Logan, WV

Logan is the Logan County seat on the Guyandotte River, where Island Creek meets the river, with 1,438 residents in the 2020 census. U.S. Route 119 follows the valley and connects the city with the coalfield communities north and south. The courthouse, downtown stores, Logan High School, Southern West Virginia Community and Technical College, and Logan Regional Medical Center give the county seat institutions beyond its size. The river valley keeps those civic and commercial pieces in one narrow Appalachian setting.

Explorers described the site in the 1780s as the “Islands of the Guyandot,” and a town was laid out here in 1827 after Logan County was created in 1824. The place was first called Lawnsville, then Aracoma, before being renamed Logan in 1907 for a Mingo chief. The Chesapeake and Ohio Railway reached the city from Huntington in 1904, helping open the county’s coal industry. Logging had already shaped the area, and timber, livestock, fruit, and tobacco farms remained part of the wider county economy. Jack Dempsey spent his boyhood in Logan, another thread in the city’s larger-than-town history.