Cameron West Virginia

Cameron West Virginia was the town that most intrigued me.  Aside from the city of Fairmount, it was the largest community I would drive through on Route 250, and it had a new school and an intriguing past.

Coming from the north, I passed the new school in the woods perhaps a couple miles before entering the town.  It’s a gleaming, spanking new middle/high school, built at a cost of $31M, by an engineering firm that received awards for its green design. 

It serves 323 students and draws, I suspect, from a much larger area than Cameron.  It was by far the most modern building I’d seen since I crossed into West Virginia.  I expected to see a town that was a hub for all the little towns I’d driven through, with maybe a Dollar General and a good chain grocery store.  I had it figured as a place to stop for lunch.

But when I got to downtown Cameron, at the bottom of a valley, I was surrounded by old brick buildings, many of which appeared vacant.

I drove by two tall churches.  There was something of a food and clothing distribution going on near the Presbyterian church. An older woman with a young child, likely her granddaughter, was crossing Church Street heading towards folding tables near the sidewalk stacked with canned goods and neatly folded piles of clothing.  I stopped to let her cross the street.  She took the little girl by the hand, waved, and smiled.

On Railroad Street, I slowed down at a newer concrete building with no sign.  It was across from the grade school.  There were cars in the parking lot.  This sign on a lamppost close to the building caught my eye.

 I pulled in, parked, and walked to the door.  I still couldn’t tell what was inside, but as I got close to the door, I saw shopping carts through a large window.

When I walked in, I saw it was a grocery store.  There was a young man in a stocking hat at a cash register by a bleak produce section. 

“I saw a sign in your parking lot.  Do you sell prepared food here?”

“No. We ought to take that down.  That was for a little event they had in the parking lot a while ago.  We’re just groceries.”

“Thanks.  Do you have a restroom for the public?”

“Yeah.  In the back past the meat counter.  You’re welcome to use it.”

He pointed to the far corner.  Walking there gave me a chance to take in most of the store. I became used to empty shelves during the pandemic, mostly in the paper aisle.  But no store shelves I’d seen in Illinois compared to those in Greg’s Market.  There was very little fresh food of any kind.  Mostly canned.  A very small frozen section.  People were moving slowly up and down the aisles.  Big carts with little food in them. 

There was a lot of looking but little buying going on at the butcher’s counter.  A thin man with faded jeans stroked a long gray beard as he studied the price of the beef cuts.  The beef prices were even higher than at home.

When I got to the corner where the bathroom was supposed to be I encountered swinging doors that divide the front of the store from the back and a sign that said “employees only.”  I stopped.  A voice from behind me said.

“You go right ahead on.  That bathroom is for everybody.”

I turned and saw an older man with cases of canned food on a pallet jack making his way toward me.

‘Don’t pay that sign no mind.”

“Thanks.”

 As I left the store a man was talking to the kid with the stocking hat clerking at the cash register.  Both looked up at me.

“Is there a restaurant here I could get some lunch?”

“You mean a sit-down restaurant?” the clerk said.

“Yeah.”

“Yeah, we have a pretty good one.  Follow this street just to the other side of the American Legion, that gray steel building over there.  Bridge Street restaurant is just behind it.”

“OK, thanks.”

I left the store and was just opening the door to the Buick when I heard a voice from the driver’s side of the pickup truck parked beside me. 

“Excuse me sir I want to second Paul’s recommendation of the Bridge Street restaurant.  Pretty good food and a lot of it.”

“That’s good to hear. I haven’t seen much in the way of eating places since I got on 250.”

“Where you coming from?”

“I started this morning in Zanesville Ohio, but I’m from Illinois.”

‘You’ve come a ways then.  How’d you like that drive from Wheeling?”

“I got to say it’s been a challenge.  I don’t have much experience driving on roads like this.  I come from Illinois.  Pretty flat.”

“Whereabouts in Illinois?”

“Ottawa.  About 90 miles southwest of Chicago on Route 80.”

“Ottawa huh? I’ve been on 80 going west but I don’t recall that town.”

“About 18,000.  Good farm ground around there.  It’s on the Illinois and Fox river.  Where they meet actually.  Say, what’s this river that winds around these hills?”

