Ansted, West Virginia, chartered in 1891, grew from coal development tied to geologist David T. Ansted, whose identification of rich bituminous seams in southern West Virginia led to investment, the town’s naming in his honor, and later industrial expansion by his protégé William Nelson Page, a civil engineer, entrepreneur, civic leader, mayor, militia and National Guard member, hospital founder, and railroad developer who helped build the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway and secretly planned the highly profitable Virginia Railway with Henry Huttleston Rogers. The town later looked beyond its vanished coal companies toward education, tourism, and quality of life, while preserving coal camp architecture and Victorian houses linked to Page and other company officials. Other figures connected with Ansted include aviator Paul Peck, born there and recognized as West Virginia’s first pilot, an early record-setter, aviation instructor, and participant in the first U.S. airmail flights; George William Imboden, a Virginia-born attorney, Confederate officer, industrial promoter, and public official who became Ansted’s first mayor and whose home, Contentment, still stands; Julia Neale Jackson Woodson, mother of Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, who lived in and around what is now Ansted and was buried in Westlake Cemetery; and William F. Tyree, owner of the Tyree Tavern or Halfway House, a stagecoach stop, sheriff, courthouse commissioner, Confederate captain, and civic figure whose tavern served at times as Civil War headquarters. Ansted is also linked to a local claim that the concept for the automatic repeat-firing Gatling gun was conceived by John Nickol Wood and his brother Marshall Wood, whom J.R. Gatlin visited in Woodville before filing his patent.