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The
people of WEST VIRGINIA are only
half joking when they call their state the
Ireland of the US. Generally poor and
almost entirely rural, it shares a similar
history of exploitation by outside powers,
with timber and coal-mining
companies taking advantage of the rich
natural resources while giving little in
return. But, quite apart from the almost
Third World deprivation which endures in
some areas (and which, along with John
Denver songs and the barefoot hillbillies
supposed to inhabit its backwoods reaches,
still colors most outsiders’
preconceptions), West Virginia is also, in
places at least, incredibly beautiful,
holding the longest whitewater rivers and
most extensive wilderness areas in the
eastern US. The extreme topography which
has historically isolated its inhabitants
now makes this a popular destination for
hikers and outdoors enthusiasts, and the
moonshiners of old have been replaced by
ski instructors and mountain-bike guides.
Pioneer
settlers only started to cross the
mountains of western Virginia in
significant numbers during the middle of
the seventeenth century. Farming small
plots of land with their own labor, they
came to have ever less in common with the
slave-holding plantation owners of old
Virginia, and when the Civil War broke
out, the area declined to secede from the
Union. The Supreme Court never ruled
whether West Virginia was legally entitled
to declare itself a state, and Virginia
itself has still not officially recognized
the split. West Virginia has, however,
developed a political and economic
identity of its own. Around 1900, when
railroads from the East Coast first
reached into the mountainous interior,
timber companies clear-cut stand after
stand of forest, setting up a succession
of mill towns, each dismantled in its turn
when they moved on somewhere new – Cass,
now preserved within the Allegheny
National Forest, is one of the few that
was left intact. Later on, coal-mining
conglomerates, especially in the south,
perfected the “company town” approach,
wherein workers were paid a little bit
less each month than the amount they owed
for their company-provided food and
lodging. Coal companies still exert
immense power in West Virginia, but the
real key to the state’s future prosperity
is tourism, which in places now accounts
for over half its income.
The most
popular destination, the restored 1850s
town of Harpers Ferry, is barely in
West Virginia at all, standing just across
the broad rivers which form its Maryland
and Virginia borders. To the west, the
Allegheny Mountains stretch for over
150 miles; more than a million acres of
hardwood forest rival New England for
brilliant autumnal color. West Virginia’s
oldest and most attractive town,
Lewisburg, sits just off I-64 at the
mountains’ southern foot, while the
capital, Charleston, lies in the
comparatively flat Ohio River valley of
the west.
Click here to go to West
Virginia web site. |
