NEW RIVER GORGE NATIONAL RIVER AND

GAULEY RIVER NATIONAL RECREATION AREA

ETHNOGRAPHIC OVERVIEW

AND ASSESMENT

ETHNOGRAPHIC OVERVIEW AND ASSESSMENT 

New River Gorge National River and 

Gauley River National Recreation Area 

Mary Hufford, Ph.D. 

With Thomas Carroll, Rita Moonsammy, 

Linda Lee, Cynthia Byrd, and Dana Hercbergs 

Prepared under cooperative agreement with: 

The Center for Folklore and Ethnography, 

University of Pennsylvania 

Northeast Region Ethnography Program, 

National Park Service 

Boston, MA 

September 2007 

i

KEY FINDINGS AND RECOMMENDATIONS 

KEY FINDINGS

This ethnographic overview and assessment of the New River Gorge National River and 

the Gauley River National Recreation Area describes the local cultural and historical context for 

the national rivers. Our study team has documented ways in which the presence of the national 

rivers affects local communities and shapes their cultural concerns, and we have identified kinds 

of ethnographic resources within the parks that are significant to the lifeways and identities of 

traditionally associated communities. We have also presented specific examples, though there are 

undoubtedly many specific sites and resources that did not come to our attention during the 

period of this investigation (March 2004–July 2005). Members of the communities we engaged 

include people whose collective history is attached to landscapes that extend into the boundaries 

of the parks. This history is embraced by people who lived and worked within the boundaries of 

the park, but now live outside of the boundaries, as well as by people who continue to live within 

the boundaries of the park, and by their descendants who reside outside the park boundaries. 

While this history is intertwined with the history of industrialization, and associated with the 

landscapes of railroads and coal towns, in the broader sweep of history the most enduring 

relationship is with the landscape itself. Descendants of Native Americans, Europeans, and 

Africans who settled in the region during different periods have learned to participate in the 

landscape in traditional ways that predate industry and have been modified over the generations. 

The research for this project involved the following principal tasks: 

1. Compiling an annotated bibliography of relevant ethnographic and historical 

scholarship. 

2. Collecting and tabulating census data for the region from 1860–2000. 

3. Reviewing transcriptions of interviews from four previous documentation 

projects. 

4. Observing and photographing modes of landscape participation throughout the 

entire region of the Gauley and New Rivers, including fishing, hunting, 
NERI and GARI Ethnographic Overview and Assessment 

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gardening, religious observances, cemetery customs, boating, swimming, and 

home-making. 

5. Conducting open-ended, ethnographic interviews with approximately 60 

community consultants. 

6. Identifying ethnographic resources profiled in historical and ethnographic 

archives and scholarship. 

Out of this collection and assessment of existing resources we have developed an 

overview of the historical process that has shaped the landscape and communities in and around 

the National Rivers, and we have identified gaps in historical and ethnographic research. We 

supplemented this research through conversations and in-depth interviews with close to a hundred 

local residents. Our interviews and observations provide a sense of how people in the region 

engage its history to shape collective identity in relation to the landscapes surrounding the rivers. 

Our findings suggest that many people living in most communities in and around the 

New River Gorge National River and the Gauley River National Recreational Area meet the Park 

Service’s criteria for traditionally associated peoples. An ongoing effort to maintain land-based 

family and community ties is a distinctive feature of life in and around the National River from 

Summersville to Gauley Bridge, and from Hawk’s Nest to Hinton. We found that the landscapes 

of the parks, as they are historically connected to surrounding landscapes, support the collective 

memory on which community members rely for cultural and economic survival. 

The landscape that mediates family and community relationships is the particular 

landscape of the mixed mesophytic forest and associated watersheds. “Mixed mesophytic” is the 

name that botanist E. Lucy Braun gave to the hardwood forest system that overlays the coalbearing plateaus stretching from northern Alabama to southeastern Ohio and southwestern 

Pennsylvania. Never glaciated, this region has given rise to the world’s most biologically diverse 

temperate zone hardwood system. It is likely that this landscape forms one of the most intact 

exemplars of a community forest and watershed to be found in North America. The mixed 

mesophytic forest of the Central Appalachian plateaus is already widely recognized as a globally 

significant resource. The knowledge of how to participate in this landscape is expressed through a 

host of practices that appear to have antecedents in distinct waves of settlement and land use, 
NERI and GARI Ethnographic Overview and Assessment

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including Native American practices dating from 16th and 17th century contact between European 

and Native American peoples, Scotch-Irish, German, and African American patterns of settlement 

and agriculture dating from the period of frontier settlement (1700–1880); the industrial period 

(1880–1960); the post-industrial pre-park period (1960–1980); and the present era of the National 

Rivers. 

