Cedar Grove (Cedar Grove, West Virginia)
building in West Virginia, United States
Cedar Grove, also known as the William Tompkins House, is a historic home located at Cedar Grove, Kanawha County, West Virginia.
It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1975.
Architecture
The two-story, five-bay, "double pile" rectangular brick house originally featured upper and lower verandas across the rear, but these were enclosed in the late 19th century. The colonial-style home features a small entrance portico with a second floor balcony.
The original structures of slave quarters still stand on the property behind the main house.
History
Commissioned by William Tompkins Jr., a salt and natural gas entrepreneur, the house was built in 1844 by enslaved people with red bricks made on-site. The Tompkins family owned as many as 50 enslaved people by 1860. The house was left untouched during the Civil War since Tompkins's wife, Mrs. Rachel Grant Tompkins, possessed a letter from her nephew Ulysses S. Grant that called for Cedar Grove to be spared by Union troops.
In 1875, activist and pastor Adam Clayton Powell moved to Cedar Grove.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Cedar Grove (Cedar Grove, West Virginia)” as building in West Virginia, United States. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
Why this record matters
The subject matters to the places & architecture register because the source frames it as building in West Virginia, United States. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Maps, plans, fabric surveys and administrative records can establish how the site’s name, extent and function changed over time. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 8, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5056714. Authority coordinates are 38.221, -81.428. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1975, 1844, 1860 and 1875.
Modern boundaries and familiar names can conceal earlier jurisdictions or structures that do not align with the present site. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Treat names, boundaries and functions as historically changeable. Maps, plans, inventories and administrative records can clarify what the place meant at different dates.
- Historic place names
- Jurisdictional context
- Routes into maps and plans
Contemporary maps, plans, listed-building records, estate papers and the responsible local or national archive.
Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “Cedar Grove (Cedar Grove, West Virginia)”, its source revision and the description used here.
- Expand the search: follow Cedar Grove (Cedar Grove, West Virginia) primary sources, Cedar Grove (Cedar Grove, West Virginia) archive and Cedar research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
- Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Cedar Grove (Cedar Grove, West Virginia)”?
- Which earlier names or jurisdictions may reveal additional records?
- Which authority defined the place, boundary or structure at the relevant date?
Search terms from this dossier
This entry incorporates text from “Cedar Grove (Cedar Grove, West Virginia)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.