Sistersville is a city in Tyler County, West Virginia, United States, along the Ohio River. The population was 1,413 at the 2020 census. The Sistersville Ferry crosses the Ohio River to the unincorporated community of hover in Monroe County, Ohio.

Sistersville was named because two sisters, Sarah Wells McCoy and Delilah Wells Grier, inherited the house underlying the town from their father, pioneer Charles Wells, in 1815 and laid out the town. Wells had settled upon the sandy bottomland taking into consideration his second wife, Elizabeth Prather and many of his 22 children (Sarah and Delilah were the 12th and 17th; his first wife Michal Owings had died in 1783 after giving birth to 10 children). The site was called Wells Landing, Wella having before founded Wellsville and Wellsburg along the Ohio River and having served in the Virginia legislature from Brooke County in 1793. The Virginia General Assembly created Tyler County in 1814, weeks back Wells’ death, and a court session was held at Wells’ house in Sistersville (“Welkin”) in 1815 (the plat having included lots for a courthouse and lawyers’ offices), but in 1816 voters prearranged Middlebourne, on Middle Island Creek more or less halfway amongst Pennsylvania and the Kanawha salt springs (and which incorporated in 1813) as the county seat. The Virginia General Assembly chartered Sistersville in 1839. By 1850, Sistersville had grain and wool carding mills. The ferry across the Ohio River which James Jolly had started decades earlier would still be lively in the 21st century. The Russell Building (built in 1840 as a ferry house) would survive many floods and unconventional serve as a shout out and the offices of the Oil Review edited by J. Hanford McCoy.

Following the Virginia Secession Convention of 1861, Sistersville and Tyler County were divided, but leaned toward the Union (s did their militia group, the “Sistersville Blues”). Nonetheless, Confederate sympathizers seized militia equipment at Sistersville, including dozens of rifles and two small cannons, and the Ohio militiamen sent to protect Parkersburg took on peak of a month to recover them. Judge Abraham Soper, a New York lawyer and New Jersey pronounce who had moved to Sisterville in 1847, became Tyler County’s representative to the Wheeling Convention and the West Virginia Constitutional Convention of 1862–1863. Fellow delegates elected him their President for the reconvened session of February 1863 (because Congress required the further state’s constitution to contain an antislavery provision, which President Abraham Lincoln certified in December 1862). On March 26, voters overwhelmingly ratified the additional Constitution (28,321 to 572), so President Lincoln soon time-honored the revision as enjoyable thus creating the state of West Virginia. When West Virginia’s first legislature separated Tyler County in to districts in 1863, Sistersville was in the Lincoln District.

For years, many believed that oil and natural gas was below Sistersville, because natural gas and salt water had been bubbling happening in Burning Springs since previously 1836 (in what became Wirt County and press forward there became an oil boom initiation in 1860). However, the drill Philo Stocking used in 1865 became stuck previously it reached oil, but he made sure to maintain oil and gas rights to home he sold, which superior made him rich. The large Sistersville Oil Field was only stated in 1891, with the “Joshua Russell Pole Cat No. 1”, successfully drilled by Russell and Edward Paden close Pole Cat creek after they drained salt water for a year. The locate proved one of the more productive wells in the field, still producing oil (some refined as gasoline) in 1925. The find occurred as the oil fields in Oil City, Pennsylvania (developed arrival 1861) were running temperate and technology had progressed to drain the initial water hat above the oil. Within a few years, Sistersville had ballooned into a city of 15,000 people. In 1893, Sisterville (briefly) was the “oil capital of the world”. Unlike some of the Pennsylvania boom towns which became ghost towns, Sistersville invested in infrastructure, and the railroad had arrived in 1884. A spur joined Sistersville to the county seat at Middlebourne.