Burnsville: A Sawmill Town Remade by a Dam

Burnsville in Braxton County started as a timber operation in the eighteen thirties, when entrepreneurs recognized that the Little Kanawha River offered a natural highway for floating logs downstream. After the Civil War, a sawmill operator named Captain John Burns established a mill here and gave the town the name it carries today. The West Virginia and Pittsburgh Railroad arrived in eighteen ninety-two, and by nineteen twenty the population had climbed to over a thousand.

Then the timber ran out. The mill relocated to Wirt County, and Burnsville shrank back toward a quieter life. The federal government transformed the landscape again decades later.

The Flood Control Act of nineteen thirty-eight authorized a dam on the Little Kanawha, and construction began in the summer of nineteen seventy-two. Burnsville Dam was completed in September of nineteen seventy-six, creating a lake of nearly a thousand acres with thirty miles of shoreline. The lake now manages flooding across a drainage area of one hundred sixty-five square miles and draws anglers, campers, and boaters to a corner of West Virginia that had once run almost entirely on timber.