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Mineral County

From its verdant low valleys to the towering backbone of the Allegheny Front, 3,000 feet above the North Branch of the Potomac River, Mineral County in West Virginia lies a stone’s throw from Maryland and just a three-hour drive from Washington. Home of Potomac State College and named for its vast mineral resources, Mineral County was a railroad and coal center at the beginning of the 1900s.

Mapped Points

• Keyser

  Keyser, once called New Creek, received an economic boost with the arrival of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad in 1852, and was renamed for B&O official William Keyser. It is the county seat of Mineral County and the home of Potomac State College.
  

  
  Turntable and roundhouse for B&O Railroad at Keyser

• Jennings Randolph Lake

  Jennings Randolph Lake was created through the damming of the North Branch. The dam is one of the largest rock-filled, rolled-earth dams east of the Mississippi.

• Fort Ashby

  Fort Ashby was built on John Sellers’s farm within the present hamlet of Fort Ashby, Mineral County, in the fall of 1755, during the French and Indian War.

• Dolls Gap

  Dolls Gap (or Devil’s Saddle) is a distinctive notch or gap in Saddle Mountain. Nancy Hanks, the mother of Abraham Lincoln, is believed to have been born in the adjoining valley, just southeast of Dolls Gap.
  

• Piedmont

  Originally in Hampshire County, Piedmont’s history is closely intertwined with the development of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad. Scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. grew up in Piedmont and wrote about his hometown in Colored People: A Memoir.

• North Branch

  The North Branch of the Potomac River is one of two branches of the Potomac and usually thought of as the river’s main stem.