During the French and Indian War, around 1750, Virginia Militia Col. George Washington supervised construction of Fort Hedges, a stockade on Warm Spring Road at the heavily traveled Skinner's Gap atop North Mountain. The town was laid out by Josiah Hedges in 1832 and established by the Virginia General Assembly in 1836, and it preserves historic original log cabin buildings dating mainly from its founding through the Civil War era. A natural limestone spring, long an Indian meeting place before European settlement, supplied water for the village and was reportedly never affected by drought, and an early local law made it unlawful to sit or loiter about the Town Spring drinking spirits. The village was repeatedly crossed by invading Union and Confederate armies during the Civil War, and a mile east the Battle of North Mountain resulted in the capture of 1,500 Union soldiers who were marched south to prisoner of war camps. Mount Zion Episcopal Church, built in 1818 before the town was established, is the county's oldest Episcopal church and replaced an earlier meeting house where the young surveyor George Washington sometimes worshipped; it is also the burial place of many Hedges family members, and a sister of John Marshall, a founding member of the U.S. Supreme Court, attended there as well. Snodgrass Tavern, built in 1742 on the east side of Back Creek along Warm Springs Road, was among the oldest known buildings in West Virginia; in the early 1800s Robert Snodgrass also ran a ferry over Back Creek, in 1828 local Presbyterians reprimanded him for allowing dancing there, a store was established there in 1832, and the house ceased operating as a tavern in 1847. Doctor Joseph E. Snodgrass, born in 1813 and raised at the tavern, later moved to Baltimore, where he became a doctor and aspiring writer and formed a close friendship and working relationship with Edgar Allen Poe. George Washington was the tavern's most famous guest: in 1769, traveling to Warm Springs with his young stepdaughter, he stopped there and recorded the meal and lodging costs in his diary, and family tradition held that after a servant dropped his trunk into Back Creek and soaked his clothes, he refused to dine publicly and had dinner sent to his room while the garments were dried. On September 8, 1794, President Washington again recorded dining at Snodgrass's on Back Creek while following his baggage wagon.
