Greenmont: Then & Now

Greenmont’s story starts long before the neighborhood had the street grid, houses, businesses, and name that residents know today. The land around Deckers Creek and the routes that would later connect Greenmont with Morgantown were part of the region’s earliest settlement landscape.

1774: a fort in the Greenmont area

The City of Morgantown’s own history identifies Fort Kern as one of several small frontier forts built in the area during the 1770s. It places Fort Kern in what is now the Greenmont area and dates it to 1774. The forts were part of a network of places of refuge constructed during a period when settlement in the upper Monongahela Valley remained dangerous and contested.

That date gives Greenmont a remarkable connection to the earliest documented chapters of Morgantown-area settlement. The Greenmont of porches, sidewalks, neighborhood businesses, and tightly spaced houses came much later, but the ground beneath it was already part of a lived landscape nearly a decade before Morgan’s Town received its Virginia charter in 1785.

From rural land to a recognizable place

For generations after the frontier period, the area changed gradually. Farms and larger tracts of land gave way to roads, property divisions, gathering places, and eventually building lots. The historic-district nomination traces that transformation and helps connect individual streets and properties to the broader growth of Morgantown and the Deckers Creek corridor.

Greenmont’s later identity did not appear all at once. It emerged from layers: settlement, transportation routes, land ownership, neighborhood institutions, workplaces, homes, and the daily movement of people between this area and the growing town nearby.

Why this chapter matters

It is easy to begin Greenmont’s story with the houses that survive today or with the moment the community became an incorporated town in 1899. Starting earlier changes the perspective. Greenmont occupies ground that has been part of the Morgantown story since the region’s frontier era, giving the neighborhood a historical depth that predates many of the civic boundaries that later defined it.

As the association’s archive grows, this chapter can also become a home for maps, archaeological and property research, photographs of surviving landmarks, and resident knowledge that helps connect the earliest record to the streets people recognize today.

For a short period at the turn of the twentieth century, Greenmont was not merely a neighborhood beside Morgantown. It was an incorporated West Virginia town with its own elected municipal government.

The 1899 incorporation vote

The Greenmont Historic District National Register nomination records a community vote on incorporation held February 18, 1899. Forty-two votes were cast in favor and seven against. The county court certified the result on February 20, establishing the legal foundation for the new town.

That vote is one of the clearest windows we have into Greenmont’s early civic identity. Incorporation meant residents were choosing to organize municipal affairs locally rather than simply remaining an unincorporated settlement on Morgantown’s edge.

Greenmont elects its own government

Town officers were elected in March 1899. J. A. Powell was elected mayor, while W. E. Kerns served as recorder. The town council included Lee Gidley, John Smith, Frank Selby, Pierce Hess, and Judd Zinn.

Those names turn a line in a historic nomination into something much more tangible: Greenmont residents had ballots, offices to fill, a mayor, a recorder, and council members charged with governing a municipality of their own. This was a functioning civic community, not simply a place name on the outskirts of another town.

What did the town look like?

The incorporated period came at a time when the area was rapidly becoming more urban. Building lots, new homes, transportation connections, employment, neighborhood businesses, and institutions were reshaping the community. Greenmont’s municipal government existed inside that larger transition from semi-rural land to a compact working neighborhood.

The association’s history project will continue looking for minutes, ordinances, election records, tax records, maps, newspaper notices, and family materials that can tell us more about what the town government actually did during its brief life. The National Register nomination gives us the essential framework; local archives and resident contributions may eventually fill in the day-to-day story.

A civic identity that outlasted the charter

Greenmont’s time as an independent town lasted only until 1901, but the fact that residents incorporated and elected their own government is central to understanding the neighborhood’s identity. Greenmont has a long tradition of people organizing around the place they call home.

That history also gives new meaning to the work of today’s Greenmont Neighborhood Association. The organization is not a continuation of the 1899 town government, but both chapters reflect the same basic idea: residents taking responsibility for their community, preserving its identity, and making sure Greenmont has a voice in the larger city around it.

Greenmont’s period as an independent municipality was brief. In 1901, the West Virginia Legislature reorganized Morgantown into a larger city and brought several neighboring municipal communities into the new arrangement.

A larger City of Morgantown

The 1901 act creating the municipal corporation of the City of Morgantown specifically annulled the charters of the existing Town of Morgantown, South Morgantown, Greenmont, and Seneca. In legal terms, Greenmont stopped being its own incorporated town and became part of a larger Morgantown.

That change reflected what was happening physically around the city. Population, housing, transportation, commerce, industry, and institutions were expanding beyond older municipal boundaries. Places that had developed as distinct communities were increasingly connected to one another through streets, employment, utilities, and everyday life.

The boundary changed; the place remained

Municipal consolidation did not erase Greenmont. The name persisted. The street pattern and houses continued to develop. Families still identified with the neighborhood. Churches, schools, stores, workplaces, gathering places, and familiar routes kept creating a sense of place that did not depend on Greenmont having its own charter.

This distinction matters when telling the neighborhood’s history. Greenmont did not simply “appear” as a Morgantown neighborhood after annexation. A community with an existing identity and recent experience as an incorporated town became part of the expanding city.

