Weiss Knob Ski Area
Davis, West Virginia1955-c.1970
Order Weiss Knob Ski Area tees, long sleeve tees, hoodies and crewnecks. Bob Barton leased part of Cabin Mountain for 99 years and opened for the 1955 season with a 1,200-foot rope tow on a snow drift in the Canaan Valley meadows. A 1957 brochure listed a T-bar, a warming hut with a snack bar and a weekend ski patrol. Browse the styles below, and the full Weiss Knob history is further down. Down Home Apparel is an American small business remembering the best places and teams of yesteryear, and every shirt is printed to order in the USA.
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Weiss Knob Ski Area History
Weiss Knob Ski Area near Davis, West Virginia, in the Canaan Valley, is described by the state encyclopedia as the first commercial ski area south of the Mason-Dixon Line. Bob Barton, a member of the Ski Club of Washington, D.C., put $15,000 into a 99-year lease on Weiss Knob, a part of Cabin Mountain, and was in business for the 1955 season with a 1,200-foot rope tow on a snow drift in the meadows. By 1958 he had two rope tows and a T-bar there. A 1957 brochure put the area about nine and a half miles south of Davis, with a 1,000-foot T-bar, a 1,240-foot rope tow for intermediates, a warming hut with a snack bar, a small ski shop, and a ski patrol on duty on weekends.
The meadows faced northwest, took the wind, and ran steeper than beginners liked. Barton moved the operation to the back of Bald Knob, where he added three rope tows and snowmaking, which a regional history calls one of the first systems in the country. Sepp Kober ran the ski school from 1958-59. Anita Barton took it over in 1962 and renamed it the Louise Love Ski School. The 1963 Winter Carnival was held at Weiss Knob, and a regional history says it included what it calls the world's first para-ski race. The area's patches show a spruce on a snowy slope inside a ring of lettering, and a ski school patch with two red skis crossing a blue range.
Sources disagree on the dates. One account has the first Weiss Knob running from 1955 to 1958 and the second site opening in 1959. DCSki's profile says 1959, and the Snow Sports Museum of West Virginia says the second site closed around 1965 or 1966. A reader and the DCSki editors point to 1968, and another reader says it lasted until about 1970, when the coming state park ski area put it out of business. Barton blamed state land condemnations and the proposed state ski area for scaring off investors.
The state's ski area opened in December 1971 on the original Weiss Knob slopes. The second Weiss Knob site has been run since 1979 as a cross-country center, and a state park ski area cuts across the first.