Ahead near Pierpont Avenue stood the home of Francis Harrison Pierpont, governor of the Restored Government of Virginia and the “Father of West Virginia.” He brought his bride, Julia Augusta Robertson Pierpont, there in 1854, and their four children were born there. In his library building in April 1861, Pierpont devised plans that restored loyal Virginia to the Union and gave life to West Virginia. After the Commonwealth of Virginia seceded in April 1861, representatives of the Unionist counties of northwestern Virginia met in Wheeling, carried out the plan he had devised there, declared Virginia’s governmental offices vacant, established a restored government of Virginia, and elected Pierpont governor. On April 29, 1863, Confederate forces under Gen. William E. Jones captured Fairmont and destroyed the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad bridge over the Monongahela River. Pierpont was then in Wheeling serving as governor of the Restored State of Virginia, while his family was with relatives in Washington, Pennsylvania. Angered at not finding him, the Confederates burned the books from his library in the street, though a Confederate tried to save the family Bible; retrieved by a neighbor, it now rests at the West Virginia State Museum in Charleston. In 1863, under Pierpont’s leadership, West Virginia became a state with Wheeling as the capital, and Arthur I. Boreman was elected governor, while Pierpont moved the capital of Restored Virginia to Alexandria. After the war ended in 1865, he relocated Virginia’s government and his family to Richmond, Virginia. In 1868, replaced by a military governor, he returned to Fairmont, resumed his law practice, held political office, and taught school for former slaves. Falling ill in 1896, he stayed with his daughter in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, died in 1899, and was buried in Fairmont’s Woodlawn Cemetery. On the site of the Methodist Protestant Church, two major events also occurred as a result of the Civil War: in 1865, the West Virginia Normal School began providing teacher training for the state’s new free schools and later became Fairmont State University and Pierpont Community and Technical College; and in 1869, under Pierpont’s leadership, efforts began there to reunite the Methodist Church after its split over slavery, with reunion occurring in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1877.