Roane County · West Virginia

Looneyville, West Virginia: A Town Named After a Real Person

Looneyville has had its name — and its post office — since 1870. It is named after Robert Looney, a pioneer settler, and the local Looney family is still there.

Pocatalico River, West Virginia — Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA)

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Looneyville 🇺🇸

West Virginia, United States

Looneyville is an unincorporated community in Roane County, West Virginia, set on Flat Creek of the Pocatalico River. There are about a dozen houses, a country store, a church or two, and a state route. The town is named after Robert Looney, a pioneer settler — and yes, that was really his last name.

Who Robert Looney was

The Looney family arrived in what is now West Virginia in the early 1800s, part of the wave of Scots-Irish settlers who moved west across the Appalachians after the American Revolution. Robert Looney established a homestead on Flat Creek and gave his name to the surrounding settlement. A post office named "Looneyville" was established in 1870 — and despite occasional 19th- and 20th-century proposals to change it (most notably during a brief 1920s campaign to rename the town "Loonyville" or "Lowville"), the original name has stuck.

Modern Looneyville

Today, Looneyville is one of dozens of small unincorporated communities scattered across Roane County, most of them named after early settler families. It sits on West Virginia Route 36, roughly halfway between the town of Spencer to the north and Charleston to the south. The community has no incorporated government, but it does have a USPS address, a small Pentecostal church, and a country store. The Looney surname remains common in the area.

Fun facts

There is no proven family connection between the West Virginian Looneys and the cartoon Looney Tunes — that title was coined in 1929 by Warner Bros. animator Hugh Harman, decades after the post office opened.
Roane County, West Virginia, contains at least 40 separately named unincorporated communities — many of them named for the families of the original settlers.
Looneyville's ZIP code is 25259.

Sources

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Text on this page is original Terralocate editorial. Background facts compiled from the public sources listed above. Images via Wikimedia Commons under their respective licenses (typically CC BY-SA or public domain).