Romney, WV

Hampshire County’s seat sits in the South Branch Potomac Valley, with a charter dating to 1762. The 2020 Census counted 1,722 residents. Romney’s location made the town a crossroads between Winchester, Cumberland, Keyser, and Moorefield, and that role still helps account for the courthouse, businesses, and routes gathered in a place surrounded by mountain valleys. Romney and Shepherdstown share the distinction of being West Virginia’s oldest chartered towns. During the Civil War, the crossroads brought repeated troop movement even though no major battle was fought in town; the damage left Romney rebuilding around county government and local commerce. The courthouse and town offices give those routes a civic destination, while the valley roads continue toward farms and orchards outside the municipal limits. The result is a street plan shaped by county business as much as local residences.

Romney’s most distinctive institution is the West Virginia Schools for the Deaf and Blind, which opened in 1870 and continues to operate in town. That campus gives a small county seat a statewide educational role. Around it, the historic core includes Literary Hall, built in 1870 by the Literary Society, and the Wilson-Woodrow-Mytinger House, an approximately 1750 structure. Indian Mound Cemetery carries the Civil War chapter too; a memorial to Confederate dead was erected there in 1867 after an early postwar cemetery decoration ceremony.

Outside the courthouse streets, Hampshire County’s orchard belt begins around Romney. The local fruit industry took shape in the late 1890s, and orchards remain part of the county’s working landscape. The Potomac Eagle scenic rail excursion runs south through the South Branch Valley and the Trough, bringing the river canyon and its bald-eagle habitat into the area’s present-day calendar. Romney has a mix of routines unusual for a town this size: county government, a specialized school campus, old buildings, orchards, and a train that follows the valley.