Ghost towns are fascinating places. Once teeming with life, they now lie abandoned and forgotten by a world that has moved callously on without them. Such is the story of many an overgrown West Virginia settlement, including the long-abandoned town of Spruce, West Virginia, whose ruins are perched high in a mountain meadow in Pocahontas County. Spruce is a particularly fascinating story with a hidden past. When it comes to ghost towns in WV, this is one you have to know about.
The remote high mountains of Pocahontas County, West Virginia hide a long-forgotten secret.
The high mountains already have an eerie feel to them. As you wind your way up narrow roads into the clouds themselves, you feel a shift in the atmosphere of the towns around you.
Just under ten miles southwest of Durbin, on the Shavers Fork of Cheat River and along the route of the Cheat Mountain Salamander train tour, lie the ruins of an old mining town: Spruce, West Virginia.
There's a certain stillness about Spruce, West Virginia that makes it as a ghost town from the first moment. This abandoned WV history is absolutely chilling.
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In 1902, when Spruce was founded, it was said to be the highest, coldest town east of the Mississippi. It's elevation? A chilly 3,853 feet. (Rumor has it that, at this height, residents of Spruce reported frosts even in the warmest months of the year.)
Workers in the area would camp nearby or take the train in and out between work shifts.
Spruce was developed primarily as a logging community with a side of coal mining thrown in. The West Virginia Pulp and Paper Company built a pulp mill adjacent to the settlement (just across the river) that operated until 1925.
The back-and-forth work style of the early 1900s wasn't favorable for families, so houses were built in the town of Spruce so that workers in the paper company didn't have to leave their families for days at a time to stay employed.
The town also boasted a hotel (an astounding wonder for its time with 30 rooms, hot running water, and above all, electric lighting!), a locomotive shop, a school house, a company store, and company row houses.
It's pretty crazy that all of this existed without formal roads connecting Spruce to the outside world. But for a time there was a small amount of development in Spruce.
After the mill relocated to Maryland in the mid-1920s, however, the town was slowly abandoned.
To see some recent footage of Spruce, West Virginia's ruins for yourself, check out this video taken by Youtuber Cody Carr:
Or, if you're bold enough, visit for yourself. There's something beautiful and, we don't lie, a little bit creepy about an abandoned space.
Have you ever visited Spruce, West Virginia? Did you hike in from the Snowshoe Resort area or ride through on the train?
If you are as fascinated by West Virginia’s abandoned ghost towns as we are, here’s the long-forgotten story of another, this one on the steep slopes of the New River Gorge: Royal, West Virginia.
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Abandoned Places In West Virginia
CC|January 31, 2023
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