Valley Falls was long regarded as a remarkable natural place and the site of one of the largest Indigenous villages in the area, where Cherokees called it "Evil Spirit Falls" before later names included "Hard Around Falls," the "Falls of the Big Muddy," and finally a name connected to pioneer settler David Tygart. At the head of a rugged two mile canyon on the Taylor-Marion County border, the falls and gorge cut through the Chestnut Ridge anticline, with connoquenessing sandstone at the falls and nearby Allegheny and Pottsville rock series, while the Buckhannon and Middle Fork are the largest tributaries. Early visitors and settlers associated with the area included Charles Poke, Thomas Leggit and his parents, Jean Dupratz, Billy Burris, David Morgan, Jacob Prickett, Nathaniel Springer, Jesse York, Richard Falls, John Lewis, Major Powers, William Pettyjohn, William Linn, Thomas Parkison, David Gray, and Samuel Hanway. Ownership later passed through John Reed, Standish Ford, and Sam Frew to W.W. Fetterman, who in 1834 built a whip-saw mill and wagon road and had William Hanley cut a mill race, while J.A. and William Work built and operated the mill. As the B and O Railroad was being built, John Bradshaw and William Whitescarver decided in 1842 to build a grist mill with millwright Isaac Holman, and in 1850 the first flour was ground there. With the railroad branch completed in 1852 and a post office established at the new station under postmaster William Powell, Valley Falls became a bustling town of traders, lumberjacks, railroad workers, and millworkers, with a hotel, hall, ferry, mills, factories, shops, depot, post office, and more than one hundred houses during its boom period. In 1863 Bradshaw, Whitescarver, and Gilbert Fetterman enlarged their business and remodeled the grist mill to produce seventy barrels of flour a day under the "Pride of the Valley" brand, while during the Civil War the railroad carried soldiers and supplies and the area was busy with gunstock making. News that Confederate raider General W.W. Jones had captured Fairmont led the Fettermans to leave at once and never return, and later an unfinished railroad grade on the opposite side of the river was used as a tramway for logs. A disastrous fire in 1886 and a severe flood two years later, which swept away much of the town with millions of saw logs, dealt Valley Falls its industrial death blow, though the grist mill continued until 1905. After its frontier town and industrial era faded, Valley Falls became a recreational destination, was used in part for the 1911 film "The Squaw's Love," and in 1964 became a state park, where scattered stone foundations remained as traces of the once thriving community.