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This project is a table of contents for all projects relating to this County of West Virginia. Please feel free to add profiles of anyone who was born, lived or died in this county.
Tucker County was created in 1856 from a part of Randolph County, then part of Virginia. In 1861, as a result of the Wheeling Convention, Tucker County joined the rest of West Virginia in breaking away from Virginia to remain a part of the Union.
In 1863, West Virginia's counties were divided into civil townships, with the intention of encouraging local government. This proved impractical in the heavily rural state, and in 1872 the townships were converted into magisterial districts. Tucker County was initially divided into three townships: Black Fork, Hannahsville, and St. George, which became magisterial districts in 1872. The following year, Hannahsville became Licking District, and in 1876, two new magisterial districts were formed: Clover from part of St. George, and Dry Fork from part of Black Fork. A sixth district, Fairfax, was organized in the 1880s, followed by a seventh, Davis, formed in the 1890s from parts of Dry Fork and Fairfax Districts.
Between 1889 and '93, a dispute known as the Tucker County Seat War took place between the people in the town of Parsons and that of St. George, over the location of the county seat. Although nobody was killed in the "war", the situation came to a climax when a mob of armed men from Parsons marched on St. George and took the county records by force.
Beginning in 1907, the Babcock Lumber Company of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, while operating out of Davis, West Virginia, clear cut the mountain ridges throughout Tucker Country. This clear cutting, with its residual slashings, converted the landscape into a "tinderbox". By 1910, fires burned continuously — in some areas for years on end, from spring until the first snows — leaving little other than thin mineral soil and bare rock. In 1914, with the county virtually denuded of standing trees, the ground burned continually for 6 months. As a result, top soils that once produced huge timbers on the mountainsides — including the largest tree ever harvested in West Virginia, a white oak some 13 feet in diameter just 10 feet from the ground — washed down into the narrow valleys and bottom lands, which had always been too narrow for harvesting productive crops or livestock. Uncontrollable soil erosion and flooding further degraded and depopulated the region. To this day, Tucker County and surrounding regions bear the scars of this remarkable conflagration.
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