Ravenswood, West Virginia: A Map Typo That Stuck

Ravenswood, West Virginia, was supposed to be Ravensworth. A map engraver spelled it wrong, and the mistake was never fixed.

George Washington’s riverbank

The land has a famous first owner. Virgil A. Lewis, writing in 1889, says George Washington and his assistant, Colonel William Crawford, surveyed it in the summer of 1770, and Washington got the patent the next year, for 1,450 acres. Lewis places the town on the Ohio River, 35 miles below Parkersburg. After his death it went to six of his grand-nieces. Two of them, Henrietta, the wife of Henry Fitzhugh, and Lucy, who later married Arthur M. Payne, ended up with the part where the town stands.

Before the heirs showed up, other people had moved in. Lewis says Lawrence Lane and William Bailey settled there in 1810 and cleared about 40 acres. An agent for the Washington heirs had the land surveyed and divided in 1812, and the squatters were put off it. James Morton Callahan’s 1923 history has Lane on the site too, on land Crawford surveyed for Washington, with squatters “later ejected by the agents of Washington’s heirs.”

Ravensworth, as intended

In 1836 the two couples moved onto the land and laid out a town. Lewis puts the naming plainly: “The name which it now bears is the result of an error.” Mrs. Payne named the town Ravensworth, “in honor of relatives of that name in England.” Then “the engravers of the first map of Virginia upon which it appears spelled it Ravenswood, and the mistake has never been corrected.”

Callahan’s version fits in a set of parentheses: “Ravensworth (accidently changed to Ravenswood by the map engraver).” Henry Gannett’s 1905 list for the U.S. Geological Survey agrees, and so does the federal place-names database today, which describes the name as “misspelled by the engravers in making the first maps and never corrected.”

What the sources leave out

The federal record gives 1852 as the year Ravenswood was established, not 1836, and none of these sources explains the gap. Nobody in them names the engraver or says which map it was, either. You also won’t find a word about anyone trying to change the spelling back. So if you look at the 1908 survey map above, you’re reading a mistake that’s been on the map for well over a century, and Mrs. Payne’s relatives in England never got their name on it.

Sources & further reading

• Virgil A. Lewis, History of West Virginia (1889), pp. 659-660. Washington’s survey of 1770, the grand-nieces, the squatters, the 1836 layout, and the naming: “the result of an error,” Ravensworth “in honor of relatives of that name in England.”
• James Morton Callahan, History of West Virginia, Old and New, vol. 1 (1923), p. 110. The squatters on Washington’s land, and “Ravensworth (accidently changed to Ravenswood by the map engraver),” laid out in 1836.
• Henry Gannett, The Origin of Certain Place Names in the United States (USGS, 1905), p. 259. Named for the Ravensworths, “a family of England,” and misspelled by the engravers.
• GNIS feature 1555445 (U.S. Geological Survey). The federal record: established 1852, with the same account of the misspelling.