BELLEPOINT W.Va. (Hinton News) – Editor’s Note: Local history collector William Jones discusses items from his collection and their historical significance each week, exclusively at Hinton News. In this edition of A Peek into Summers County’s Past, Jones is talking about the town of Bellepoint.
Before being renamed Bellpoint and consolidated into the town of Hinton, this little community was called Foss. The post office for this small town was established in June of 1884. W. L. Raines was the first postmaster of the newly established post office.
There had been a ferry in place so one could easily ford the Greenbrier River to the communities of Avis and the fast-growing railroad town of Hinton. By an act of the West Virginia Legislature and chartered by the Secretary of State in July of 1906 as the Foss Bridge Company the planned construction of a bridge from Foss to the railroad side of the river was in the works. I recently acquired this original blueprint of the proposed steel highway bridge over the Greenbrier River near Hinton, W.Va.
It should be noted at this time, more than 6000 railroad cars passed through the town of Hinton on a yearly basis. The railroad employed roughly 1000 men in Hinton with a payroll of around $55,000 each month. The state-of-the-art McCreery Hotel was almost complete.
At this same time, there was an already established and operational ferry in Foss owned by A.E. and Charles Lewis Miller, being the only way to cross the river at that time. You had to pay .5 cents if traveling by foot, a horse with a rider was .25 cents, for two horses and a wagon was .55 cents and .5 cents for each additional horse.
With this area springing up at a very fast rate due to the railroad it is no wonder that a bridge was needed. It started as a toll bridge to pay for its construction. This would be the first iron bridge to ever cross the Greenbrier River.
It should be noted that only the bridge floor and its pillars are depicted in this rendering. After bringing this up to an engineering friend of mine we came to the consensus that the iron frame part of the bridge was left off because it would have taken away from the detailed diagram for the proposed bridge.
The view of this diagram is as if you were below the current bridge looking up the river towards Talcott. In doing research for this piece I ran across an article from The Hinton Daily News on Sept. 21, 1939, which says the following: “The Foss Bridge, incidentally, is fast coming apart. Only a skeleton is left, and soon there will be nothing there except the concrete pillars to mark its 32-year existence.”
The photo of the close-up of the Foss Bridge is from 1907. It was taken from the 1908 History of Summers County from the Earliest Settlement to the Present Time by Judge Miller. The photo with the blocks of ice in the Greenbrier River is from around 1920 or so and shows the Foss Bridge in the background. This is the only early photo I have ever seen that shows the entire span of the bridge.
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