Despard, WV

Despard’s local story is tied to a mill that once gave this Harrison County community an industrial scale far beyond its size. In the early 1900s, the Jackson Sheet and Tin Plate Company was described as the largest manufacturing enterprise in north-central West Virginia. After 1905, the operation became the Phillips Sheet and Tin Plate Company, a name that also traveled locally as the Tin Plate Mill. The company names are a useful way into Despard’s past: they point to steel, payrolls, and a working landscape that shaped the community’s place in Harrison County.

The mill’s ownership changed again through a bankruptcy auction, when Pittsburgh partners James R. Weir and James Phillips took over and the works carried the Phillips name. That turn linked Despard to the larger steel networks running through northern West Virginia, but the local story remains more specific than a general industrial label. It is the story of a Harrison County CDP remembered through a plant, a company name, and the generations who built their working lives around it. Even with a short record, Despard has a clear thread: manufacturing put it on the map.