Take me home, country roads

By CHARLES STAFFORD

© St. Petersburg Times, published July 9, 2000

The hardy soul of West Virginia stretches high into the beautiful Allegheny Mountains, across its verdant valleys and deep into its coal-fed roots.

Driving east from Morgantown on Interstate 68 on a lovely Sunday morning in the fall, the beauty is breathtaking. The rising sun burnishes the red, bronze, gold and green leaves of the trees that cover these West Virginia hills, while in the valleys the deep mist patiently awaits the sun to melt it away.

And in my wandering and vagrant heart the words come again: This is my native land.

Describing for the traveler the attractions of this wild and wonderful state is as difficult as describing its really weird shape. It suffers from contradictions.

God blessed these hills and valleys with surface beauty and the earth beneath with huge wealth. People, mostly exploiters living outside West Virginia's borders, dug for the subterranean wealth, leaving ugliness behind.

In tribute to the hearty mountain dwellers who scratched livings from their hillside garden plots and the bounty of the forests, West Virginia's motto is Montani Semper Liberi -- "Mountaineers (are) Always Free." But for decades, lasting almost to the middle of the 20th century, the West Virginians who extracted the black diamond, coal, from these same hills lived in bondage.

It isn't easy being a native West Virginian, even one like me who has migrated beyond its borders. We are perceived as the fruit of a poor, backward, violent land. And, oh my, the jokes.

How do you tell an affluent West Virginian? He has two cars out in the front yard . . . both up on blocks!

Well, now hear this: West Virginia is uncommonly rich in history. Its hills and valleys offer a wealth of sporting opportunities: skiing, white-water rafting, camping, hiking, mountain biking.

But to seek attractions for the 21st century traveler, we must first track the history of this land.

European settlers began filtering into western Virginia while America was still largely a British colony. The area was not heavily populated by Indians, who regarded it as too rugged to inhabit, but it was their hunting ground.

George Washington was 17 when Lord Fairfax hired him to survey his western lands. Washington acquired land for himself and began his career as a soldier here during the French and Indian War in the 1750s. That war ended with the Treaty of Paris, in which the French ceded to England all land east of the Mississippi River.

What historian John Alexander Williams calls the climactic event in the history of colonial western Virginia took place on Oct. 10, 1774, at the confluence of the Great Kanawha and Ohio rivers, a place called Point Pleasant. About 1,100 Virginia militiamen led by Col. Andrew Lewis faced off with roughly the same number of Indians, commanded by Shawnee Chief Cornstalk. There were heavy losses on both sides before Cornstalk withdrew in late afternoon. He later negotiated a peace treaty with the royal governor of Virginia.

Today the Point Pleasant battleground is a park with a monument commemorating the battle. Here also is the oldest hewn log cabin in the Kanawha Valley.

From Bath to spas

In 1776, the year the colonies declared their independence from Britain, friends and family of Washington established a town named Bath in what is now the state's eastern panhandle. Washington had enjoyed its sparkling mineral waters in 1748.

Though its official name remains Bath, it is now known as Berkeley Springs, home to five full-service spas and several art galleries.

In 1818 the National Road, the first national highway, was completed from Cumberland to Wheeling on the Ohio River. By 1825, Wheeling was second only to Richmond in population among Virginia's cities.

At mid-century, the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad pushed westward from Baltimore, up a tortuous route over the Alleghenies and down the western slope to Grafton. This little town on the hillsides above a bend in the Tygart's Valley River suddenly became an important rail center, the junction of B&O rail lines extending to Wheeling and Parkersburg.

Train shops and a marshalling yard were built, along with a large train station and adjoining hotel. Train crews based here took the trains coming down from the mountains and onward west.

While it isn't noteworthy in Grafton's history, I was born here in 1923, the product of a train dispatcher on the Parkersburg Branch and his lovely wife, the daughter of a B&0 conductor.

[Photo: by Steve Shaluta Jr., West Virginia Division of Tourism] Historic Harpers Ferry, where John Brown led supporters in a raid on a federal arsenal, is seen from Maryland Heights, where the Potomac and Shenandoah rivers converge.

But I'm ahead of my story.

By 1850 the nation was caught up in the debate over slavery. Virginia's mountain area, where there were few slaves, was sandwiched between two ways of life -- slave-holding easterners and slave-free Ohio.