Connected to downtown, still distinctly Greenmont

Over time, routes through Greenmont increasingly tied the neighborhood to downtown Morgantown and to employment centers along the Deckers Creek corridor. That geographic relationship is still visible today. Brockway Avenue carries traffic through Greenmont toward the city center, one reason the association has begun exploring the phrase Gateway to Morgantown as a modern expression of the neighborhood’s location and identity.

The phrase is new; the connection is not. Greenmont’s story has long involved being both distinctly itself and closely connected to the larger city.

Why 1901 remains important

The end of the town charter marks a legal transition, not an ending. It begins the next chapter: Greenmont as a Morgantown neighborhood whose residents would continue to build businesses, raise families, work across the city, participate in local government, and advocate for the community within a larger municipal system.

Greenmont’s most visible historic character was shaped during the decades when Morgantown was growing rapidly and working families needed homes close to jobs, transportation, shops, schools, and downtown.

A neighborhood connected to work

The National Register documentation describes Greenmont as a working neighborhood whose residents were tied to construction trades, transportation, mills, glass and other industries, mining, stonework, neighborhood commerce, and the expanding service economy of Morgantown. The story is not one of a single employer or trade. It is the story of generations of people whose labor helped build and operate the city around them.

Greenmont’s location made that possible. The neighborhood sat between downtown and employment areas along the Deckers Creek corridor. Streets and later transit connections made it practical for residents to live in Greenmont while working in many parts of the growing city.

Streetcars, storefronts, and daily movement

The streetcar era strengthened Greenmont’s connection with downtown and with industrial areas toward Sabraton. Transportation was more than an engineering story: it affected where people could work, where they shopped, and how neighborhood businesses developed. A walkable street pattern and close-set homes helped create the compact community character that remains recognizable today.

Local stores, taverns, food businesses, service shops, and gathering places became part of the neighborhood’s everyday social infrastructure. Businesses changed over the decades, but the tradition of having familiar local places within the neighborhood remains an important part of Greenmont’s identity.

Craft, masonry, and the built landscape

Skilled trades left a physical record across Greenmont and Morgantown. Stonework, retaining walls, foundations, porches, commercial buildings, and modest homes all tell part of the story of people who worked with their hands and passed skills through families and communities.

Many communities within one neighborhood

Greenmont’s history also reflects migration and diversity. The historic record includes immigrant families and a significant Black community, as well as residents whose roots reached back through generations in West Virginia. Italian heritage, skilled stoneworkers, industrial workers, small-business owners, and the history of the Second Ward school and White Avenue community all belong in a complete Greenmont story.

That diversity should not be reduced to a footnote. The National Register documentation recognizes social history as part of what makes Greenmont historically significant. As resident contributions and archival research grow, the association intends to make those stories more visible and more specific - with names, photographs, family histories, businesses, schools, and firsthand memories wherever reliable sources allow.

The people behind the historic district

Historic designation can make a neighborhood sound like a collection of buildings. Greenmont’s significance is much more human. Houses mattered because families lived in them. Streets mattered because people walked them to work, school, shops, worship, and one another’s homes. The neighborhood’s enduring character comes from that relationship between the built environment and the people who continually made it a community.

On February 2, 2005, the Greenmont Historic District was listed in the National Register of Historic Places. The designation formally recognized a neighborhood whose historical importance is visible not only in individual buildings, but in its street pattern, development history, institutions, commerce, and social life.

What the historic district covers

The City of Morgantown describes the district as roughly bounded by Arlington, Front, Conn, White Avenue, Posten Avenue, Kingwood Street, and Decker Avenue. Within that area is a remarkably layered record of how Greenmont changed from earlier landholdings into an incorporated town and then into a dense Morgantown neighborhood.

More than architecture

The nomination is valuable because it does not treat Greenmont simply as a collection of attractive old houses. It documents the neighborhood through themes that include settlement, community planning and development, commerce, transportation, education, social history, work, and the experiences of the people who lived there.

That broader approach fits Greenmont. The neighborhood’s significance lies in the relationship between modest homes, local businesses, streets, institutions, workplaces, transportation routes, and the many communities that shared the same small geographic area.

A 205-page record - and a starting point

The National Register nomination is extensive, with property descriptions, maps, photographs, architectural information, historical narrative, and documentation assembled to establish the district’s significance. It is one of the strongest anchor sources available for the association’s own history project.

But an official nomination can never contain everything a neighborhood remembers. It was written for a particular preservation purpose at a particular moment. Residents know stories, people, businesses, nicknames, family connections, and everyday experiences that may not appear in the formal record at all.

Preservation as a living practice

Historic recognition does not mean freezing Greenmont in time or pretending that every period of its history was simple. Preservation is most useful when it helps a community understand change: what survives, what was lost, who was included in the record, whose stories still need to be recovered, and how the neighborhood can continue evolving without losing the character that makes it recognizable.

That is why the Greenmont Neighborhood Association is pairing archival sources with reader contributions. Photographs, documents, corrections, oral histories, and family memories can be reviewed alongside official records so this website becomes a growing neighborhood archive rather than a static summary written once and forgotten.

Why the designation matters today

The 2005 listing gives Greenmont a documented historical foundation and national recognition. The association’s goal is to make that record accessible to ordinary neighbors - not by making everyone search through a long nomination PDF, but by turning verified research into readable chapters that remain connected to their original sources.