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 coalmining 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, West Virginia is also, in places at least, incredibly
beautiful, and can boast the longest white-water rivers and most
extensive wilderness areas in the eastern US. The extreme topography,
which has historically isolated its inhabitants, now makes the
state 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and the moonshiners of old have been replaced by ski instructors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 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 state's 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.