On Oct. 16, 1859, a Sunday, John Brown and 18 followers crossed the Potomac River at Harpers Ferry, seized hostages, broke into the federal arsenal and barricaded themselves. Brown's plan was to seize weapons for a war to free slaves.

Marines, under the command of Col. Robert E. Lee, arrived from Washington. At dawn on Tuesday, Lt. J.E.B. Stuart presented a note demanding Brown's surrender. When the demand was refused, Stuart jumped aside as the Marines charged. Sixteen men were killed, including two of Brown's sons.

Brown and six of his followers were tried on charges of murder and treason at nearby Charles Town and sentenced to be hanged. At the trial's conclusion, Brown -- brigand or hero? -- proclaimed that if he had acted on behalf of the powerful or well-born, his act would have been applauded, but instead his effort was in behalf of God's "despised poor."

Brown was hanged on Dec. 2. Present was a unit of cadets from Virginia Military Institute under the leadership of Maj. Thomas J. Jackson, who would soon gain the nickname "Stonewall."

The war arrives

In 1862, Confederate troops led by Jackson surrounded Harpers Ferry and forced the surrender of the Union troops based there. Jackson shipped machinery from the arsenal to Richmond, blew up the B&O bridge and withdrew.

Harpers Ferry climbs a hill where the Shenandoah River runs into the Potomac. The modern town is little different from that moment when history embraced it 141 years ago. Its historical section is maintained as a national historic park, featuring small museums in original buildings.

The state of West Virginia was born in a cradle of crisis. When Abraham Lincoln was elected president in November 1860, South Carolina broke away from the Union. After Fort Sumter was fired on the following April, Virginia followed.

The next month, Confederate forces seized Grafton. With federal forces advancing on them, the Rebels withdrew about 15 miles to Philippi. The first land battle of the Civil War began there on June 3. It lasted only a few minutes and no one was killed, but Confederate forces were driven south.

The troops from Grafton crossed the Tygart's Valley River over a wooden covered bridge into downtown Philippi. The bridge is still there, carrying traffic from U.S. 119 to U.S. 250.

Leaders of the western counties gathered in Wheeling, in what is now called Independence Hall, and on June 17, 1861, they issued " A Declaration of the People of Virginia" that created the Restored Government of Virginia, with its capital in Wheeling.

Virginia had seceded from the Union; the western counties seceded from Virginia.

On Dec. 31, 1862, President Lincoln signed legislation creating West Virginia as the 35th state, the only one in the Union ripped from the territory of an existing state.

Exactly how the new state's lines were drawn isn't clear, but one portion is: The three most-eastern counties of the Eastern Panhandle were included because the main line of the B&O traversed them.

Wheeling's Independence Hall is now a museum in which the centerpiece is the original copy of "A Declaration of the People of Virginia." The hall provides a comprehensive history of that time including recorded words of the debate.

If you are a country music fan, you can move from the history lesson to the Capitol Music Hall from which Jamboree USA has been broadcast for more than 50 years by radio station WWVA.y.

In another of those West Virginia contradictions, the state's favorite son is Stonewall Jackson, the West Point graduate and VMI professor who became Gen. Robert E. Lee's right arm and a Confederate hero.

Jackson, who was born in Clarksburg in 1824, lost his father when he was 2 and his mother when he was 7. He grew up in the bachelor home of an uncle at Jackson's Mill, on the west fork of the Monongahela River near Weston.

Although Jackson considered the area around the mill his home, he disapproved of the statehood movement. After his death in the war, his widow said the general "died as he was born, a Virginian."

Today Jackson's Mill is a year-round conference and historical district. The original mill houses a museum. A few yards away, the huge stone wheels of the Blaker Mill grind grain into flour. The Stonewall Jackson Heritage Arts and Crafts Jubilee is held here each Labor Day weekend.

The infamous family feud

During the war, gangs of bushwhackers roamed the hills, some fighting for the Union, others for the Confederacy. In the southwestern part of the state, where the hills are high and the valleys narrow and deep and the Tug Fork separates West Virginia from Kentucky, the Confederate Hatfields and the Federalist McCoys were downright hostile.

Hostility did not end with the war.

The Hatfields crossed over the river from their West Virginia home on an August day in 1882 for the excitement offered by an election taking place in Kentucky.

