In July 1965, The Nature Conservancy (TNC) purchased 61.3 acres on the Greenbrier and Pocahontas border for $5,000 from Willam and Opal Moore of Hillsboro. On the property was a labyrinth of 300-million-year-old formations of Droop sandstone, and it was locally known as “Big Bear Town.” In 1970, TNC sold the property to the State of West Virginia for the “use and benefit of the State Department of Natural Resources.” The property became Beartown State Park, and the transition was enabled with financial assistance from Huntington’s Dorothy Polan in memory of her son, Ronald Keith Neal, who was killed in the Vietnam War in 1967 when he was 21 years old.
In 1923, the editor of the Pocahontas Times visited Bear Town in July and noted that thirty or forty feet down in the narrow hallways there was plenty of ice. He wrote that ice had been taken from Bear Town by the wagon load as late as the Fourth of July. He kindly provided his readers with directions to Beartown: “…travel the Seneca Trail to the old log church on Droop Mountain. Turn to the east up the road by the church. If the car is hung high, it will make it over the rocks, but a low hung car is liable to get the pan dinged. With the exception of the matter of clearing some rocks the road is not bad. Leave the car at the Billy Mike Gillilan place and take the trail toward some big pines. The distance from the state road is less than two miles. It is a trip well worth anyone’s time.”
Photo courtesy of the West Virginia University West Virginia Regional History Center.
Sources: The West Virginia News, Wild Wonderful West Virginia, e-WV.
