June 2018: Jackie, Brenda and Brian manning the ERDHS display

21 June 2018: The Northern Echo report by Chris Lloyd

The story has been uncovered by the Evenwood, Ramshaw & District History Society which is featuring it in its exhibition this weekend.

In 1849, Thomas Raine and his wife Ruth (nee Willan), who both came from Evenwood in County Durham, emigrated to Ohio and settled in a newly founded ironmaking town.

Their sons, Thomas and John, become lumbermen, and in 1904 founded their own company in the Dry Fork District of Randolph County in West Virginia. They needed somewhere for their workers to live and so built Evenwood, named after the birthplace of their mother.

Thomas and John were short-lived in Evenwood because in 1906 they purchased one of the largest stands of virgin hardwood in the whole of the US, which was about 150 miles away in Greenbrier County.

To get to their trees, they had to build a 20-mile railway – sorry, railroad – and then they needed a new settlement to house their workers. They called this new settlement Rainelle, after their own surname.

The Raine brothers’ company, the Meadow River Lumber Company, soon employed 500 men at Rainelle and had the largest hardwood sawmill in the world. They cut down 3,000 acres of virgin timber a year and turned it into 31m board feet a year (a board foot is an American timber measurement: a board foot is 1ft long by 1ft wide and one inch thick).

Although their Evenwood enterprise only lasted until 1922, the Meadow River lumber mill at Rainelle, which operated until 1975, must have made these lads with County Durham roots pretty wealthy.

Today, Evenwood in West Virginia is just a dot of a place and Rainelle, which was badly hit by floods ten years ago, has a population of about 1,500.

The connection between Evenwood USA and Evenwood County Durham is told, along with lots of other local stories, in the exhibition at Evenwood Parish Hall today, from 11am to 3pm, and tomorrow, from 2pm to 4pm. Admission is free, though donations are gratefully received. Refreshments will be available.

THE observant will have noticed that Evenwood in West Virginia is in Randolph County and that in Evenwood, County Durham, there was the Randolph Colliery. This is just coincidence. Randolph in West Virginia was named after Edmund Jennings Randolph, a politician, in 1787, whereas the Randolph Colliery was sunk in 1893 and named after the chairman of its parent company, William Randolph Innes Hopkins.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

wvhistoryonview.org

babel.hathitrust.org

Greenbrier Historical Society

Steamtown: special history study. American Steam Locomotives. Meadow River Lumber Company

Below: A selection of photographs to show Evenwood and Rainelle, West Virginia, USA