Nutter Fort: One of the Strongest Stockades South of Fort Pitt

In the spring of seventeen seventy-two, brothers including Thomas, Matthew, and Christopher Nutter arrived in what is now Harrison County, West Virginia, and built a log stockade on the east bank of Elk Creek. Thomas Nutter had received a land grant of fourteen hundred acres along the creek, and he and his brothers, along with neighbors Obadiah and Daniel Davisson, put up a fort that contemporaries said was one of the strongest south of Fort Pitt. The timing was no accident: the frontier was dangerous territory, and settlements along the Monongalia wilderness faced raids that could come without warning.

In seventeen seventy-nine, refugees fleeing attacks on nearby Hacker's Creek settlements poured into Nutter's Fort for protection. Thomas Nutter served as a captain in the Revolutionary Army and spent his later years farming the same land he had defended. The small town that grew up around the old stockade site was incorporated in nineteen twenty-three and still carries the family name, one of the more literal place-names in a region full of them.