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Sitting on the beautiful banks of the river, many regard as the oldest in the Western Hemisphere is the tiny town of Thurmond. While it is still purring and whirring and shows some evidence of life, it looks almost completely abandoned. It exudes an appearance of a town frozen in time: part eerie, part fascinating. To any bewildered onlooker, nothing remotely suggests that Thurmond was once a bustling town that, at the dawn of the 20th century, was handling more freight than Richmond, Virginia, and Cincinnati, Ohio combined.

During its Gilded Age, the town, now nestled within New River Gorge National Park, would also go on to earn a notorious reputation as a place where booze flowed freely, where gambling left men hopelessly pauperized, and where prostitution thrived. The scene of all these scandals was the Dun Glen Hotel, sometimes called Dunglen or Dunglenn. Well, the Dunglen would also stage the longest-running poker game.

New River
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New River that flows near Dunglen

Here’s The Historical Context Of The Dunglen Hotel

Las Vegas, Nevada, often reputed as an adult playground, is today well known, perhaps even celebrated, as America’s Sin City. Of course, among the many other curious nicknames, it has gotten over the years. Well, this may come as a startling surprise, but in its heyday, Thurmond was often regarded as the Las Vegas of its era. The town was the archetype of a wild west way of life where saloons lined the street on one side and brothels on the other. Thurmond was called many names, names that often consisted of various choice words. Some even called it “Hell.” A columnist of a local newspaper even suggested that the only difference between Thurmond and hell was the presence of a river in the former.

West Virginia
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Looking across the New River Bridge

Yet Thurmond was not all hell. And if a place in Thurmond would be called hell, it would have to be the Dunglen Hotel. The story goes back to 1901 when Thurmond was established by a Baptist man of strong convictions who bears the same surname and who would go on to ban the sale of alcohol within the city. At the time, the area was known for its gold and coal deposits. In this technological age, an age of steam locomotives, coal, often used as fuel to heat water in the train's boiler, was an economic hot cake.

Related: 20 Once-Popular Tourist Hot Spots That Are Now Eerily Abandoned

New River
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The New River Bridge near Dunglen

With the building of a freight station and as the main railroad center on the C&O Railway, Thurmond would soon attract hordes of people from all over the country, including a coal baron known as Thomas McKell. McKell would go on to buy thousands of acres on the Southside of the town. Since the town’s founder had banned the sale of alcohol within the city and saw a business opportunity he wanted to exploit, Thomas McKell would build a hotel just outside the boundaries of the city where alcohol could be sold and consumed freely. The name of that hotel was Dunglen.

How Dunglen Hotel Defined Thurmond’s Scandalous Reputation

Some accounts say that the 100-room Dunglen hotel was a three-story building. Other accounts are confident it was a four-and-a-half edifice. Controversy seems to be its defining feature. Perhaps there should be no surprises. It was built in a cloud of controversy. Controversy over the sale of alcohol. However, there’s no controversy when it comes to Dunglen’s scandalous reputation. Here’s where coal barons gambled away huge amounts of money. There was booze. There was an elegant ballroom. There were dancing girls. And behind closed doors, prostitution thrived. Yet all these were in the Prohibition Era.

There’s “no Sunday west of Clifton Forge,” it was said of Thurmond, “and no God west of Hinton.” This kind of moral atmosphere would spawn two record-breaking happenings. One of these involved a business transaction. According to various accounts, the largest financial transaction in the area took place inside the glamorous hotel. It was a more than 1-million-dollar sale of one of the local mines. The second record-breaking event would be more enduring and more popular. Dunglen hotel would stage the longest-running poker game. This poker game ran not for one year or two—but for an incredible 14 years. This record would be captured in both Ripley’s Believe it or Not and in the Guinness Book of World Records.

Related: West Virginia Is Also Called 'Almost Heaven,' And This Is Why You Should Visit

Here’s How Dunglen Hotel Went Down

The cause of Dunglen’s demise was fire, the same spiraling element that caused almost irreparable damage to the oldest scientific institution in Brazil. It is not clear how Dunglen hotel caught fire, but the tragedy occurred on July 23rd, 1930, just before midnight.

Though abandoned and almost forgotten, the town on which Dunglen once stood on—and which Dunglen scandalized—is attractive in a way, almost lively. It boasts a number of fascinating attractions worth exploring. To many, the history of one is the history of the other.