Charleston, West Virginia: The Founder Was Named George

The man who founded Charleston, West Virginia, was named George. The town is named for his father, Charles Clendenin, and it took some digging to prove it.

A blockhouse at the mouth of the Elk

Virgil A. Lewis tells the start of it in his 1889 History of West Virginia. George Clendenin, the eldest son of Charles, bought the land where Charleston stands in 1788, while he was in Richmond for the convention that ratified the federal Constitution. That fall he moved to the mouth of the Elk River “accompanied by his aged father and brothers and sisters,” and they built the first structure on the site. Charles died inside it about 1790 and was buried nearby.

For a while the place didn’t really have a name. W. S. Laidley’s 1911 county history says people called it “The Town at the Mouth of Elk,” or sometimes the Clendenin Settlement. Then, on December 19, 1794, the Virginia legislature made it a town “by the name of ‘Charles Town.’”

Brother, son, or father?

John P. Hale, a Charleston historian, told the rest in his 1886 book Trans-Allegheny Pioneers. The mail kept getting mixed up between Charleston and Charlestown in Jefferson County, so the town held a public meeting about renaming itself “Kanawha City.” The idea lost, Hale wrote, because it seemed like “sacrilege” to drop the name of the old pioneer who had founded the town and “given it his own name.”

So Hale went looking. He found “that the founder’s name was George, not Charles.” Fans of the old story switched to a new one: George had modestly named the town for his brother Charles, and they quoted Henry Howe’s history of Virginia to back it up. But the family records showed George had no brother Charles. Maybe a son, then? He had no son either. In the end, Hale says, a Clendenin descendant in Mason County, C. C. Miller, told him “the town was named by George Clendenin, the founder, in honor of his father, whose name was Charles.”

Here’s a small surprise if you check Howe yourself. The 1845 edition doesn’t say “brother” at all. It just says Charleston “was named after Charles Clendenin, an early settler, and an owner of the soil forming its site.” Lewis, three years after Hale, names Charles as George’s father, and Henry Gannett’s 1905 government bulletin on place names says the same. Gannett’s thank-you list includes “J. P. Hale” of Charleston, for “material in the shape of county and town lists.”

Charlestown into Charleston

Hale also noticed a puzzle he couldn’t solve. The legislature had written “Charlestown,” and the county “Kenhawa,” but people changed them on their own to Charleston and Kanawha. “How, why or when, no body knows,” he wrote.

You’ll find the name Kanawha missing out on a promotion twice in this state’s history. The town turned down “Kanawha City,” and in 1861 the delegates in Wheeling dropped “Kanawha” as the name for the whole state. That story is in How West Virginia Almost Became the State of Kanawha.

Sources & further reading

• John P. Hale, Trans-Allegheny Pioneers (1886), pp. 289-290. The 1794 act, “Charlestown” and “Kenhawa,” the “Kanawha City” meeting, the brother and son theories, and C. C. Miller’s account of the father.
• Virgil A. Lewis, History of West Virginia (1889), pp. 574-575. George Clendenin’s purchase in 1788, the move with “his aged father,” Charles’s death about 1790, and Charleston “first named in honor of Charles Clendenin.”
• Henry Howe, Historical Collections of Virginia (1845), p. 343. The older line: “named after Charles Clendenin, an early settler.”
• W. S. Laidley, History of Charleston and Kanawha County (1911), p. 161. “The Town at the Mouth of Elk” and the wording of the 1794 act.
• Henry Gannett, The Origin of Certain Place Names in the United States (USGS, 1905), pp. 10, 76. Charles, “father of George,” the founder; Hale in the list of contributors.
• GNIS feature 1558347 (U.S. Geological Survey). The federal record for Charleston, capital of the state. Established 1794.