By Colleen Nelson
It’s hard to think about loving a place that you drive through – don’t blink, you’ll miss it! – but over the years I’ve built a relationship with the forgotten village of Bristoria as I continue to watch it go through its changes. Back in the 1970s, my friends and I cruised the old Vee Dub van through the cluster of mostly old houses, past what used to be a general store run by auctioneer Bud Behm’s dad, on our way to get fresh milk from the Chess farm over by Ryerson Station State Park. Bristoria sits along the edge of the Dunkard branch of Wheeling Creek and one day I fell in love with a fine old tree by the bank, while doing weekly water testing behind the abandoned store. I was a volunteer for the Isaac Walton League, building a data base of the chemical composition of the water – before the fact – that can be compared to how the water reads after Marcellus drilling commenced on the hills above this watershed. In between were years of driving through Bristoria on my way to the state park downstream, to swim, hike and help organize its fall Arts in the Park Festival – with music, blacksmithing, apple butter making, reenactors, crafters, and a lake to fish and paddle in. (Fishing and paddling Duke Lake ended in 2005 when undermining damaged the dam and the lake was drained, but the fall festival is still a happening thing.)
There is a small house on the left beside Mary and Fred Whipkey’s place where Glen and Arliegh Durbin lived, maternal grandparents of my good friend Judith Fitch. Her own home on Macedonia Road bought in the 1980s sits upstream beside an unnamed tributary that joins others to become the Dunkard branch flowing through Bristoria, on its way to Wheeling and the Ohio River. Living this close to the land, you can feel the connection that water offered the first settlers as they built their mills on big streams that would eventually see houses and general stores and later, what money can buy as the gas and oil boom struck in the 1890s. Standard Oil began sending in their proxies early on, to buy gas and oil rights from landowners. Life would never be the same for this pioneer holdout land. Villages such as Bristoria, Long Run and Ryerson Station are connected by roads that climb hills to find valleys where streams confluence and pioneers settled. Sawing wood and grinding grain was the order of the day for those who raised their crops and livestock here, then headed up the road to Jacksonville then down the hill to Waynesburg to market their wares, before the Civil War and beyond.
In the beginning, Bristoria was called Kincaid’s Mill but by 1869 the village was large enough to warrant its own post office. The name Bristoria as a postal destination was most likely a nod to the many Bristors who lived around Wind Ridge.
A trek through G. Wayne Smith’s Greene County History books offers a fascinating view of the years after Standard Oil came to town. Some families struck it rich selling their leasing rights and getting royalties when the wells came in, others found good work building the pipelines and drilling while minding the farm.
In the chapter called “Vacations” Smith reports in 1886 James Hughes and family of Bristoria “went to the Pacific by train and had a four-month extended stay” with a brother in California who, with his sons, was operating a large wheat farm.
The Bristoria extraction field had already been identified by the scientific standards of the day and the world was ready for what lay beneath this ancient land.
The official startup date for the oil boom in the western reaches is 1897, keeping good time with the fact that between 1894 and1900 Standard Oil owned rights to a whopping 31 percent of all the acreage in the county. Add to that the more pertinent fact that drillers hit pay dirt on the Bristoria field that same year. Boom!
When the trapped oils and gases of the Emma Woods on Long Run Road hit the air in 1897, she produced “90,000 barrels since March” the newspapers shouted. Folks who lived on Long Run shrugged and grinned and went home to eat. “When Emma came in, there was an oil slick clear to Wheeling.”
The “Mason Scott farm at Bristoria” suddenly had 12 more wells.
Bristoria was now a toddling town, with a community building that doubled for everything from a hall for the Grange and the Knights of Pythias to a place where Presbyterians gathered to pray before building the Wheeling Valley Presbyterian Church in 1914. By then Bristoria had a post office, a one-room school, dry goods and grocery store, blacksmith shop and a grist and saw mill. Glen Durbin had a garage, Mr. Wendall kept a hotel and William Hughes had “an eating place back of the mill.” Charles Harrison and James Parry had their blacksmith shop beside the mill and in 1881 the firm of Millikin and Supler was established. Things were looking good for landowners and everyone who could do the job had one. No one was much complaining.
Which is true of the folks that I’ve gotten to know in Bristoria. No one complains much. When CONSOL Energy came to long wall mine they discovered that the block of coal Bristoria was sitting on had never been bought – and the remaining landowners were happy to call Bristoria their hood.
Some families sold, pulled up stakes and moved. Others sold, stayed and fixed their places up. The now-corporate owned homes had their windows boarded up and put up for sale. Lately, new owners have been moving in.
A few years ago, Marcellus pipeline building took a look at the geography and found Bristoria in its sights. This was about the time the effects of undermining changed the water flow coming out of the big hill that holds up a couple of ridges. The ridge began to move and so did Bristoria Road. Road crews and detours became part of the landscape and getting to Ryerson became quite an adventure. 
These days, Bristoria has a rough edged but hopeful new look. The road is still wobbly and corporate entities are working with landowners to divert disturbed water veins that are heading to the creek by way of their back yards. New folks are moving in because housing prices are low. Locals know that the land here is good for animals and families that can live off the land like their great grandparents did – with a little help from paychecks from off-the-farm jobs that are available if you know where to look.
I have to laugh, reading Smith’s micro film-found newspaper article reporting that in February of 1893 William Hughes of Bristoria and Frank V. Iams of Waynesburg “announced they were initiating a creamery and cheese manufactory” at Bristoria to build a plant.”
I’ve never seen any trace of that plant – I can’t even find the old mill – but I think it’s fitting that nine-year old 4-H’er Neil Pettit, along with his mom and dad and three siblings are settling in on land that Larry’s great grandpa Charlie Brown once owned and plan to build a goat milk dairy to make cheese, yogurt, ice cream, fudge and soap. What goes around comes around! I can hardly wait!
