At 6:30 on a summer Tuesday, the performance deck behind the Francis Creative Arts Center starts filling in the way it always does: a few lawn chairs first, then more, then somebody's cooler, then the first notes of a banjo tuning up at the corner of Maple Avenue and Washington Street. On August 18 that banjo belongs to Rick Tincher, playing alongside Jessica Schoonover. Seven years ago, Tincher was picking banjo for a different act on this same deck, a band called Shortline Junction, back when the shows still happened on the lawn instead of a built stage. He's a state banjo champion in Ohio, West Virginia, and Maryland. He's also, in the way this town works, both a headliner and an alum of the show that came before him.
That detail is the whole story. Downtown New Martinsville's cultural life isn't a rotating cast of touring acts passing through. It's a small, tight circle of musicians and shopkeepers who keep showing up in different configurations, year after year, and the reason a Tuesday night here feels worth planning around is that the same handful of people have spent two decades building the infrastructure that makes it repeatable.
A Deck With Twenty-Five Years Behind It
The Francis Creative Arts Center itself carries that same continuity. The building was donated by Jack Francis, in memory of his late wife Elizabeth Francis, to West Virginia Northern Community College for use as an arts center, and a $100,000 renovation of the space happened alongside the founding of ArtsLink in 2001. ArtsLink is the arts council for Wetzel and Tyler counties, and the Coffeehouse Series is its longest-running public habit. What used to be folding chairs on the lawn is now a proper performance deck, a small but real capital investment in a series that could have stayed casual and didn't.
The 2026 lineup runs through late August, free and sponsored by First Mutual Bank, every show at 6:30 p.m. on that same deck:
- Shortline Junction — July 21, the Wetzel County bluegrass band formed in 2020
- Robert "Moose" Dodrill — July 28
- Mountain State Bluegrass Express — August 4
- Rick Tincher and Jessica Schoonover — August 18
- Crow's Company — August 25, the season finale
If you're reading this before the 18th, two Tuesdays remain. Bring a lawn chair either way. Light refreshments are served, and the show moves indoors if the weather doesn't cooperate.
The Same Names, Different Configurations
Shortline Junction's July 21 lineup included Ben Tharp on guitar and lead vocals, Dustin Terpinning on banjo, George Daniels on upright bass, and Jim Simpson on mandolin. Tharp is the through-line. He's been performing since the early 1960s, back when he played rock and roll with a band called Those Guys, and today he's a member of the Wetzel County Music Hall of Fame. Terpinning shows up across town in more than one project, including a band called Crandell Creek, and he's been trading instruments in Shortline Junction's lineup for years, banjo in some seasons and mandolin in others depending on who else is on stage.
Mountain State Bluegrass Express carries its own version of that same staying power. As of a few years ago the band had been playing together for fifty years, with Ed Hildebrand on fiddle, Brenda Strahler on guitar and vocals, Kevin Eddy on bass and vocals, and Al Spencer on banjo. Half a century of the same regional bluegrass acts trading Tuesday nights on the same deck isn't a coincidence. It's what happens when a town's music scene is small enough that everybody eventually plays with everybody, and the ArtsLink series has been the venue that keeps giving them a reason to.
Main Street Runs On One Bookstore's Spreadsheet
None of this would be easy to find if it weren't for Heather Wetzel. She's owned and operated The Book Store on North Street for more than two decades, a shop packed with new and used titles across every genre, plus the odder inventory that makes a small-town bookstore worth walking into: cryptid guides, puppets, biographies, candles. A few years ago, after her mother passed away and she found herself with more time and mental space than she expected, she started asking why nobody had ever put downtown New Martinsville's events in one place. She was, in her own words, tired of having to search each individual place to see what was going on. So she built the fix herself: a Facebook group called Downtown New Martinsville, WV, meant as one stop for events, business information, menus, and sales across every shop on the strip.
The theme days came out of the same restlessness. National Unicorn Day led to Dino Day, then Fairy Day, then Harry Potter's Birthday, which was the first event big enough to pull in outside groups like the WVU Extension and 4-H for craft tables. Once Wetzel realized how much those days helped foot traffic, she started asking other downtown businesses to join in, which is how a single owner's whim turned into coordinated Galentine's Day and Spring Shop Hop events, with multiple stores staying open later on the same night.
If you want to know what's actually happening on Main Street this month, that Facebook group is a better source than any calendar a chamber of commerce could print. It exists because one shop owner decided the information gap was hers to solve.
A Record Store That Talks To The Rest Of The Country
On North Main Street, Kraken Records tells a related but different version of the same story. Kim Nelson and Ryan Shifflett had been selling records online for a few years before they opened the physical storefront, once they'd built enough inventory to justify the risk. Kim wanted, in her words, to bring something fun and unique to New Martinsville. What they built instead turned out to be a shop with a national footprint that its town's size would never predict on its own.
New Martinsville's population sits just over 5,000. Kraken Records still shows up in the same release-week rundowns as record stores in cities many times its size. It hosted a Record Store Day event and an early listening party for Noah Kahan's music in April 2026. It was one of the participating shops named alongside Amoeba Music in Los Angeles and Waterloo Records in Austin for Lamb of God's nationwide "Into Oblivion" listening weekend, and it turned up on the list of stores tied to Bruno Mars' run as 2026 Record Store Day Ambassador. A shop this small getting folded into release-week events built for stores in Los Angeles and Nashville says something about how connected a two-person operation can be when the owners treat the hobby as seriously as the business.
How To Actually Use Any Of This
The remaining Coffeehouse dates are August 18 and August 25, both at 6:30 p.m. on the Francis Creative Arts Center's performance deck, corner of Maple and Washington. The Book Store is on North Street if you want to see what a shop with two decades of institutional memory looks like in person, and the Downtown New Martinsville, WV Facebook group is the fastest way to know if a shop hop or a theme day is coming up before you hear about it secondhand. Kraken Records keeps its own event calendar for listening parties and Record Store Day drops throughout the year.
None of this is loud. There's no billboard for any of it. It's held together by a bookstore owner who got tired of checking ten different places, an arts council that's kept the same free concert series running for a quarter century, and a record shop that decided a town of five thousand people didn't need to feel small. That's the actual texture of a Tuesday night here, and it's not something you'll find by searching "things to do in New Martinsville." You find it by knowing which Facebook group to join.
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