Named for Captain Bull, a leader of the Delaware Nation, Bulltown was later the site of a small saltworks operation and later still, on October 13, 1863, the scene of a Civil War skirmish. The brief battle, which resulted in a victory for Union forces, focused on a fort and a covered bridge that carried the Weston and Gauley Bridge Turnpike across the Little Kanawha River.
In 1972 the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers began constructing the Burnsville Lake, and in December 1978, the dam was put into service. As part of the mitigative processes the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966 requires for federally sponsored projects, the Corps removed, rebuilt, and restored four historic structures that would otherwise have been inundated. These were relocated to the Bulltown Historical Area, near the in situ Cunningham House and outbuildings, where traces of the old turnpike and trenches of the fort remain. In their pleasant country setting, the buildings of Bulltown are instructive examples of midnineteenth-century log building types and methods of construction.