WEST VIRGINIA
| Location: |
| Veteran's Park, Riverside Drive & Route 52, Welch, West VA, 24801 |
| Contact: |
| Mr. Russell Burge, 15 Broad Street, Welch, WV, 24801, (304) 436-3803 or (540) 297-4946 |
| Artifacts: |
| A collection
of perhaps two dozen items from the West Virginia Merci car is located in
"Mansion House", a hewn log structure built as a tavern in 1796,
but now maintained as a museum by the Colonel Charles Lewis Chapter, N.S. Daughters of the American Revolution. The museum itself is in a
small state park called Tu-Endie-Wei within the city of Point Pleasant,
WV. The name is Wyandotte Indian for "Point Between Two
Waters". Also in the park are four French Oak trees, which came
in the Merci boxcar as saplings from France. Russell Burge (see above) started some
saplings with acorns gathered from the trees in the park and has planted
two saplings near the present site of the boxcar in Welch. Ms.
Gloria Roush, a volunteer at the museum, reported that "a 97 year old
woman who worked here in 1949 said that there are more of the Merci Train artifacts in the State Archives in Charleston". Ms. Roush can
be contacted by phone at 304- 675-7198.
Another French Oak tree grown from acorns that came in the Merci Train is growing in the front yard of the late Andy Dolak's home in Lamar, S.C. I believe I have been told that there are more of the trees at the War Memorial Museum in Newport News, Virginia. |
