Pearl Buck's Birthplace and Averell's Raid

The small town of Hillsboro in Pocahontas County holds two stories that rarely get told together. The first is military. In December of eighteen sixty-three, Union General William Averell launched a daring winter cavalry raid deep into Confederate Virginia, striking the railroad depot at Salem. On that winter march through bitter cold, his column moved through this part of Pocahontas County. The nearby Battle of Droop Mountain, fought just weeks earlier in November, had been one of the last significant Confederate resistance efforts in what was now West Virginia.

The second story is literary. Pearl Buck was born in Hillsboro in eighteen ninety-two, the daughter of Presbyterian missionaries who took her to China as an infant. She spent most of her life writing about rural China, and in nineteen thirty-eight she became the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. West Virginia barely had time to claim her before she was gone.