Beckley: Named for the First Librarian of Congress

Beckley, West Virginia carries the name of a man most people have never heard of, John Beckley, the first Librarian of Congress and the first Clerk of the House of Representatives.

General Alfred Beckley, John's son, founded the town on April fourth, eighteen thirty-eight, laying out streets on thirty acres of his own land at the twenty-third mile marker of the old Bluestone Road. The founding was largely ceremonial at first, the town existed on paper but not yet in practice. It gained real momentum in eighteen fifty when the new Raleigh County was formed and Beckley was named the county seat.

The real transformation came from coal. Commercial mining of Raleigh County's bituminous seams began in the eighteen nineties, and a rail branch of the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway reached town in nineteen oh one. When the Winding Gulf coalfield opened in nineteen oh seven, Beckley boomed into the regional hub it remains today, a gateway to Southern West Virginia's coalfields and, now, to the New River Gorge National Park.