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Birch River Monthly Spotlight April 2001 - Mouth of Birch Although Birch River flows in relative obscurity through three counties of central West Virginia, the locale where it enters Elk River at Glendon is anything but obscure. In March of 1955, a musky was caught at the mouth of the river that weighed forty-three pounds and was fifty- two and one-half inches long. Charleston Gazette photographer Ferrell Friend took a picture of the fish and angler, Lester Hayes, Jr. of Charleston, that has appeared in numerous publications and remains to this day the best known picture ever taken of a West Virginia fish. Both the length and the weight records stood for forty-two years until a musky caught at Stonecoal Lake (Lewis County) in 1997 broke the weight record. However, the mouth of Birch still holds the length record.For eighteen years, the musky catch shared the spotlight with a deer killed nearby that held the state record for a typical (symmetrical) white-tailed deer. That deer was killed in 1976 by Doug Given, then a teenager and now a doctor in nearby Gassaway. His record was broken in 1994. The mouth of Birch is a favorite spot for walleye fishermen in the winter and early spring but better known than the fishing is a swinging bridge that that crosses over Elk leading to Birch. The bridge was built in 1910 by the Birch Boom and Lumber Company for access to its store, post office and sawmill. It remains a community landmark eighty years after the mill has ceased to exist. The company had a log boom in Birch above the mouth; piles of rock that anchored the boom still remain as visible evidence of this long ago operation. Another familiar sight at the mouth of Birch is the railroad trestle which was completed in 1905 by the West Virginia Coal and Coke Railroad (which later became the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad). The trestle was the first large structure to span Birch. Italian immigrant workers were used in its construction and stone for the piers was quarried nearby. In 1932, with the completion of West Virginia Route 4 (Elk River Road) on the north side of the Elk, the Glendon Post Office was moved to the highway. For many years the mail was carried across the swinging bridge and placed on a hook alongside the track, where it was picked up by the train crew. Birch River enters the Elk River just over eighty miles above Charleston and about twenty miles below the Sutton Dam. In the 1960s, the Army Corps of Engineers studied the possibility of a dam on the Birch. The dam would have been located slightly over a mile from the mouth of Birch but that project (thankfully) was abandoned. |
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March 2001 Spotlight - Birch
River's Rocks
April 2001 Spotlight - Mouth
of Birch Eddy
May 2001 Spotlight - Boggs
Falls and Mill
June 2001 Spotlight -
Boggs Shootout
July 2001 Spotlight - The
Blue Hole
August 2001 Spotlight -
The Floods of Birch
