The Industrialist and the Mountaineer: The Eastham-Thompson Feud and the Struggle for West Virginia's Timber Frontier

West Virginia and Appalachia

by Ronald L. Lewis

In 1897 a small landholder named Robert Eastham shot and killed timber magnate Frank Thompson in Tucker County, West Virginia, leading to a sensational trial that highlighted a clash between local traditions and modernizing forces. Ronald L. Lewis’s book uses this largely forgotten episode as a window into contests over political, environmental, and legal change in turn-of-the-century Appalachia.
 
The Eastham-Thompson feud pitted a former Confederate against a member of the new business elite who was, as a northern Republican, his cultural and political opposite. For Lewis, their clash was one flashpoint in a larger phenomenon central to US history in the second half of the nineteenth century: the often violent imposition of new commercial and legal regimes over holdout areas stretching from Appalachia to the trans-Missouri West. Taking a ground-level view of these so-called “wars of incorporation,” Lewis’s powerful microhistory shows just how strongly local communities guarded traditional relationships to natural resources. Modernizers sought to convict Eastham of murder, but juries drawn from the traditionalist population refused to comply. Although the resisters won the courtroom battle, the modernizers eventually won the war for control of the state’s timber frontier.
 

312 pages, Paperback

Published March 1, 2017

About the author

Ronald L. Lewis is Stuart and Joyce Robbins chair and professor emeritus of history at West Virginia University.

Reviews

[Connor Hicks · Rating 2 out of 5]

While extremely insightful to someone interested in West Virginia history and the formation of Tucker and Randolph Counties, the actual story line doesn’t go far and is more a recitation of a court docket than a tall tale of the Wild West. Would recommend if trying to add to an internal knowledge of West Virginia trivia, but this definitely drags on.

[Jim Woolwine · Rating 3 out of 5]

The author tries mightily to build a class narrative out of a seemingly ordinary land feud during the late 1800's that ended in gunfire. Doesn't quite come off; two men can't obtain favorable court decisions, get hot-headed, and then a shoot-em-up. Not much more than that.

However, the research is exhausting, the prose coherent, the story-telling of the family history on each side of our duelling duo is interesting, and the setting, a rapidly industrializing America, is well-drawn.

What is most interesting is that in 1954, one of the protagonist's descendants deeded this land which was the focus of the feud to the State of West Virginia with the condition that the State match equal acreage (which it did) resulting in Canaan Valley State Park, a crown-jewel in the West Virginia state park system. Fabulous ending!