“Not a river.  Grave Creek.  Flow’s past that tall mound in Moundsville where the Adena Indian tribe buried their people.  Ends up in the Ohio River.”

“You lived here long?”

“All my life.  My great-great-grandfather lived here when this town really was something.  Nothing like it used to be.”

“You have really big churches and lots of downtown buildings for a town of 946.”

“That was the 2010 census number.  2020 census has us at 807.  Our high point was 1920.  2,404.  In a hunnert years we’ve lost nearly two-thirds of our people.”

I’d shut the Buick’s driver’s side door and we talked to each other over the hood. He turned from looking at me to looking over his town’s center.

“This town is circling the drain.”

“What happened?”

He turned and looked at me.

“Well, for starters we lost our train.”

“I was looking for tracks.  We’re on Railroad Street but I don’t see any.”

“Nope.  They pulled up the tracks in 1975.  First passenger train ran in 1853 and the last passenger ran in 1956.  Then we lost our freight traffic too.  Took everything they could out of these hills, then walked away.”

“Who’s they you’re talking about?”

“The company that bought the company that bought out the B&O Railroad.  Ended up being CSX I think.  It was the first public access train built in America.  Ran from Baltimore Maryland on the East coast to Wheeling Virginia and the Ohio River in sixteen hours.  It was a big deal for its time.  Like the Erie canal before that.  Set up a way to move goods and people fast.  Spent a lot of money on it too.  Between Cumberland Maryland and Wheeling, they built 11 tunnels and 113 bridges.  That’s what made this town.  People took the train in, took the train out.  This part of town right here was jammed with people making a trip through the mountains.  Slumming it maybe, but they came.”

“What was your great-grandpa doing back then?”

“Made a business out of derrick well drilling.  He dug wells first but ended up making the equipment. You drive pipe into the ground, slam it over and over, then take out whatever.  Mostly natural gas, but water wells too. They took coal outa here, sand, iron ore.  We had an ironworks at one time, and steel was made nearby.  That business mostly all went to Weirton.  But Cameron was a booming place.  And that’s all gone.”

“You got a heckuva high school out there though.”

“Yes we do, and we’re proud of it.  Gotta keep kids in it though.”

“Where’d you get the money for that?”

“$23M from the state and $8M from the county.  Kind of amazing.  We tried to restore our old train depot in the early 2000s, make a community center deal out of it, still can’t find the money to finish it.  But you’re right, we have a great school, and that’s important.”

 “How was the pandemic around here?”

“Well, we live fairly separately anyway.  Social distancing is not really new for us in the hills.  But we didn’t take to masks or shots as well as we probably should have.  I think we lost more neighbors than we had to.  My idea though is some people died of sheer loneliness, especially the older ones.  We didn’t get many visitors like you in the past two years. Not that we ever do now that we’re down to just that winding road.

He paused.

“Covid was terrible.  But I tell you what the opioid thing was worse.  Still is.  We’re going through a lot, and we don’t know what’s going to happen next.  I’m very worried for our young people.”

“I understand.  I don’t think the drug companies did you any favors on the opioid epidemic but you’re right.  I don’t think anybody knows what’s around the corner.”

I had intended to talk to West Virginians about politics.  69% of West Virginia voters marked their ballots for Donald Trump in 2020, a full percentage point more than in 2016.  Marshall County voters, one of which I was talking to, cast 75% of their votes for Donald Trump in 2020 after voting for him at a 77% clip in 2016.

I wanted to ask the nice man I was talking to why.  I wanted to ask him how Joe Manchin keeps getting elected as a Democrat in such a Republican state.  I wanted to ask him what Donald Trump had done for West Virginia to earn such trust.  But I didn’t.  I had the chance, but passed it up.  It felt wrong.  Like I would be badgering him. 

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“Dave.”

“I’m Dave too.”

I was going to ask if I could take his picture but when he chose not to tell me his last name, I didn’t do that either.

“Well Dave, it was nice talking to you.  Enjoy lunch in our town.”

“I’m sure I will.  Nice talking to you too.”

I opened the door of the Buick again. Dave’s voice stopped me from getting in.

“Hey, I might tell you.  Don’t know how far you plan to go on 250 but past Elkins it gets pretty rough.”

“Rougher than from Wheeling? “

“Yeah. Lots.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.  Thanks for the worry.”