Barboursville Senior Center

History

This early history of Barboursville was prepared by J.W. Miller for the West Virginia Agricultural Extension Service in 1925. It offers a snapshot of early life in the Village from a man who had rare insight into early Barboursville and its people.

Barboursville became the county seat of Cabell County in 1813. The county was taken from Kanawha County in 1809. It included all of Wayne, Lincoln, and a large part of Logan, Boone, and Putnam counties. Its area was 1750 square miles, with a population in 1810 of 2717, including 221 slaves and 25 Indians not taxed. Or about 1 1/2 persons to the square mile. We now have one sixth of this area, and more than 300 people to the square mile. Immigration began to come in about 1780 and land was easy to get, was marked out and claimed, and the state would sell the settler as much as one thousand acres or more, at the small price of $1.60 per 100 acres. Hence, everybody tried to see how much land they could get.