In the afternoon, after the consumption of an imposing amount of whiskey, Tolbert McCoy and Ellison Hatfield began fighting. Tolbert stabbed Ellison, and then one of Tolbert's brothers shot Ellison in the head.

While family members carried the wounded Ellison home, his three brothers, including Anderson "Devil Anse" Hatfield, took the McCoy men prisoner and held them in an abandoned schoolhouse on the West Virginia side of the river. The McCoys were told that they would die if Ellison died.

He died two days later. At dusk, the Hatfields took the McCoys back into Kentucky, tied them to some bushes and shot them. And the feud was on, chronicled in newspapers throughout the East.

There were killings back and forth for the next eight years. Then, in early 1891, Anse Hatfield sent word to the press, "The war spirit in me has abated, and I sincerely rejoice at the prospect of peace."

Anse died peacefully in his log home in 1921. His family erected an Italian marble statue of him over his grave in a cemetery near Matewan.

Things have changed for my hometown. No longer are Grafton's Main Street sidewalks crowded on Saturday night the way they were during my teen years. Shopping is now done at suburban malls in Morgantown, Fairmont and Bridgeport, and many Main Street storefronts are empty.

The B&O no longer exists. The roundhouse and shops are gone. The Parkersburg Branch, which carried the luxurious National Limited and Diplomat passenger trains out of Baltimore west to Cincinnati and St. Louis, has been torn up. The roadbed is still maintained from Clarksburg to Parkersburg as a hiking and biking trail.

One thing hasn't changed. Memorial Day is still Grafton's most important day. Schoolchildren carrying flowers march up Main Street, across the bridge to the West Side and out Walnut Street (past my boyhood home) to the National Cemetery, where they decorate the graves.

The cemetery is the burial place of Pvt. T. Bailey Brown, the first soldier killed during the Civil War. Buried there also are 1,251 casualties of that war and subsequent ones.

In the 1930s, a dam -- the largest east of the Mississippi -- was erected across the Tygart's Valley River just south of Grafton. It created an 11-mile-long lake. Along its eastern shore is Tygart Lake State Park with a lakeside lodge, cabins, campsite, boating, fishing and swimming.

When coal was king

In the state's early days, the capital was moved from Wheeling to Charleston, back to Wheeling and finally to Charleston to stay.

In 1932, the lovely Capitol was erected on the banks of the Kanawha River. The Capitol dome, covered in gold leaf, rises 293 feet in the air. In the rotunda, 180 feet above the floor, a 2-ton chandelier gleams with 10,080 pieces of Czechoslovakian crystal. Outside are statues of Booker T. Washington, the son of slaves who grew up in nearby Malden and went on to become the nation's most influential black leader at the turn of the century, and Stonewall Jackson.

Nearby is the Cultural Center, which houses a state museum tracing West Virginia history from Indian migration to the early 20th century. Guided tours of the Capitol can be arranged daily.

In the opening years of the 20th century, West Virginia was wracked by warfare and violence. The culprit was coal and the greed of those who sought their fortunes through its extraction.

In Monongah, five miles south of Fairmont, there were five mines operating in December 1907, on the banks of the West Fork River. They were supposedly models of the best in mining. The portals of Nos. Six and Eight were about two miles apart, but they connected underground.

At 10:20 in the morning of Dec. 6, an explosive mixture of coal dust and methane gas turned the connected tunnels into giant cannons. The blast took the lives of 358 miners. Three more were killed during rescue efforts.

It remains the worst coal-mine disaster in this nation's history. A memorial to the dead is located in Fairmont's Mary Lou Retton Park. (Remember her? The West Virginia teen won gold, silver and bronze medals for gymnastics in the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles.)

The migration of Italians to the northern coal field was so heavy during this period that in Clarksburg, an Italian Heritage Festival is held in early September. The main street is closed, canvas-covered stalls are erected for food sales, and dancing and Italian games are held.

Monongah was a tragic accident. But in the narrow valleys stretching south and west of Charleston to the Tug River, there was warfare between striking miners and mine guards.

In the northern coal fields, miners lived in established towns. There were few of those in the southern fields, so coal companies erected their own towns near the mines -- company towns. The company built the houses out of wood harvested from the hillsides and rented them to the miners. It owned the store. Very often, the miners were paid with scrip, rather than cash, which was redeemable for food and supplies only at the store.

