Map of Piedmont town, West Virginia

Piedmont is a town in Mineral County, West Virginia, United States. It is part of the Cumberland, MD–WV metropolitan statistical area. The population was 716 at the 2020 census. Piedmont was chartered in 1856 and the town is the subject of Colored People: A Memoir by Piedmont native Henry Louis Gates Jr.

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History

The Town of Piedmont is situated in the Allegheny Front mountain range along the North Branch of the Potomac River. A century prior to the chartering of Piedmont, the area was opened for European settlement with the creation of Hampshire County in 1754 by the colonial government in Virginia. The region was the scene of hostile interactions between European settlers and pro-French Native Americans during the French and Indian War. Owing to its location and natural resources, the Piedmont area attracted German, Scotch-Irish, Swiss, English, and Italian immigrants, making the region more diverse than the primarily English-American Hampshire County. These cultural differences within the county, as well as growing population in the years leading up to the Civil War would later contribute to the formation of a new county.

The village of Piedmont was settled by people seeking to extract coal from the Allegheny Front mountain range which extends for several miles to the south of the town. Its strategic location at the intersection of George’s Creek Valley, an industrial center in neighboring Maryland, made Piedmont a desirable location for a depot on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad as it pushed west on its route to Wheeling and the Ohio River. The original main line of the B&O railroad reached the site of Piedmont on July 21, 1851. Two years later in 1853, the railroad reached the Ohio River at Wheeling, connecting Baltimore, Maryland with a direct route leading to the rapidly-growing Northwest Territory states. The line through Piedmont remains a segment of the B&O system, now part of CSX Transportation.

With the arrival of the B&O and the building of a roundhouse and rail yard, the Town of Piedmont was chartered in 1856. During the American Civil War (1861–1865), the town of Piedmont was frequently raided by the McNeill’s Rangers in an effort by the Confederates to disrupt B&O train service. Despite the interruption of the war, the region continued to develop new industrial and commercial institutions, leading to the creation of Mineral County in 1866 (separated from Hampshire County). Along with neighboring Grant County, these two new counties were the first created in the state of West Virginia which itself was separated from Virginia in 1863. In 1888, William Luke established the West Virginia Paper Company (now Verso Luke Mill) on 50 acres (20 ha) of Maryland land known as West Piedmont (now Luke, Maryland, adjacent to the larger town of Westernport, Maryland), fueling further development of the region.

Notable residents of Piedmont have included U.S. Senator Henry Gassaway Davis who worked as a storekeeper and railroad agent before opening the region’s largest coal mines on the “Big Vein” on the Allegheny Front. Leslie Thrasher, a noted illustrator whose work was featured on the covers of Liberty magazine and the Saturday Evening Post was born in Piedmont on September 15, 1889. Jazz musician and composer Don Redman was born in Piedmont on July 29, 1900. Henry Louis Gates, a professor of African-American history at Harvard University, was raised in Piedmont, an experience he described in his 1994 book Colored People. Steve Whiteman, lead singer for the glam/rock band Kix was raised in Piedmont and graduated from Piedmont High School.

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Geography

As its name suggests, Piedmont is located at the base of a mountain, in this instance the foot of the Allegheny Front, the eastern edge of the Allegheny Mountains or Appalachian Plateau, on the south (West Virginia) side of the North Branch of the Potomac River.

Piedmont is located at 39°28′49″N 79°2′53″W / 39.48028°N 79.04806°W / 39.48028; -79.04806 (39.480232, -79.048086). According to the United States Census Bureau, the town has a total area of 0.38 square miles (0.98 km), all land.

See also