L. E. Mumford Banking Company

The building now occupied by the Historical Museum of West Point was originally the L. E. Mumford Bank. A branch of Mumford Bank was first located in West Point in 1901 in the old Masonic Lodge building at the corner of 5th and Main Street. After the great fire of 1903 destroyed the downtown business district, Lemuel Edward Mumford built this brick bank building, whose vault still survives and now houses some museum displays. Mumford, an entrepreneur from Cape Charles on Virginia's Eastern Shore, founded the bank in 1895. Born in 1855 in Berlin, Maryland, he had run a successful dry goods business before selling it and beginning a banking career. Other branches operated in Gloucester, Mathews, Tappahannock, Irvington, Urbanna, and Kilmarnock. In 1910 a local group bought the West Point branch and renamed it the Citizens Exchange Bank. In 1933, during the Great Depression, it merged into Farmers and Mechanics Bank. The building later housed many businesses and an upstairs apartment before the Historical Society of West Point acquired it in August 2015, and the former apartment now serves as additional museum display space and a historical books library.

West Point, Virginia · United States