page_title: Keyser, West Virginia
section_title: Late 19th and early 20th centuries
hierarchical_section_title: Keyser, West Virginia / History / Late 19th and early 20th centuries
caption_attribution_description: English: Worsted Woolen Mill Keyser WV, 1908, with Queens Point
context_page_description: Keyser is a city in and the county seat of Mineral County, West Virginia, United States. It is part of the Cumberland, MD-WV Metropolitan Statistical Area. The population was 5,439 at the 2010 census.
context_section_description: Keyser's growth accelerated in the 1880s, with the end of the Long Depression, through the turn of the century. The first high school opened in 1885. The first bank in town, the National Bank of Keyser, was chartered in 1886. A town water system was built in 1892, as was the first telephone line, connecting Keyser to Burlington, West Virginia. The Keyser Light and Power Company brought electricity to the town in 1895. A fire department, the Vigilant Reel and Hose Company No. 1, was organized in 1896. The Hoffman Hospital opened in 1904, as did the Preparatory School, which would later become Potomac State College. Both of these were located on Fort Hill, the site of Fort Fuller during the Civil War. A natural gas system powered street lamps and provided heating beginning in 1905. An ornate music hall opened for entertainment.
  In these years, a prominent citizen of Keyser was Thomas R. Carskadon. He had been a shareholder of the Keyser Land and Improvement Company that sold the plots that would become much of downtown Keyser. In 1888, Carskadon ran for governor of West Virginia on the Prohibition Party ticket. A newspaper article described his pro-temperance views as unpopular yet voters liked to listen to his "characteristic, sound, humorous, eloquent, and happy speeches, which held his audience spellbound to the close." In 1900, Carskadon put his name in the mix for Vice President on the Prohibition ticket but failed to win the nomination at the national convention.  Later that year, he ran again for Governor of West Virginia.
  All of the aforementioned infrastructure improvements attracted more industry, and Keyser's private sector began to diversify beyond its sometimes problematic dominant employer, the Baltimore & Ohio. Besides the B&O, railroad workers were now employed by the Western Maryland Railroad and the West Virginia Central Railroad, started by the Davis brothers and their in-law Senator Stephen Elkins in the 1880s.  The Keyser Woolen Mills began operations in 1893.   Rees' tannery operated on New Creek.  In 1905, the Keyser Pottery Company began firing its kilns along the Potomac River, producing decorative and bathroom ceramics.
  In 1903, another woolen mill, specializing in worsted wool, was opened on the banks of the Potomac in the shadow of Queens Point.  It was the women of Keyser who largely worked the machines here. A 1906 story reported: "A number of the girls employed at the Patchett Worsted Company are on a strike for higher wages this week." In the early 1920s, the mill employed 200 workers, 175 of whom were women.  In later years, sometime before 1946, the workers voted to join Textile Workers Union of America Local 1874, the same local that organized workers at the much larger Celanese plant near Cumberland.
  As Keyser's industry boomed, so did its population. The need for labor was ravenous. European immigrants made their way to Keyser. The largest group of foreign-born Keyser residents in this era was the Italians, followed by the Irish. In 1910, a single quarry operation near Keyser alone housed dozens of Italian men in its boarding facilities. News of jobs traveled through family and village networks. Many of the Italians settling in Keyser and nearby Piedmont therefore hailed from the same Calabrian village, Caulonia. A restrictive national immigration law enacted in 1924 had at least two significant effects on Keyser.  First, while the town's population had more than doubled between 1900 and 1920, in the following decade the population leveled out, despite being the Roaring Twenties. Second, descendants of Keyser's Italian families have a disproportionate number of relatives in Adelaide, Australia. When the U.S. all but closed its gates to Italians in 1924, the village networks led Cauloniesi to emigrate to Adelaide.  The same Italian family names found in Keyser and Piedmont can be found in this south Australian city.
  On February 3, 1913, the West Virginia legislature granted Keyser a charter designating it the "City of Keyser". The legislation consolidated Keyser with South Keyser and add
caption: The Potomac Worsted Woolen Mill in Keyser, 1908. The mill went through various owners and names through the years, including Patchett, Potomac, and Keyser Worsted. Queens Point is visible in the background.
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