Our principal finding is that the ethnographic resource which is vital to both cultural and 

natural conservation in the parks and in the region in general is the landscape of the mixed 

mesophytic watershed in tandem with the collective memory that animates and is animated by 

this landscape. While the historical and archival record implies the presence of a community 

forest, little systematic attention has been paid to it by the park or by scholars. 

To understand the mixed mesophytic community forest in its historical and contemporary 

contexts, we conducted close to sixty tape recorded interviews, four times the number anticipated 

in the scope of work. We found that: 

1. There are people living in the Gauley and New River basins whose ecological 

memories and sensitivities could be drawn upon in order to frame a plan for 

regenerating and protecting the mixed mesophytic forest and associated 

landscapes and collective memory. 

2. Participation in this landscape, conditioned by local knowledge that is 

generations deep, is the basis for continued ethnogenesis in this region. 

3. While there are local venues for sharing cultural and ecological information 

about the status of the mixed mesophytic community forest and watershed, there 

is presently little, if any, venue at the regional level (i.e. the New and Gauley 

River basins). 

4. By expanding some of its existing initiatives and developing its themes, the park 

could play a leading role in developing a regional program for regenerating and 

monitoring the mixed mesophytic community forest and watershed as a global 

biocultural resource. 
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Regenerating and protecting the mixed mesophytic community forest and watershed in 

consultation with the collective memory available in the region could be a very powerful and 

effective strategy for cultural conservation as a means of ameliorating the effects of global 

climate change. What follows is a brief summary of recommendations for management and 

further research. 

RECOMMENDATIONS

Management 

• Constitute the Mixed Mesophytic Community Forest and Watershed as a Ground for 

Civic Engagement 

Finding ways to engage with traditionally associated people around the task of 

regenerating, monitoring, and tending the mixed mesophytic community forest and watershed as 

a landscape that is the expression and medium for community life is critical to the management of 

this resource, and therefore fundamental to the purpose for which the park was created. In this 

plan, the collective memory of traditionally associated peoples about the mixed mesophytic 

watershed would not simply be documented and stored in the park archive. Rather the landscape 

itself would continue to function as a living archive. While the park would continue to regulate 

the use of land and resources within its boundaries, it could exercise leadership in restoring the 

mixed mesophytic watershed by engaging (and employing) people inside and outside the park 

boundaries in the propagation of mixed mesophytic species and in the cleaning up of invasives. 

Further Research, Programs, and Educational Products 

• In Consultation with Traditionally Associated Communities, Develop Programs for 

Educating Park Visitors about the Biocultural Underpinnings and Global Significance 

of the Mixed Mesophytic Watersheds of New River and Central Appalachia. 

Local residents comprise a knowledgeable constituency for the mixed mesophytic 

watershed in ways that most visitors to the park do not and cannot. The collective memory that 

circulates in talk and practice and the reservoir of deep affection for the environment that many of 

our consultants expressed are resources on which the park could build a program of ongoing 

research and public education. 
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TABLE OF CONTENTS 

Key Findings And Recommendations i

Key Findings ............................................................................................................................... i 

Recommendations ..................................................................................................................... iv 

Management ......................................................................................................................... iv 

Further Research, Programs, and Educational Products ....................................................... iv 

Table of Contents ........................................................................................................................................v

List of Tables ............................................................................................................................................. ix

List of Figures .............................................................................................................................................x

Chapter One: Introduction ........................................................................................................................1

The Purpose of the Ethnographic Study ................................................................................ 1 

Engaging the Living Archive ................................................................................................. 4 

Chapter Two: Historical Framework and Overview ..............................................................................9

The Landscapes of NERI and GARI .......................................................................................... 9 

Early Trail Systems .............................................................................................................. 11 

Mississippi and Cherokee Antecedents of Mountain Culture and Agriculture ................... 16 

Exploration, Speculation, Warfare, and Settlement in the Colonial Period: 1641–1775 .... 22 

Patterns in the Scotch-Irish Dispersion ................................................................................ 29

Historical Discourse: Foundation Narratives from the Interviews and Oral Histories ............ 32 

The Engrossment: Settler vs. Speculator Capitalism in the Pre-Industrial Period 

1790s–1870s ............................................................................................................................. 36 

Land Distribution in the Federalist Period ........................................................................... 37 

Great Awakenings: Religious Freedom and Ethnogenesis in Transallegheny Virginia ..... 40 

The Development of Settler Capitalism ............................................................................... 43 

