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George Washington Trail In West Virginia
SITE IX:
GEORGE WASHINGTON'S LANDS
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America's best prepared teenager, George Washington began his career at sixteen, surveying the western lands of his native Virginia. Many farms still follow the boundaries Washington set while surveying the Lost River and Capon Valley area from 1748-52. In Wayne County, he named a creek Twelve Pole because it was twelve poles of rods wide.
He acquired thirty thousand acres in "West Augusta" for his service in the French and Indian War. Twenty years later he patented nearly five thousand acres that embraced the sites of today's towns of St. Albans and Dunbar. His 1770 tour of the Kanawha and Ohio River valleys focused on exploring much of the land he owned in these areas. In 1775, he patented one hundred and twenty-five acres on the Kanawha River upstream from Malden which contained a bituminous spring (oil and gas) making George a pioneer in West Virginia's mining industry a century later.
In 1784 George Washington patented a tract of 587 acres in Round Bottom just south of Moundsville after purchasing patents from French and Indian War veterans. Today, part of the tract is the Washington Lands Elementary School on SR2.
Artifacts are housed in the Washington Western Lands Museum at the Great Bend of the Ohio near Ravenswood.
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