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.