Page-Vawter House: Gothic Revival in the Gorge Country

In the New River Gorge country of Fayette County, West Virginia, the Page-Vawter House stands as an unexpected piece of Victorian architectural ambition. Built around eighteen ninety in the community of Ansted, the house is a two-story Gothic Revival structure notable for its steep gabled roofline, decorative bargeboards, and wooden tracery details that would not have looked out of place in a prosperous Ohio Valley town.

Ansted sits at a high point above the New River, and in the eighteen nineties it was a center for the coal and timber trade filtering out of the Gorge. The house was built by company carpenters for the family of William Nelson Page, president of the Gauley Mountain Coal Company, making it one of the more architecturally distinctive residences in the region.

The house is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and remains standing today, a reminder that even in industrial Appalachian communities, the ambitions of the Gilded Age found architectural expression.