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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.
Wirt County was created from parts of Jackson and Wood counties on January 19, 1848. The county was named after William Wirt (1772–1834).[4]
The first European pioneer was William Beauchamp (1743–1808), a veteran of the Continental Navy and a Methodist minister. Beauchamp arrived in 1796 with a claim to 1400 acres on the Little Kanawha River. He farmed, built a mill, and laid out the town of Elizabeth, named after his daughter.
Burning Springs was the site of an oil rush in the 1860s. In 1863 the town was burned, along with 100,000 gallons of oil, by Confederate cavalrymen.
On June 20, 1863, at the height of the Civil War, Wirt County was one of fifty Virginia counties admitted to the Union as the state of West Virginia. Later that year, 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. Wirt County was divided into seven districts: Burning Springs, Clay, Elizabeth, Newark, Reedy, Spring Creek, and Tucker. Except for minor adjustments, the seven historic magisterial districts remained largely unchanged for over a century. In the 1980s, they were consolidated into three new districts: Central, Northeast, and Southwest.
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