the African Zion Baptist Church. Mrs. Cooper's mother was Martha Sullivan Wayne. She was a dignified, happy lady who was a strict and adoring mother. Her signature look was her head scarves and gold coin earrings, which she wore everyday. She and Booker T. Washington's sister were best friends.

Minnie Wayne Cooper fulfilled her parents' dreams. She became a civic leader and educator who helped integrate Kanawha County Schools without incident in 1956. She was the recording secretary for the International Association of University Women at a meeting in Helsinki, Finland. She attended Wilberforce Normal School and Columbia University. Interestingly, she was the second grade teacher of the brother of one of her cottage's current owners. Her friend Governor John D. Rockefeller IV gave her the first West Virginia Washington Carver award for her acclaimed civic leadership for African Americans.

In 1998, the cottage was reconstructed into a 2 story home incorporating its original windows, floors and doors. Named The Alma Lee, P. Joseph Mullins, architect and sculptor for the State Veterans' Memorial, designed and called her "the Grand Dame of the Kanawha River," with her high porch views serenely overlooking the picturesque river area shown above.

Doors from the "Mother Jones Prison" in nearby Pratt were installed here along with other architectural artifacts. Mother Jones' prison was a boardinghouse which was demolished in 1996. She was lodged there in 1913 after a rump Military Court convicted her of murder in the Paint Creek-Cabin Creek Mine War. Her 20 year sentence was overturned.

Cabin Creek Quilts has the secret trap door Mother Jones used to pass letters to journalists from inside a closet under the boardinghouse staircase to create international outrage over the mine war and to have the United States Senate conduct hearings in Charleston about abuses before and during the mine war. The hallway in The Alma Lee has the same design using an 1890s staircase from a resident's Santolla Virginia family farm.

Ferry Bell

FERRY BELL AT OLD DOCK AREA

JAMES RIVER AND KANAWHA TURNPIKE

WELCH-OAKES HOUSE
Circa 1845

A bell on a pole with a metal striker rod sits atop the riverbank near the Welch-Oakes House which was reconstructed by Michael and Linda Jarrett in 2000. In the early 1900s a similar bell was used to call the ferryman from his home across the Kanawha River in Kanawha Estates east of today's Kanawha City I-64 exit, to ferry them to the south side of the River so they could take a local train into Charleston.

Minnie Wayne Cooper taught Latin to her Malden friends and playmates on their ferry and train trip to segregated high schools in Charleston. In 1999, your author constructed the prototype bell about 100 feet east of its original location.

In 1850 the Post Office for "Kanawha Salines" as the area was known here, near the dock for steamboats which would load salt barrels and unload supplies for over a hundred years until the 1920s.

Also nearby in 1850 was a toll booth for the James River and Kanawha Turnpike which was a toll carriage trail along the riverbed through Malden to Charleston, and overland to Guyandotte on the Ohio River near today's Huntington.

In 1898, America's first lock and dam system was completed on the Kanawha River. This remarkable engineering feat opened up the rich Kanawha coalfields for a boom era of King Coal at the turn of the 20th Century. The 1912 Mother Jones' Mine Wars followed.

The locks raised the water level in Malden above the old carriage road. The C & O Railway had made the toll road obsolete with the last spike driven at Hawks Nest in 1873.

In the 1920s the overland area of the old carriage trail made a comeback with automobile travel on national U.S. Route 60, from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean.

The "Midland Trail," as the coast-to-coast automobile route became known in the 1920s, was West Virginia's first official state highway. In 1988 it was named a State Scenic Highway and then became West Virginia's first State Scenic ByWay in 1993.

In 2000, while your author was president of the Midland Trail Scenic Highway Association, the Midland Trail was designated a national scenic byway, and then it was extended as a state scenic byway west generally along old Route 60 from the State Capitol to the Kentucky border. Malden now sits proudly as an historic district at the center of the Midland Trail.

Ruffner Family Cemetery

RUFFNER FAMILY CEMETERY
Private Cemetery

The small Ruffner family cemetery is near today's coal depot west of Malden, near the site of the Ruffners' 1808 deep salt well. General and Viola Ruffner's home was nearby on a riverbank knoll at today's General Drive, where 2 Generals have lived.

At the height of his national leadership, Booker T. Washington placed a rose at Viola Ruffner's grave to express his gratitude for her help to him in Malden. He saw her elderly husband, General Ruffner, suffer a permanent injury in a fight against the Ku Klux Klan here in Malden involving hundreds of men. The General and his abolitionist brother, Henry, are buried here. The "particular Yankee Lady," Viola Ruffner, is buried in Louisville, Kentucky.

FREEDOM SPREADS FROM MALDEN TO SOUTH AFRICA

The stories of young Booker, Miss Viola and General Ruffner, make us proud of our history after the Civil War, when so many Southern States were in turmoil. The Ruffners and others (1) paid wages for hard work based on work produced, without regard to race, (2) emphasized equal public education for all and (3) used integrated worker housing here. It is no accident these principles are the famous 1977 "Sullivan Principles" used by Reverend Leon Sullivan to end modern slavery in South Africa while he was on the General Motors Board of Directors. They enabled African American families here to nurture great educators and world leaders including Booker T. Washington, Reverend Sullivan and West Virginia State College's former Dean, Carter G. Woodson, the Father of Black History.

