Information About the Greenbriar River

Photo Credit: https://www.railstotrails.org/trailblog/2012/june/01/greenbrier-river-trail-west-virginia/
Researched, compiled, and written by Carrie Birdsong

The Greenbriar River is a tributary of the New River, 162 miles long, in southeastern West Virginia.  Via the Kanawha and Ohio rivers, it is part of the Mississippi watershed, draining an area of 1,656 square miles, and is one of the longest rivers in West Virginia.

The Greenbriar is formed at Durbin in northern Pocahontas County by the confluence of the East Fork Greenbrier River and the West Fork Greenbriar River, both of which are short streams rising at elevations exceeding 3,300 feet and flowing for their entire lengths in northern Pocahontas County.  From Durbin, the Greenbriar flows generally southwest through Pocahontas, Greenbriar and Summers Counties, past several communities including Cass, Marlinton, Hillsboro, Roncerverte, Fort Spring, Alderson, and Hinton, where it flows into the New River.  The river in general flows between the Yew Mountains to the west and the Allegheny Mountains to the east.

Along most of its course, the Greenbriar accommodated the celebrated Indian warpath known as the Seneca Trail (Great Indian Warpath).  From the vicinity of present-day White Sulphur Springs, the Trail followed Anthony’s Creek down to the Greenbriar near the present Pocahontas-Greenbriar County line.  It then ascended the River to the vicinity of Hillsboro and Droop Mountain and made its way through present-day Pocahontas County by way of future Marlinton, Indian Draft Run, and Edray.

The first permanent white settlers west of the Alleghenies have traditionally been considered to have been two New Englanders: Jacob Marlin and Stephen Sewell, who arrived in the Greenbrier Valley in 1749.  They built a cabin together at what would become Marlinton, but after disputing over religion, Sewell moved into a nearby hollowed-out sycamore tree.  In 1751, surveyor John Lewis (father of Andrew Lewis) discovered the pair.  Sewell eventually settled on the eastern side of Sewell Mountain, near present-day Rainelle.  They may well have been the first to settle what was then called the “western waters” – i.e., in the regions where streams flowed westward to the Gulf of Mexico rather than eastward to the Atlantic.

Virginia settler (1749-1823), a Revolutionary War commander and pioneering western Virginia settler, surveyed the Greenbriar Valley and is known locally as “The Father of Greenbriar County”.  At the age of 20, Stuart was a member of the 1769 survey by citizens of Augusta County, Virginia, which explored the wilderness of the Greenbrier Valley to the west in preparation for European settlement.  The following year he built the first mill in present-day Greenbrier County, at Frankford.  In 1774, he led a company of Greenbriar troops in the Battle of Point Pleasant at the confluence of the Kanawha and Ohio Rivers.  He was among Lewisburg’s first trustees and in 1780 he became Greenbrier County’s first clerk, leaving many historic records behind.