West Alexander
Pennsylvania
West Alexander sits at the Pennsylvania-West Virginia border, and for a few decades in the early eighteen hundreds it was a busy stop on the National Road. Robert Humphrey founded it in seventeen ninety-two and named it for his wife, Martha Alexander. When the National Road came through in eighteen twenty, the town exploded.
At the peak of the stagecoach era, as many as twenty-five coaches a day rattled through, stopping to change horses, feed passengers, and collect travelers heading west. The roadside economy built around those coaches sustained taverns, blacksmiths, and inns for miles around. When the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad bypassed the town in favor of a different route, the coaches slowed and eventually stopped.
West Alexander returned to being a quiet crossroads community, which is more or less what it remains today.
