Collections : [West Virginia and Regional History Center]

Collection of booklets belonging to Etta Haught Beckley containing plays, poems, and dialogues for school children. Includes booklets for Christmas, Thanksgiving, and other holidays, the end of school, and other themed plays and recitation exercises.

Newspaper clippings, mainly from Doddridge and Harrison county, concerning marriages, deaths, family histories, letters from World War I service men, nurses, and from former residents who had moved, or gone to other states to teach, including a series of letters from L.P. Willis from the Phillippine Islands and Japan. Mr.Willis was employed as a teacher and Head Of the Bureau of Education in Japan, and the Phillipines for twenty years. Also, included in the collection are tax and school tuition receipts, orders,unsigned copy of Thomas Hickman's will, deed and other papers of several members of the Hickman family of Harrison county. A photostat copy of a form letter from the State Medical Society Committee on Examination of the Medical Botany of the State addressed to Dr.P. Davis from Wheeling, 1868.

Collection includes family correspondence of the Bowman, Veach, and Leeper families. Manuscripts include a recounting of the Civil War event known as "Jones' Raid." In another document Nathaniel Cochrane, an ancestor of Thomas Leeper, recounts his capture and imprisonment by indigenous people, along with a biography of Cochrane. Daily life for that time is captured in "Home Life of the Leeper Family." Other typescript histories include "Monongah," Thomas Leeper's diary regarding heavy rains and high waters of 1888, a history of West Monongah High School, and "History of the Leeper Family."

Papers of the Ladwig family. They document the professional and personal lives of medical and teaching professionals in West Virginia in the early twentieth century, includng Dr. Otto Ladwig (1875-1968), his wife Calora Hardway Ladwig (1882-1974), and Margaret and Gertrude Hardway, Calora's sisters. The Ladwigs lived in Harrison and Randolph counties and were active in itinerant logging communities such as Evenwood. There are correspondence, publications, deeds, certificates, and photos of the Ladwig and Hardway families.

Records regarding the history of the White Day Creek region of Marion County, WV. There are also photocopies of primary sources of information supplementary to the White Day Creek book, including: letters and financial ledger of the Watson family (1820-1890); essay titled "Smithtown Local History" (1922); business ledger of George Washington Stevens, a cobbler (1890s); deeds and estate sale documents of William Morris (1854); grist mill business ledger of Sam Smith (1894); financial ledger and "folk wisdom" of Levi Devault (ca. 1875-1900); and the history of the Weaver family, including estate sale information (1854). The history of education in Marion County is documented in the photocopied "1992 Dedication of the Snodgrass One-Room Schoolhouse Museum; October 30, 1992." (Original in Printed Ephemera Collection.) This dedication program also features a reminiscence of Ethel Ferrell (b. 1898), a Marion County school teacher.