The Implications of Family Settlement Patterns for Ecological and Historical 

Memory in the Region ..................................................................................................... 46 

Integrating the Region into the National and Global Economy: 19th Century Routes ..... 49 

Tuckahoes, Cohees, and the Incubation of West Virginia’s Class Society ..................... 50 

Imported from Britain: A Class-based Culture of Deference and Condescension .......... 52

The Mixed-Mesophytic Community Forest and Watershed in a Pre-Industrial Settler 

Capitalist Society ............................................................................................................. 53 

The Productivity of the Mixed Mesophytic Community Forest .......................................... 60 

The Civil War, Statehood, and the Consolidation of Absentee Control of Land and 

Resources ............................................................................................................................. 66

Industrialization ....................................................................................................................... 70 

Origins of New River Basin Settlers on the Eve of Industrialization ...................................... 75 

The Community Forest in the 1880s .................................................................................... 75 

The Hidden Landscape of Forest Farming ............................................................................... 77 

Immigration to the New River Basin During the Industrial Golden Age (1880–1930) ........... 79 

Coalfield Ethnogenesis: Land Use and the Livelihood of Kin ............................................ 82 

African Americans, Native Americans, and Mulattos in Southern West Virginia .............. 83 
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Perspectives on Native American History from the Interviews ........................................... 91 

The Community Forest and the Articulation of Modes of Production ................................ 96 

Examples of Ethnogenesis in Southern West Virginia ...................................................... 101 

Appalachian Ethnogenesis and the Mid-Twentieth Century Diaspora .............................. 104 

The Mixed Mesophytic Community Forest and Watershed in the Time of Post-Coal .......... 108 

What Became of the Communities? ....................................................................................... 109

Chapter Three: The Transition from Industrial Capitalism to Travel Capitalism ......................... 111

Between the Time of Coal and the Time of the National River ............................................. 111 

The Land-Based Livelihood of Kin in the Time of Travel Capitalism .............................. 113 

The Economy of Barter and Borrow and the Concept of the Commons ........................... 114

Chapter Four: Ethnographic Resources of the New River Gorge National River ........................... 121

Introduction ............................................................................................................................ 121 

Hinton and Fayetteville: Gateway Communities ................................................................... 122 

Hinton ................................................................................................................................ 122 

Fayetteville ........................................................................................................................ 125 

The Logic of Cultural Renewal on New River ...................................................................... 126 

Gardening .......................................................................................................................... 131 

Gathering ........................................................................................................................... 135 

Fishing ............................................................................................................................... 138 

Trot-lines ....................................................................................................................... 139 

Bait Catching ................................................................................................................. 141 

Camping ........................................................................................................................ 143 

Fishing Camps and Family Cabins ................................................................................ 146 

Hunting .............................................................................................................................. 148 

Swimming and Boating ..................................................................................................... 154

Chapter Five: Ethnographic Resources of the Gauley River National Recreation Area ................ 161

Introduction ............................................................................................................................ 161 

Family, Land, Home, and Community ................................................................................... 165 

Family and Land ................................................................................................................ 165 

Homes and Homeplaces .................................................................................................... 170

Cemeteries and Churches ....................................................................................................... 172 

Knowledge of the Landscape ................................................................................................. 174 

The Gauley ......................................................................................................................... 174 

Springs ............................................................................................................................... 177 

Plants ................................................................................................................................. 179 

Recreation/Subsistence .......................................................................................................... 181

Hunting .............................................................................................................................. 181 

Fishing ............................................................................................................................... 182 

Camping ............................................................................................................................. 184 

Boating ............................................................................................................................... 185 

Hiking ................................................................................................................................ 187 

Work ...................................................................................................................................... 187 

Agriculture ......................................................................................................................... 188 

Mining ............................................................................................................................... 190 

Timbering .......................................................................................................................... 192
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Chapter Six: Concluding Discussion and Recommendations ............................................................. 193

Reintegrating a Fragmented Ecosystem: A Foundational Role for Collective Memory ....... 193 

Engaging the Archive: Practices of Cultural Retrieval and Discourses of Reconnection ...... 200 

Recommendation for Interpretation and Management ........................................................... 204 

Constitute the Mixed Mesophytic Community Forest and Watershed as a Ground for 

Civic Engagement .............................................................................................................. 205 

Recommendation for Further Research, Programs, and Educational Products ..................... 206 

Conclusion: The Mixed Mesophytic Community Forest and Watershed Is Foundational 

to the Purpose for Which the Parks Were Created ................................................................. 208

References Cited ..................................................................................................................................... 209

