Parkersburg: Oil, the B&O, and the Birth of West Virginia

Parkersburg was platted in eighteen ten and named for a Revolutionary War captain, Alexander Parker, who was granted land here for his service. By the Civil War it had become a critical junction on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, and the Union made it a major troop transfer point and supply depot for the first campaigns into Confederate territory.

Then, almost simultaneously, the oil fields of western Virginia came in. Burning Springs, Volcano, and the surrounding Wood County fields fed a booming local industry. Johnson Camden founded a major oil refining company here in eighteen sixty-six, and it was sold to Standard Oil in eighteen seventy-five.

Parkersburg sits at the Ohio River just across from Belpre, Ohio, and it has always been a crossing-point town, shaped by what moved through rather than what stayed.