A Founder’s Day Exhibit opening October 17 at the Morgantown History Museum tells stories we haven’t heard before.
It was October 17, 1785, when the Virginia Assembly granted Zackquill Morgan the charter for “Morgan’s Town” in western Virginia. This Friday, October 17, the Morgantown History Museum celebrates our fair city’s 240th birthday with a reception unveiling a new Founder’s Day exhibit.
The new exhibit covers history that we don’t often hear about—the steamboat era, for example. “Steamboats have this mystique: gingerbread trim, smokestacks, Mark Twain,” says Morgantown History Museum Manager Jason Burns.
There’s the story of Colonel Ashbel Fairchild, a wainwright, or carriage maker—and also a prankster. In the 1860s, the arrival of a steamboat in town was a big deal. “People would leave church and they’d run out of schools and their homes to see a steamboat,” Burns says. “There are stories of people running out into the rain to see the steamboats come in.” So one day, Fairchild blew the steam whistle at his carriage shop by the river in the middle of the day to mimic a steamboat. “Practically the entire population of Morgantown was on the wharf, waiting for the steamboat that never arrived,” Burns laughs. “It was such a prank that they wrote it down in the history books.”
A 1902 incident sounds like a scene in a slapstick silent film. After the lock and dam was built, steamboats from rival companies would sometimes race to get to the lock first. “They could only go through one at a time, but whoever got there first would get all of the passengers at the next stop,” Burns says. “This particular time, heading north toward Pittsburgh, two steamboats raced, and they were neck and neck when they got to the lock—and they got stuck at the opening of the lock, so neither of them could get through.”
You can see a photograph of the boats jammed together in the lock and learn more about our town’s illustrious, and sometimes not so illustrious, history in the new exhibit. It opens with a reception on Founder’s Day, October 17, from 6 to 9 p.m., and it will remain on display into January.
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