The Grant Town post office opened in 1909, the earliest record of the town by name. Another post office, Gray's Flat (1853), opened inside today’s town and later closed.
2020 census: 685117 years
Founding year: the first Grant Town post office (Blevins & Helbock, CC0).
What stands out about Grant Town’s past
Read from the archive, the National Register and the record. The page puts what stands out first.
Wikipedia doesn’t have a history of Grant Town yet. The photos, dates and memories neighbors add here are how it gets written.
Grant Town is a town in Marion County, West Virginia, in the eastern United States. The population was 690 at the 2020 census. The town was formed in 1901 with the opening of the Federal Coal and Coke Company bituminous coal mine, and was named for Robert Grant, vice president of the coal company. The "Federal No. 1" mine remained open for the next 84 years until its closure in 1985. At one point it was the largest underground coal mine in the world in terms of gross production, mining the Pittsburgh coal seam. The town was incorporated as a municipality in 1946. Grant Town is the site of an 80 Megawatt electrical generation facility, located adjacent to the coal refuse areas above the town…
Its first post office opened in 1909. Between the 2010 and 2020 censuses its population grew from 613 to 685 (+12%).
Intro from Wikipedia. Population: U.S. Census Bureau.
Timeline
Grant Town, 1853 to 1946
Woven from the archive, old maps, post office records, the National Register and the people born here.
Nothing in the archives for these yearsWeddings on Main Street, storms, parades, school pictures, the old store. If it’s in your family album, it belongs here.
Founding dates: Wikidata, Wikipedia, the U.S. post office records of Blevins & Helbock (CC0) and the Census. Homes by year built: Census ACS 2020–24. National Register of Historic Places: National Park Service (list of May 22, 2026). Old photos, postcards and papers: Wikimedia Commons, the Library of Congress and other public archives, credited on each item’s page. Maps: U.S. Geological Survey historical topographic maps (via Esri) and Sanborn fire-insurance maps (Library of Congress). History text and census tables: Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0). Places that used to be: USGS Geographic Names Information System (2021). How TownRatings grades history →
From Wikimedia Commons (6), Wikidata and Wikipedia for famous people, the US Post Offices dataset (Blevins & Helbock) and the USGS Geographic Names Information System. Archive images are copied here with their credits and licenses, shown on each photo’s page. Refreshed monthly.
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