Gassaway, West Virginia

The small Braxton County town of Gassaway carries the name of one of the most powerful men in West Virginia's Gilded Age. Henry Gassaway Davis was a U.S. Senator from West Virginia from eighteen seventy-one to eighteen eighty-three, and he had an ambitious project: a railroad linking the coalfields of Elkins to the Kanawha River at Charleston. He called it the Coal and Coke Railway. In nineteen oh four, Davis platted a new station town along the route on the Elk River and named it for himself. The town was incorporated the following year.

The Gassaway Depot, built to serve that railroad, is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Davis was also the father-in-law of Stephen B. Elkins, the senator for whom the city of Elkins was named, making the two men a kind of twin dynasty written into the map of central West Virginia.