Marlinton, named for Jacob Marlin, grew at the site of the first English settlement west of the Alleghenies after Marlin and Stephen Sewell arrived in 1749 and built a cabin near the mouth of the Greenbrier River; after a religious disagreement, Sewell moved into a hollow sycamore tree, and Col. Andrew Lewis found the two there in 1751 while surveying for the Greenbrier Company. Marlinton remained the business center of Pocahontas County, home to the Pocahontas County Historical Society and Museum and the McClintic Library, which houses The Heritage Room and the Appalachian Collection. Railroad construction transformed the town beginning in 1899, with the Chesapeake and Ohio's Greenbrier Railway pushing through Marlinton, about 1,500 men at work within months, and the first train arriving on October 26, 1900, for a daylong celebration. After floodwaters destroyed a temporary bridge at Sharp's Tunnel on November 25, 1900, replacement girders were redirected with a quickly built wye track, and by January 22, 1901, a special train carried Chesapeake and Ohio Railway executives to Cass. As lumbering expanded, passenger and freight traffic rose sharply: in 1906-1907 the Greenbrier Line carried 139,848 passengers and earned $93,147, with Marlinton the busiest station at 24,941 boardings, while the town's 1905 freight depot handled nearly 50,000 tons of coal, food, goods, supplies, furnishings, mail, newspapers, catalog orders, automobiles, and fuel in 1907. Freight service, often using Chesapeake and Ohio Class G 2-8-0 locomotives, also hauled bark for tanneries and later kept lumber, pulpwood, and slabs moving to and from Cass into the early 1920s, even as many sawmills closed by 1910. The railroad also shaped Marlinton's cultural life, supporting an Opera House that began presenting vaudeville, dramas, and moving pictures in 1907 and a larger three-story concrete Opera House built by J.G. Tilton in 1910, later restored as a performing arts center. Among the town's prominent figures was Calvin Wells Price, editor of The Pocahontas Times, noted for his "Field Notes," panther tales, leadership in conservation, service as first president of the West Virginia Wildlife Federation, and pride in the 1954 dedication of The Calvin W. Price State Forest.