Salem, West Virginia: The Other Salem

Salem, West Virginia was established in seventeen ninety by a group of Seventh Day Baptist settlers from Shrewsbury, New Jersey, who settled in what is now Harrison County. They built a church, a mill, and a school almost simultaneously. In eighteen eighty-eight their community founded Salem Academy, later Salem University, one of the oldest institutions of higher learning in West Virginia.

The town sits along Salem Fork, and the Northwestern Turnpike corridor later became one of the main immigrant roads into the Ohio River country. The Seventh Day Baptist congregation that founded Salem still has a presence here, making it one of the longest-continuously-serving religious communities in the state. Salem University today enrolls a few hundred students and remains the dominant institutional presence in a town of roughly fifteen hundred.