Your Invitation

Visit Historic

OLD MALDEN

Home of

Booker T. Washington

where

America's Heavy Industry Began

WOMEN OF THE KANAWHA SALINES: Mary Draper Ingles, Viola Ruffner, Teresa Gatewood Cozad, mother of Painter Robert Henri, little Booker's mother Jane Ferguson and his first wife Fannie Norton Smith, and his sister Amanda Johnson and her friend Martha Sullivan Wayne and her daughter Educator Minnie Wayne Cooper, Rachel Tompkins, aunt of President U.S. Grant, Mother Mary Jones, Llewellyn Shrewsbury Cole, Anna Evans Gilmer, Elizabeth Liggins Mosely, resident member of African Zion Baptist Church, State Poet Laureate Louise McNeil Pease, Authors Grace Martin Taylor and Denise Giardina, and residents Margaret Jones, Mary Price Dickinson Ratrie, Llewellyn Cole, Martha Cole and many others.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Former State Senator Larry L. Rowe is a Malden attorney. He is an advocate for children, and a state leader for historic preservation and tourist destination development. His love of West Virginia history began with a Golden Horseshoe Award in the 8th grade at Peterstown High School in Monroe County. He was Phi Beta Kappa at West Virginia University and graduated in the top 10% of his law class. Larry and his family have lived here since 1989.

Thank you for visiting us in Old Malden

Information Sources for Old Malden Walking Tour

• Cohen, Stan, Richard Andre, Kanawha County Images A Bicentennial History, 1788-1988. Charleston: Pictorial -Histories Publishing Company, 1987 (A great book)
• Cole, Martha and Llewellyn Cole, Malden Historians and Shrewsbury Descendants.
• Corbin, Alan David, Life, Work and Rebellion in the Coal Fields. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1981.
• Drennen, Bill, One Kanawha Valley Bank: A History. Charleston, West Virginia 2002.
• Hale, John P., TransAllegheny Pioneers. Edited by Harold J. Dudley, 3rd Edition, Robert Ingles Steele, Radford, Virginia, 1971.
• Mansfield, Stephen, The Darkness Fled: The Liberating Wisdom of Booker T. Washington. Cumberland House: Nashville, 1999.
• Stealey, John E. III, The Antebellum Kanawha Salt Business and Western Markets. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1993.
• Stealey, John E. III, Editor, Kanawhan Prelude to Nineteenth-Century Monopoly in the United States, The Virginia Salt Combinations. Virginia Historical Society, Richmond, 2000.
• Washington, Booker T., Up From Slavery, New York: Bantam Books, 1963. (Great book to read)

Key Malden Dates in History

• 1755 Mary Draper Ingles makes Salt here
• 1795 Daniel Boone leaves us for Kentucky Salt
• 1808 America's First Deep Well Is Drilled Here
• 1815 World Discovery of Natural Gas Is Here
• 1817 Ruffners & King Salt Starts State Coal Industry
• 1817 Malden Cartel Monopolizes Salt Markets
• 1831 "Saltborough" Subdivision creates Town
• 1841 First Industrial Use of Natural Gas here
• 1847 Dr. Henry Ruffner Publishes Abolitionist Paper- First to use the name "WEST VIRGINIA"
• 1852 African American Families form Zion Church
• 1859 First US Oil Well Drilled by Ruffner Drillers
• 1863 African Zion Baptist Church formalized after West Virginia becomes 35th state
• 1865 Booker Walks To Freedom Home after Civil War
• 1865 Painter Robert Henri is born in Ohio to a Jones and Gatewood Girl from Malden
• 1869 Rachel Tompkins' Nephew, Union General Ulysses S. Grant becomes US President
• 1872 African Zion Baptist Church sits proudly on Mainstreet less than 10 years after Civil War 1875 Booker is paid Orator for Election to move State Capital from Wheeling to Charleston
• 1883 Malden Incorporated as Town for Only 2 Years
• 1891 WV State College established on Cabell Lands
• 1895 Statesman Frederick Douglass dies
• 1895 Atlanta Exposition Speech makes Booker T. Washington a National Leader
• 1898 America's First River Lock System Is Completed
• 1901 Up from Slavery acclaimed and author dines later with President Teddy Roosevelt, a first
• 1912 Paint Creek_Cabin Creek Mine Wars, Mother Jones imprisoned at Pratt Boardinghouse
• 1915 Booker T. Washington dies at Tuskegee
• 1956 Minnie Wayne Cooper Helps Integrate Our Schools
• 1970 James Thibeault starts Cabin Creek Quilts
• 1977 Rev. Sullivan uses Malden Equity Principles to help end South African Apartheid in 1990s
• 1980 Malden becomes a National Historic District
• 1991 State Poet Laureate Louise McNeil Pease here publishes Last Book Hill Daughter
• 2000 Booker T. Washington Institute formed
• 2002 Washington and Ruffner Family Reunions here