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.