Parkersburg, West Virginia: Newport Until the Parkers Won

Parkersburg, West Virginia, was called Newport until 1809. It took Alexander Parker’s name after his heirs won a fight over the land, years after he died.

A tomahawk claim

The land story starts before the town did. Virgil A. Lewis’s 1889 state history says that in 1773 a Pennsylvanian named Robert Thornton made a claim to 400 acres where Parkersburg now stands. Lewis calls it “a settlement right,” and also “a tomahawk entry.” Virginia’s land commissioners confirmed it to Thornton in 1783.

Thornton didn’t keep it. In December 1783 the land was surveyed for Alexander Parker, of Greene County, Pennsylvania, “assignee of Robert Thornton,” which means Thornton had passed his claim to Parker. The state issued Parker’s patents on July 3, 1787. Henry Gannett, who gathered place-name origins for the U.S. Geological Survey in 1905, keeps it short: Parkersburg is “named for Alexander Parker, of Pennsylvania.”

The Point, then Newport

By 1800 there was a little settlement where the Little Kanawha River runs into the Ohio. Lewis says it was called “The Point,” and it was a half-dozen log cabins. One of the families living there was John Stokely’s. Stokely got his own patent on December 8, 1800, and laid out a town called Newport. James Morton Callahan’s 1923 history adds that people also called the spot Stokelyville, though “The Point” was the usual name.

Meanwhile Parker had died, about 1800 according to Lewis, and his land went to his daughter Mary, who married William Robinson Jr. of Allegheny City, Pennsylvania. Lewis notes the title “was as usual disputed,” and Stokely was one of the people on the other side.

The heirs win

That’s where the name changed hands along with the land. Lewis says Newport kept its name until 1809, when “the above-mentioned heirs of Parker gained the land from Stokely.” The Parker heirs held on to about 700 acres. In December 1810, Lewis writes, the town was laid out and named Parkersburg. Callahan says an 1810 act of the legislature set up Parkersburg “adjoining and including the town of Newport.” So Newport didn’t disappear. It got folded into the town that carried the name of the man who’d held the patent.

You might notice that Parker never saw his name on the town. If Lewis’s dates are right, he’d been dead about ten years when the town was named for him.

If you look closely at the 1902 government map above, a place labeled Newport sits just across the Little Kanawha from Parkersburg. Lewis puts Stokely’s Newport “on the Parkersburg side,” and none of our sources says whether the Newport on the map has anything to do with it.

Sources & further reading

• Virgil A. Lewis, History of West Virginia (1889), pp. 587-588. Thornton’s “tomahawk entry” of 1773; the survey for Alexander Parker in 1783 and his patents of 1787; Parker’s death about 1800 and his daughter Mary; the disputed title, Stokely’s Newport until 1809, the 700 acres, and the naming of Parkersburg in December 1810.
• James Morton Callahan, History of West Virginia, Old and New, vol. 1 (1923), pp. 109, 158. “The Point” or Stokelyville, Newport until 1809, and the 1810 act establishing Parkersburg “adjoining and including the town of Newport.”
• Henry Gannett, The Origin of Certain Place Names in the United States (USGS, 1905), p. 238. “Named for Alexander Parker, of Pennsylvania.”
• GNIS feature 1544587 (U.S. Geological Survey). The federal record and map coordinates for Parkersburg.