Jane Lew: A Congressman Named His Town for His Mother

The small Lewis County town of Jane Lew sits along Hackers Creek in north-central West Virginia, on land with a long frontier history. Frontier settlers built a fort and a grist mill along the creek in the decades before the town existed. The town itself was platted in the early nineteenth century, when Lewis Maxwell, a former United States congressman who had represented western Virginia from eighteen twenty-seven to eighteen thirty-three, laid out the lots and gave the settlement a name.

He called it Jane Lew, a contraction of the name of his mother, Jane Lewis. It was a common enough gesture in an era when naming towns for family members was a way to put a personal mark on land you had shaped. The town was incorporated in the early twentieth century.

It has remained small, a few hundred residents clustered along the creek, known today mainly as a quiet community on the route south toward Weston and the highland plateau country of central West Virginia. Its main street is United States Route Nineteen, and Weston, the county seat, lies to the south. Jane Lew High School operated from nineteen twelve until nineteen sixty-six, when it merged into Lewis County High School, and its boys basketball team won a state championship in nineteen twenty-two.