Watters Smith State Park: A Frontier Farm Preserved in Time

In seventeen ninety-six, a man named Watters Smith arrived in Harrison County, West Virginia, from Trenton, New Jersey, with his wife Elizabeth Davisson Smith and a determination to farm the hill country of the upper Little Kanawha watershed. He built a home, cleared fields, raised a family, and never left. Generations of the Smith family worked the same land, keeping the farm intact through the Civil War, the timber boom, and the coal era.

Later, a descendant named Burr Smith willed the family farm to the state of West Virginia, with instructions that it be preserved as a memorial to his ancestor. It became Watters Smith Memorial State Park, a living history site where the original farm buildings have been preserved or reconstructed: a log cabin, smokehouse, corn crib, hog pen, blacksmith shop, and barn. The eighteen seventy-six Smith family farmhouse serves as a museum.

It is one of the few places in the Mountain State where you can walk a working pioneer homestead exactly where one stood more than two hundred years ago.