Blackwater Canyon Heritage Loop

Directions to Thomas

From Parsons, head east on WV-72 to US-219, then north to Thomas. The 18-mile drive takes approximately 25 minutes through forested mountain terrain.

Coketon Civil Rights Heritage

Just outside of Thomas, on the unassuming Douglas Road, you’ll arrive at the Buxton & Landstreet Gallery. Once the heart of Tucker County’s industrial operations, these brick buildings also commemorate a powerful story of resistance. 

In 1892, more than 60 years before Brown v. Board of Education, a young African American schoolteacher named Carrie Williams won a landmark civil rights case that established equal educational rights in West Virginia. When the Tucker County Board of Education shortened the school year for Black students from eight months to five months while keeping the full term for white students, Williams was advised by J.R. Clifford, West Virginia’s first Black attorney, to continue teaching for the full eight months and then demand her full salary.

Williams taught at the Coketon Colored School, serving the children of Black coal miners who had come to work in the Davis Coal and Coke Company’s operations. When the school board refused to pay her for the additional three months, Clifford filed suit. In 1898, the West Virginia Supreme Court ruled in Williams’ favor, with Justice Marmaduke Dent writing that “discrimination against people because of color alone as to privileges, immunities and equal protection of the law is unconstitutional.” This represented a rare civil rights victory before the turn of the century and established equal school terms and pay for Black teachers across West Virginia.

Coketon Industrial Heritage

Continue on Douglas Road towards Rail Falls Road to explore what remains of an industrial legacy that fueled America’s rise in the 20th century.

Coketon was the headquarters of a vast industrial empire built by Henry Gassaway Davis, one of West Virginia’s wealthiest and most powerful men. Beginning in the 1880s, the Davis Coal and Coke Company extracted coal from the surrounding mountains and converted it to coke in hundreds of beehive ovens, dome-shaped brick structures that burned coal at high temperatures to produce the carbon-rich fuel essential for steelmaking. At its peak, over 600 coke ovens operated here, employing some 1,500 workers and their families from around the world.

Continue walking down the road to catch a glimpse of several of the North Fork of the Blackwater River’s stunning waterfalls and red-stained rocks, a byproduct of the region’s industrial past.

Optional Afternoon Activity: Fairfax Stone State Park

If time permits, head 6 miles north of Thomas via US-219 and Fairfax Road.

This four-acre state park protects one of America’s oldest survey markers, the Fairfax Stone, placed in 1746 to mark the western boundary of land granted to Lord Fairfax by King Charles II of England. The survey was conducted by Colonel Peter Jefferson (Thomas Jefferson’s father) and Thomas Lewis. Two years later, in 1748, a young George Washington, then just 16 years old, helped resurvey the area.

The stone marks the headwaters of the North Branch Potomac River and was used to determine the boundary between West Virginia and Maryland, a dispute not finally resolved until the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1910. The current six-ton stone with a bronze plaque was dedicated in 1957, replacing earlier stones that had been lost to weathering and vandalism.