National Register Listing

Boomtown Historic District

Roughly along Winchester Ave. to Arden Rd., W. King St. to Red Hill Rd., W. Stephen, W. Addition St, and Raleigh Sts., Martinsburg, WV

West of town two graded roads lead from 19th-century Martinsburg into the Valley of the Virginias. One, the Winchester Turnpike, is now Winchester Avenue. The other, the Berkeley and Hampshire Graded Road, is now W. King Street extended. A toll house, now moved slightly and adapted to another use, still survives on this street. Both roads still lead into the country -- to a point where the city stops and the country begins. For this reason, and because of their architectural distinction, the streets are superb introductions to the city.
W. King is unmarred by intruders -- out of place buildings or uses -- and is the city's best showplace of Period House styles. Dwellings in the Bungaloid Style, Georgian Revival, Spanish Colonial, Adobe, Western Stick Style, and many others sit on large lots back from the street, splendidly cared for and loved.

Winchester has some of the same, but many older 19th-century buildings as well. A shopping center interrupts the continuity of the street at one point, but the major tragedy of the center is that it interrupts the view from 586 Winchester Avenue the city's Shingle Style house par excellence. Varied forms, sweeping roofs, and mixtures of materials make the structure an early 20th-century architectural delight.

Near the intersection of the two streets, the 19th-century Richardsonian Romanesque station of the Cumberland Valley Railroad stands, now used adaptively. Industrial structures of the Shenandoah Pants Company, Brooklyn Brass Works, and Kilbourn Knitting Machine Company, among others, are adjacent across the tracks. Ranging in age from 1890 to the 1930s, they have great character and distinction displaying brick and glass masses, monitors, parapeted and multiple roofs, and an occasional smoke stack. Rhythms and repetition of forms are restated in the mill housing along W. Race and Porter. In several styles, now individualized by non-mill private owners, the mill village houses still show their common industrial heritage.

It is along Virginia, West Virginia, and Faulkner avenues between Stephen and Addition streets that the real Boom Town lies. Opened as a subdivision by the Martinsburg Mining and Manufacturing Company in 1891, concurrently with the opening of street service downtown this streetcar suburb boomed. Buyers and builders flocked to the area, creating an 1890s Victorian extravaganza that is the middle-class equivalent of the upper middle class along W. Burke in the Downtown Martinsburg Historic District and in sharp contrast with the working classes of the mill villages across Winchester Avenue.

Local significance of the district:
Listed in National Register of Historic Places in 1980.