10/05/2026
A New Depot, a New Town, and the Railroad That Changed Paw Paw
In our last story, we ended on January 24, 1882.
That was the day the Williamson store and dwelling burned, bringing an end to a building that had been connected to some of Paw Paw's earliest commercial and railroad history, but 1882 was not the end of the story and in many ways, it was the beginning of a new chapter.
The same year that fire destroyed the Williamson property, the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad was building a new station at Paw Paw.
The B&O's 1882 annual report described the new station as a two-story brick building, measuring 36 by 60 feet, with a slate roof.
The building was designed by E. Francis Baldwin, one of the railroad's most important architects, whose work can still be found throughout the former B&O system and that building, is the Paw Paw Depot we are fighting to preserve today.
It is easy to look at the depot as simply an old railroad station, but when you look at what was happening around it, you begin to understand why the B&O invested in a substantial new building here but Paw Paw was growing.
The town had already been shaped by the railroad, the Potomac River, the C&O Canal and the large tannery established by J. B. Hoyt & Company in 1868. The tannery brought hundreds of jobs to the community, while the railroad gave local businesses access to markets far beyond the Potomac Valley and the new depot was part of that growth.
In 1891, Paw Paw itself was becoming something more than a railroad settlement as the town was officially incorporated.
At the time of incorporation, the community had grown to a population of 772 with general stores, a furniture store, churches, a high school, post office, all serving a community that had developed around the transportation and industrial opportunities created by the railroad and the tannery.
Two years later, in 1893, the new town built its Mayor's Office and Jail, with the little building becoming much more than a place for municipal business.
A newspaper description from 1894 gives us a wonderful glimpse of how Paw Paw's residents viewed their community at the time. The Morgan News described Paw Paw as being more beautiful than at any previous point in its history, praising its plank sidewalks and its street lights.
For a small Appalachian town at the end of the nineteenth century, this was a community that was proud of what it had become, but another industry was beginning to take root.
In 1894, three of the Miller brothers came to the Paw Paw area from Berkeley County and began establishing orchards. Henry W. “Harry” Miller, Gilbert P. “Gib” Miller and L. Porter “Port” Miller would eventually become major figures in Paw Paw's apple industry.
It was Henry Miller established his Paw Paw orchard in 1898 and at first, much of the attention was on peaches, but agriculture in the region was beginning to change and by 1910, more than 150 commercial orchards could be found across Morgan and Hampshire counties.
And the railroad was essential to what came next and the same tracks that carried passengers and general freight through Paw Paw would eventually carry the region's agricultural products to markets far beyond Morgan County.
There was another major change coming from the railroad world as well as the Western Maryland Railway was pushing west from Hagerstown toward Cumberland.
Construction of its Cumberland Extension began in 1903 and the railroad followed the north side of the Potomac through the difficult terrain of the Paw Paw Bends, crossing the river, cutting through mountains and building three tunnels and six major bridges along the route with the new line finally opened to Cumberland on March 15, 1906.
For Paw Paw, this meant something important as the town that had spent more than half a century living beside the B&O, now found itself surrounded by an increasingly sophisticated railroad network.
The Western Maryland was not simply another railroad in the abstract as it'snew line crossed the Potomac repeatedly around the Paw Paw Bends, with portions of the railroad actually passing through West Virginia before crossing back into Maryland.
Meanwhile, the B&O was still using the original route through Paw Paw, as the great modernization of the B&O through the Paw Paw Bends had not happened yet and would come a few years later, when the railroad began developing what became known as the Magnolia Cutoff.
By 1910, Paw Paw had changed dramatically from the settlement Isaac Baker knew in 1846 as the old general store that once doubled as a post office and was known as “Isaac Baker's Store” or “Isaac Baker's Depot” was gone, the Williamson store had burned and Jacob Ziler was gone.
The original 1845 depot was gone but the railroad itself was still there and standing beside those tracks was a brick depot and already nearly thirty years old. The town around it had grown from a handful of stores and a railroad settlement into an incorporated community of hundreds of people, supported by the tannery, the railroad, local businesses and the beginnings of an agricultural industry that would eventually make Paw Paw famous for apples.
That building survived all of it and somehow, after everything else around it changed, the depot remained.
Today, when we look at the Paw Paw Depot, we are not simply looking at an old railroad building, we are looking at the place where several generations of Paw Paw's history came together and for generations, the depot was part of the connection between all of them and the outside world.
By 1910, Paw Paw was ready for the next great change as the B&O was already looking at ways to straighten and modernize its route through the Paw Paw Bends. Within a few years, the railroad would build a new line through the mountains that would change the relationship between Paw Paw and the railroad forever.
That story begins with the Magnolia Cutoff and the Paw Paw Depot was still standing when the first surveys began.
Today, we are working to make sure it is still standing for the generations that come after us.
Help us preserve the Paw Paw Depot because if you believe places like this are worth saving, please consider supporting the effort to preserve one of Paw Paw's last surviving connections to the railroad era.
Donation Link:https://www.zeffy.com/en-US/donation-form/paw-paw-station-surveyor-fund
