MAAAAAAAAAAAAiiiiiLLLLLL...MIRACLE RUN

"A bi-weekly mail runs from Morgantown to Miracle Run post-office, and then by Wadestown post-office (West Warren) to Burton station in Wetzel County" (761 Wiley, History of Monongalia County).

There was also the St. Cloud Post Office in the extreme northwest of the district.  The Wise Post Office was on Dunkard Creek about 3 miles south of West Warren.  And there were post offices at CROSSROADS and JOB.

from The Morgantown Post, 12 NOV 1965

We wrote to the Cornerstone Genealogical Society overtah Waynesburg in Pennsylvania in 2011 and received the newspaper obituaries of some of our Miracle Run people.

Mama Sherry remembers Grandma Pearl driving herself and mama into the town of West Branch, Michigan to call.  Pearl couldn't do it she was crying too hard but she had to know if it was real, what she'd heard through the grapevine.





Running through the northern part of the district was the "Morgantown and Burton Pike" or the Dunkard Valley Turnpike (properly).



The Fairmont Pike ran from West Warren, south through the district to Clay County and on into Marion.



"The old Morris Mill is below West Warren," Wiley writes.  "It passed into the hands of Shriver and Santee, then to Woodruff, who contemplated putting steam to it.  Lewis Fox's mill is on Miracle Run, and the Thomas Mill is near the Job post-office" (761).



Most of the churches in the district seem to have been Methodist Episcopalian...there were some of those in Miracle Run, in St. Cloud, and near West Warren.  And there was the Highland Methodist Episcopalian in the southwestern part of the district.

St. Cloud also had a Baptist church, as did West Warren.

Liming Church belonged to the Disciple or Christian denomination.







There isn't a ton of information on the schools in Wiley’s History as a request for the enumeration and names of school board members, i.e., to the custodian of records of the district, "elicited no response" (762).  Although Wiley does mention "subscription-schools of the early days" and the beginning of the free-school system.

Commissioners in that system included:
S.H. Shriver
Jacob Wiley
J.G. White
John Anderson
J.S. Lemley
Ami Tennant
Levi Stiles
Michael Barr

The Paw Paw school-house was destroyed by fire, thought by some to be arson on the night of December 17th 1875.  School was held in a private house as early as a week after the fire and a new school was erected on the old foundation.







Wiley cites a...         

"Venerable Couple" 

writing,

"There is living in Battelle District, on Miracle Run, 

five miles from Blacksville, perhaps the oldest married 

couple in Monongalia County.  William Minor, who was 

born in 1797, married Margaret Lantz in January, 1818.  

Almost sixty-five years they have been living together 

as husband and wife" (763).





We can find many of the places and family names of which Wiley writes on the map we got from Historic Map Works Residential Genealogy.




Around the year 1870...

In “Mericle” we find our family.  Henry and Clerissa are in their late thirties.
Five of their children are attending school.
Reason is only six years old so he’s too little.
William’s still a toddler.
And (our future great) ELIAS is all of eight months old.

By looking at the map of Miracle Run from an Atlas of Marion and Monongalia Counties 1886, we can find a couple different schools that the children might have been attending.  But we’ll have to do some more history reading to find out if the schools on the 1886 map were NEWER than the schools of 1870.