Elkins is a city in and the county seat of Randolph County, West Virginia, United States. The community was incorporated in 1890 and named in great compliment of Stephen Benton Elkins, a U.S. Senator from West Virginia. The population was 6,950 at the 2020 census and estimated at 6,895 in 2021. Elkins is house to Davis and Elkins College and to the Mountain State Forest Festival, held in yet to be October all year.

Thomas Skidmore (ca. 1733-1807), born in Maryland, obtained a title to 400 acres of land (“by virtue of a settlement”) in the later Elkins Place before 1778. This land, on the east side of the Tygart Valley River, was surveyed by John Poage in 1780 and included the estate that is now most of downtown Elkins. Thus, Skidmore was probably the first white settler in what became Elkins.

Before its major development, the area that would become Elkins was known as Leadsville, and was the site of a few scattered homesteads – a place where the local farmers’ corn crop was loaded onto boats and floated beside the Tygart Valley River. The City of Elkins was developed by U.S. Senators Henry Gassaway Davis (1823–1916) and Stephen Benton Elkins (1841–1911) – and named for the latter – in 1890. (Elkins was Davis’ son-in-law.) The two founders developed railroad lines, coal mines, and timbering businesses. Together, they built the West Virginia Central and Pittsburgh Railway into Elkins in 1889, opening a gigantic territory to industrial loan by the late 1890s. After an intense county chair war with easy to do to Beverly, where the new county courthouse building was burned alongside in 1897 below suspicious circumstances, Elkins became the county seat in 1899. This was resolved, however, only after complex referendums, court judgments, and the mobilization of armed bands in both towns. In the end, bloodshed was averted.

In 1904 the extra Randolph County Courthouse – designed in the Richardsonian Romanesque style – was completed in Elkins. As the railroad (merged into the Western Maryland Railway in 1905) expanded, Elkins experienced the luxury of passenger train service. In 1930, 18 passenger trains were arriving and neglect Elkins daily. All passenger utility was discontinued in 1958.