When the Civil War began in 1861, only the one-story wing on the far left of the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum stood completed, while the main building’s foundation served periodically as a horse stable as both sides occupied the grounds. After Virginia seceded from the Union in April 1861, it ordered funds set aside for the asylum’s construction returned to the state treasury in Richmond for defense, but before that could happen the 7th Ohio Volunteer Infantry occupied Weston and removed $27,000 in gold from the Exchange Bank, later transferring it to Wheeling to help finance the Restored Government of Virginia. Weston changed hands several times during the war as Federal and Confederate troops briefly occupied the town, and although Confederate raiders twice confiscated funds and supplies intended for the asylum, the hospital opened to patients during the conflict and became the first civic project of the new state of West Virginia. Authorized by the Virginia General Assembly in the early 1850s, the asylum followed Thomas S. Kirkbride’s ideas for institutions designed with abundant light and air under the philosophy of Moral Treatment. Richard Snowden Andrews designed the building in the Gothic Revival and Tudor Revival styles, construction began in 1858, was interrupted by the war, and was not completed until 1881. Alleged to be the nation’s largest hand-cut blue sandstone building, the asylum was meant to be largely self-sufficient, with a farm, dairy, waterworks, and cemetery on the grounds. The first patients arrived in 1863, the population peaked at 2,400 in the 1950s, and the hospital, designated a National Historic Landmark in 1990, closed in 1994.