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An Area Rich In History
Most of Laurel Run is quiet today. Farms, houses, and woodland are the main theme. That was not the case over the years.
Where Oak Grove Road crosses the stream in Taylor County, you can still faintly make out the Baltimore to Clarksburg stage route used during Benjamin Franklin's time to carry mail to what was then the frontier. The right of way is still on the books today, as are other surveys of roads that were planned, but never built.
Near the mouth of Laurel Run, where it empties into Three Fork Creek in Preston County, you can find the foundation of the Victoria Hotel from the mid 1800s. The foundation was hand cut by slaves owned by a resident of what is now Arthurdale who was robbed and murdered on his way home from collecting payment for their work. Or so the story goes.
Workers lived in houses along the Laurel and Three Fork Creek and read newspapers from the newspaper published across the street from the hotel. Workers bought grain from Fortney's Mill, shown at right, on nearby Three Fork.
 Across the road from the hotel, buried under dirt now, is the Nemegyi Iron Foundry. The railroad bed from Thornton remains as the road along Three Fork that Laurel Run empties into. Tailings from the foundry were put on the road heading west from Victoria along Laurel Run. Rich in iron ore, you can still find iron ore nodules along Laurel Run when digging. The foundry was closed due to a labor dispute after 1878 when the picture at left was taken. Colonel Nemegyj, a Hungarian expatriot, had previously been a developer of a railroad across Panama prior to the first start of the Panama Canal. Later the vice consul to Tabasco, Mexico, he is buried in the Congressional Cemetary in Washington, DC.
Today, a concrete spring box can still be found just west of the foundry. Water from the spring was bottled at a bottling plant on Three Fork and shipped to New York before that city had a municipal water supply, as well as to other locations.
Subsistence farming was the most common undertaking along the Laurel. Steep though some hillsides were - and are - land was often cleared with mules. Children in large families picked rocks and placed them in piles still found today here and there. When not helping with chores, children attended the numerous one-room schools in the watershed.
Cutting and sawing timber were the most common Laurel Run undertakings. It is almost hard to find a flat spot along the run where there was not a saw mill at one time or another. If you look at the woods closely, you can see old logging trails where horses and sometimes mules pulled timber out of the woods. A typical mill appears at the top of this page. Click here to see additional pictures of the area.
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