The miners had to buy their picks and shovels and the black powder that they used. The homes were divided into clusters -- one for whites, another for blacks and another for foreign-born miners.

Organizers of the United Mine Workers of America were signing up the miners and seeking recognition as their bargaining agent with the coal operators. In 1912, miners went on strike in the Paint Creek and Cabin Creek valleys. Guards evicted the miners from their company-owned homes, and they took shelter in tent colonies.

The hills echoed with gunfire as miners and guards shot at one another.

In Charleston, Gov. Henry D. Hatfield (a nephew of Devil Anse Hatfield) initiated negotiations between the union and the operators. Finally, Hatfield issued a "compromise proposition" that included a 9-hour day for miners, the right to employ people to oversee the calculation of wages and the right to spend wages at places besides the company stores.

The operators accepted because most of the propositions were already law that they had simply ignored. The union ended the strike.

But the violence continued. On May 19, 1920, in the town of Matewan, a firefight broke out between mine police from the Baldwin-Felts agency and union men and pro-union local officials. Ten died in the "Matewan Massacre."

One of the local officials, "Two Gun" Sid Hatfield, became a miners' hero. When he was killed on the steps of the courthouse in Welsh by a Baldwin-Felts agent in August 1921, 3,000 armed miners fought a five-day battle with a sheriff's posse at Blair Mountain. U.S. troops finally forced an end to the fighting.

The UMW pulled back from Mingo County. Then came the Great Depression, and the demand for coal went into free-fall. The union's hold on West Virginia mines deteriorated and was not restored until the beginning of World War II.

For the flavor of the life in a mining town in the 1950s, there is nothing better than Homer Hickam's tale of his boyhood in Coalwood where he and four friends, inspired by the Soviet Union's launching of Sputnik, experimented with rocketry. The novel, now a film, is October Sky, originally published as Rocket Boys.

To get a feel for a coal miner's life, Beckley -- the self-styled "Smokeless Coal Capital of the World" -- is your destination.

In New River Park, open from spring until fall, former miners take visitors on a 45-minute tour of an exhibition coal mine. A coal museum offers local history. Nearby is a three-room coal-company house from the turn of the century.

A quick trip through other sites to see:

[Photo: Thomas R. Fletcher] Nearly 900 feet up, the New River Gorge Bridge carries U.S. 19 -- yes, that U.S. 19 -- through spectacular scenery near Fayetteville, W.Va.

For beauty, the ancient New River drops into the 1,000-foot-deep New River Gorge. The following 53 miles are designated as the New River Gorge National River. The National Park Service has visitors' centers at Hinton, Grandview, Thurmond and Canyon Rim. The New River has excellent kayaking and whitewater rafting.

More than 200,000 acres of West Virginia have been set aside for their scenic beauty and historical significance. The state operates 38 parks and nine forests. There are also all or parts of three national forests in the state. Eight of the state parks have lodges, and 13 have cabins. All are moderately priced.

Some of the state's most beautiful scenery is in the eastern section called the Potomac Highlands, where the summer heat is mild and the winter snowy. Canaan Valley Resort State Park offers golf and hiking in the one season, and skiing over 34 interconnecting slopes in the other. Snowshoe Mountain Resort has 56 slopes and trails for downhill skiers and was ranked in the top 10 among eastern destinations by Ski magazine.

Several eastern West Virginia locations offer scenic railroad rides. At the old logging town of Cass, a restored Shay locomotive labors uphill to Whittaker Station and then on to Bald Knob, the second highest point in the state. The train travels the same line that was built in 1902 to haul lumber to the mill in Cass.

Huntington has an excellent art museum and is home to Marshall University, a rising power in the world of college football. In the fall the Collis P. Huntington Railroad Society offers the New River Train Excursion, which takes visitors from Huntington to Hinton through the New River Gorge.

On a football Saturday in fall, the only place to be for thousands of West Virginians is Morgantown, the home of West Virginia University, with a student body of 22,000. They crowd the 70,000-seat football stadium to watch their beloved Mountaineers.

After all these words, you have a smattering of the sad history and spectacular beauty of wild, wonderful West Virginia. Believe me, it's a darn good state for the shape it's in.

--- Former St. Petersburg Times Washington bureau chief Charles Stafford, a Pulitzer Prize winner, now lives in Springfield, Va. He acknowledges John Alexander Williams and his book "West Virginia, A History" for many of the historical facts in this account.

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