This route is one of the great stage routes leading from the Ohio Valley to Washington city, and to all parts of old Virginia.
The White Sulphur, Red Sulphur, Hot, Warm, and Sweet Springs, are in the mountainous parts of Virginia, and on this route. These are all celebrated as watering places, but the White Sulphur spring is the great resort of the fashionable of the Southern States. Let the reader imagine an extensive campground, a mile in circumference, the camps neat cottages, built of brick, or framed, and neatly painted. In the centre of this area are the springs, bath-houses, dining hall, and mansion of the proprietor. The cottages are intended for the accommodation of families, and contain two rooms each. This is by far the most extensive watering place in the Union. Of the effect of such establishments on morals I shall say nothing. The reader will draw his own conclusions, when he understands that the card-table, roulette, wheel of fortune, and dice-box are amongst its principal amusements. Here, not unfrequently, cotton bales, negroes, and even plantations, change owners in a night. The scenery around is highly picturesque and romantic. Declivities and mountains, sprinkled over with evergreens, are scattered in wild confusion. A few miles from White Sulphur springs, you pass the dividing line—the Alleghany ridge, and pass from Western into Middle Virginia.
Chief Towns.—Wheeling is the principal commercial town, and a great thoroughfare, in Western Virginia. It has a large number of stores, and commission warehouses; and contains six or eight thousand inhabitants. It is 92 miles by water, and 55 miles by land, from Pittsburg. It has manufactures of cotton, glass, and earthenware. Boats are built here. The Cumberland or National road crosses the Ohio at this place, over which a bridge is about to be erected. The town is surrounded with bold, precipitous hills, which contain inexhaustible quantities of coal. At extreme low water, steamboats ascend no higher than Wheeling.
Charlestown, Wellsburgh, Parkersburgh, Point Pleasant, Clarksburgh, Abington, Louisburg, and many others, are pleasant and thriving towns.
The climate of Western Virginia is preeminently salubrious. The people, in their manners, have considerable resemblance to those of Western Pennsylvania. There are fewer slaves, less wealth, more industry and equality, than in the "Old Dominion," as Eastern Virginia is sometimes called.
FOOTNOTES:
[8] See "Mitchell's Compendium of the Internal Improvements in the United States," where much valuable information of the rail-roads and canals of the United States is found in a small space.
[9] I have adopted the orthography of the legislature.