Coal, Timber, and the Railroad That Named the County
Near Wisp, West Virginia
The mountains around you are quiet now, but a century ago they roared with saws, coal cars, and steam whistles. Garrett County itself was carved out of neighboring Allegany County in eighteen seventy two, the very last county created in Maryland, and it was named for John Work Garrett, the president of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. That was no accident.
When the railroad pushed through these high ridges, it turned a remote wilderness into an engine of extraction, hauling out timber and coal to feed the growing cities to the east. Down along the upper Potomac, the little town of Kitzmiller tells the whole boom and bust story. It began around a woolen mill built by Ebenezer Kitzmiller in eighteen fifty three, then exploded when the railroad arrived in the eighteen eighties, first for lumber, then for coal.
At its peak Kitzmiller held a little over one thousand people, with a movie theater, its own bank, groceries, and doctors. Irish, Scottish, and Welsh immigrants swung the axes and dug the mines. When the easy coal and the big timber ran out, the towns emptied.
Today Kitzmiller is home to only about three hundred residents, a small survivor of the mountain industry that built this county.
