Weston, West Virginia

The city you are passing through, Weston, was founded in eighteen seventeen as the county seat of Lewis County, carved from Harrison County the year before. It changed names twice, from Preston to Fleshersville, before settling on Weston in eighteen nineteen. The town was formally incorporated in eighteen forty-six.

But Weston's most remarkable landmark has nothing to do with government. Construction began in eighteen fifty-eight on what became the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum, a sprawling Gothic and Tudor Revival structure built on the principles of physician Thomas Kirkbride, who believed that sunlight, fresh air, and orderly surroundings could heal the mind. Workers quarried and cut every stone by hand. When the building was finally finished in eighteen eighty-one, after twenty-three years of construction, it stood as one of the largest hand-cut stone masonry buildings in the United States. Designed for two hundred fifty patients, it held over two thousand three hundred by the nineteen fifties. The asylum closed in nineteen ninety-four and today draws visitors from across the country.