Pleasant Hill

Pleasant Hill was a rural community nine miles southwest of Gilmer off State Highway 155 in south central Upshur County. The community, which took its name from its location on a small rise, was established sometime before the Civil War and is said to have been one of the earliest Anglo settlements in the county. John T. Holloway, a Christian evangelist, held revival meetings in the area and founded a church around 1865. The town grew rapidly after the Civil War, and at its height in the 1880s and early 1890s had a church, a store, a cotton gin and grist mill, and a blacksmith shop. T. J. Allison built a private school during the 1880s, and for a time the two-story frame structure was the largest school in the area. When the St. Louis Southwestern Railway was constructed in the early 1890s, it bypassed the town, and most of the residents moved to the newly-formed community of Pritchett three miles to the north. By the early 1930s Pleasant Hill no longer appeared on highway maps, and in 1990 it was a ghost town. No population estimates were available.