West Virginia

I crossed the Ohio River and entered West Virginia on I-70 East, then took the Moundsville/South 250 exit.  I’d been on Interstate highways since I turned onto I-80 in Ottawa.  It was April 20, 2022.     

The road to Moundsville takes you down the Ohio River Valley and West Virginia Route 250 takes you up into the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains.  When I took the South 250 exit and the Buick began the steep climb up, I breezed past the very spot where, in April 2016, a squad car with flashing lights and a barricade stopped me from going farther.  They said it was due to icy road conditions and assured me it was for my own good.  I generally don’t like people making those decisions for me.

On that day in 2016, the skies were dark, and I was in the middle of a terrible snowstorm.  In 2022, it was clear sailing.  I’m still not sure the pandemic is over, but at that moment it felt like it.  I was alone on a road I’d never traveled and was free to go wherever I chose.  I’d waited a long time for that feeling.  During my life, I’ve had no luck duplicating it.

Route 250 is a two-lane road that will take you clear across the state and into eastern Virginia.  Slowly. On that initial climb up a steep grade the pavement was rough and patchy.  At the top of the climb, the road followed a high ridge for only a moment and then turned sharply downward.  A speed limit sign advised me not to exceed 15 miles an hour. At the bottom of the descent, the road turned quickly back up.

That was the first of many kiss-ass turns I’d been told about years ago at Amy’s Candlelight Fine Dining and Sports Bar in New Martinsville.  That same pattern of climb and descend, with a slowed-down switchback turn at each transition was repeated over and over.  I couldn’t imagine driving that road when it was icy.  I give grudging thanks to the cops that stopped me that day in 2016.

The trees had not greened up for the most part, but redbud trees just blooming added faint purple blotches on the hillsides.  I wished I could have gazed at the scenery more, but my eyes were locked onto the road.

The pavement could have been better, but the task of maintaining that winding track of two-lane asphalt must be huge.  Road shoulders were narrow, and I believe every bit of flat land large enough for a foundation contains a building of some kind.  Homes and farm buildings are few and far between.  The few pastures cleared of trees looked impossibly steep, yet cows and sheep clung to them.  Slope has the upper hand over human habitation in those hills. 

It was slow going.  I had considered the mileage but not the speed.  From Illinois, I imagined myself being in eastern Virginia by Wednesday night.  At this slow rate of travel that might not work.  But no matter.  It was a goal rather than a deadline. My overall hope was to be in Tampa Florida by Saturday night.  But if I wasn’t there, it was OK.  Lack of deadlines makes living easier.

I had researched the towns along South 250 on Wikipedia before I left.  Most are unincorporated, but I didn’t know they were practically unrecognizable.  Limestone is for the most part a road sign, a Presbyterian church, and a general store.  

Littleton is listed in Wikipedia as a CDP or Census Designated Place.  It was formerly incorporated but dissolved in 2004.  196 people lived there in 2000 according to that year’s census.  I turned off the road but saw little activity.  I didn’t look long, but mostly saw abandoned commercial buildings.  lllinois has small towns, but their buildings are grouped together.  I suspect Littleton’s 196 people are spread in houses spread up and down the hills rather than grouped along the main road.  There are precious few places to pull off and turn around on 250 South.  I kept on driving.

 

Burton in comparison looks to be doing all right.  It lost its post office in 2011 but still has a gas station and Discount Center store that sells everything from bread to motor oil plus hot food you can eat in a small dining area if you choose.   Core Oil is a full-service gas station that sells tires and does minor car repairs. Burton even has a body shop/car repair business that doubles as a West Virginia Vehicle Inspection Center.  Here’s an aerial view of Burton.

The bad news is the town of Burton is not included in any cell phone company’s current advertised service area.  You can get a landline in Burton, and “high speed” DSL internet service through Frontier Communications.  And while there is outpatient health care available at “The Burton Clinic” housed in the now-closed Burton Grade School, hospital care is an hour away by ambulance.

All these towns are far ahead of Glover Gap which has a dot named after it in the Rand McNally 2022 Road Atlas but is listed in Wikipedia purely in hopes one of its readers can help them locate its coordinates and discover things like cemeteries or razed building sites to verify its existence.  This goes under the category of “we’ve heard of Glover Gap, but we can’t find it.”  Research in the region leads the Wiki people to believe it was once a community and not just a place name.  So, if you know anything about Glover Gap, let them know.

Hundred, a town of 262 people on 250 south, has a colorful history.  It is named after a man named Henry Church, a citizen of the town who lived to be a hundred (109 in fact, or perhaps fiction) and died in 1860.  Henry fought for the British in the Revolutionary War and was taken prisoner by Lafayette’s forces before being released and returning to his home in the hills.  I forget when I travel in Eastern America how much farther the history of white settlers on the continent extends beyond that of the Midwest.

Here’s a photo of Cleveland Street in Hundred.

Hundred also boasts the birthplace of Edward King who played Major League Baseball for seven years and drove in the final run in the 1922 World Series while playing for the victorious New York Giants.  You learn something every day.

Before I left home, I learned some West Virginia history in preparation for the trip.  In the run-up to the Civil War, a portion of the state of Virginia broke away and formed a new state, West Virginia.  I never knew the story.  Retirement is handy for filling in the gaps.

The land that is now West Virginia was taken from indigenous people in 1607 when Britain claimed to own both it and present-day Virginia.  That action formed the Virginia colony.  In 1776 when thirteen such colonies declared their independence from Britain, the hills and mountains of Appalachia stayed part of the state of Virginia and remained so until the state sharply divided over the question of slavery.  

I think we ignore the significance of slavery not only to our country's history but to its identity.  How Americans living in the land I was driving through felt about the moral question of slavery and wished to define their community created West Virginia.  

In 1861, at a convention in Wheeling (then Virginia) a convention of Northwestern Southern Unionists voiced support for repealing Virginia's ordinance of secession passed in April of 1861. Secession ordinances were boilerplate resolutions circulated among southern states who wished to retain the legal right to enslave black people brought from Africa and keep their status as chattel property of white owners.

After Abe Lincoln's election as President of the United States, secession began with South Carolina and was quickly followed by ten other states and one territory (Arizona).

Two states, Kentucky and Missouri, failed to formally secede but were considered by the Confederacy as southern states anyway.  Two states previously considered southern, Delaware and Maryland, rejected secession and remained in the Union.  No other states acted n the question of secession until, following the Wheeling Convention, a Unionist government formed from50 counties in western Virginia.

That state, West Virginia, was admitted to the Union as a U.S.state on June 20, 1863, in the middle of the Civil War.  Its borders reshaped the demarcation line those famous surveyors, Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, laid down to separate North from South and divide our country on the question of slavery.  

But those events are over and done.  I was looking to be in the moment with people in West Virginia, to learn about their present reality and maybe ponder their future.  That started in Cameron.