Appendix I: Historic Population Trends for Magisterial Districts along the New River ................ 227

Raleigh County .................................................................................................................. 229 

Summers County ............................................................................................................... 230 

Nicholas and Fayette Counties .......................................................................................... 231 

Appendix II: Supplementary Tables .................................................................................................... 233

Appendix III: Timeline of New and Gauley River History ................................................................ 241

Appendix IV: Ethnographic Assessment and Overview New River Gorge and Gauley 

National Rivers: Work Plan .................................................................................................................. 263

Table of Contents ................................................................................................................... 264 

Project Context and Rationale ................................................................................................ 265 

Project Timeline ..................................................................................................................... 273 

Phase 1: Archival research and preliminary interviews ..................................................... 273 

Tasks for Research and Fieldwork in the First Phase .................................................... 273 

Phase 2: Fieldwork and Interviews with communities ...................................................... 273 

Phase 3: Writing, archiving, and compilation of materials ................................................ 274 

Phase 4: Review (by Park Service) and revision (by CFE) ............................................... 274 

Archival Research and Fieldwork Methodology ................................................................... 274 

Archival Research .............................................................................................................. 274 

Fieldwork Methodology .................................................................................................... 275 

Cultural Conservation and Forms of Historical Discourse ................................................ 276 

Project Archive and Database ............................................................................................ 279 

Sample Fields and Entries ............................................................................................. 279 

Interview information: ................................................................................................... 279 

Topics Covered: ............................................................................................................ 279 

Outline for Final Report ..................................................................................................... 280 

Project Personnel: .......................................................................................................... 280 

Needs from Park Service: .............................................................................................. 281 

Working Bibliography ........................................................................................................... 281 

I. Cultural Conservation Theory and Appalachian Culture and History ............................ 281 

II. New River Gorge .......................................................................................................... 287 

III. Resources of Forest, Land, and Water ......................................................................... 288 

IV. Government-Sponsored Reports & Documents .......................................................... 288

Appendix V: Ethnographic and Historical Resources: An Annotated Bibliography ..................... 295

Ethnography ....................................................................................................................... 295 

Local History ..................................................................................................................... 307 
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Maps .................................................................................................................................. 315 

Park Planning and Interpretation ....................................................................................... 317 

Regional History and Culture ............................................................................................ 325 
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LIST OF TABLES 

Table 1. Agricultural Economy – 1850 Census ........................................................................... 61 

Table 2. Medicinal Plants Gathered for in the 19th Century ........................................................ 65 

Table 3. Wayne and Logan Counties: Hardwoods, 12,263 Acres on West Fork of Twelve-Pole 

River. .................................................................................................................................... 76 

Table 4. Wayne and Logan Counties: Softwoods, 12,263 Acres on West Fork of Twelve-Pole 

River. .................................................................................................................................... 76 

Table 5. Greenbrier County: Hardwoods, 1,000 Acres at the head of Cherry River. ................... 76

Table 6. Greenbrier County: Softwoods, 1,000 Acres at the head of Cherry River. .................... 77 

Table 7. Sample of Witness Trees Marking Property Boundaries, 1896–1912 ........................... 77 

Table 8. People of Color in Counties Surrounding NERI and GARI in 1880, by District ........... 85 

Table 9. Fayette County Communities with Black Schools ......................................................... 87 

Table 10. Land Holding Company Acreages by County ............................................................ 112 

Table 11. Seasonal Round of Activities on New and Gauley Rivers ......................................... 130 

Table 12. Population Trends for the Northern Region of New River, 1870–1960.................... 227 

Table 13. Population Trends for Magisterial Districts in Raleigh County, 1870–1960 ............. 229 

Table 14. Population Trends for Magisterial Districts in Summers County, 1870–1960 .......... 230 

Table 15. Profile of Population Growth for the Gauley River Area ........................................... 231 

Table 16. Birth Places of Residents in Raleigh County, 1880 Census ....................................... 233 

Table 17. Birthplaces of Residents in Fayette County, 1880 Census ......................................... 233 

Table 18. Birth Places of residents in Summers County, 1880 Census ...................................... 235 

Table 19. Birth Places of Residents in Nicholas County, 1880 Census ..................................... 236 

Table 20. Birth Places Reported in the 1920 Census by Foreign Born Residents of Counties 

Surrounding the New and Gauley Rivers ........................................................................... 236 

Table 21. NTFPs of Commercial and/or Domestic Value ........................................................... 237 
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LIST OF FIGURES 

Figure 1. In the Cathedral Café, fieldworker Dana Hercbergs interviews Rick Bays about a map 

he is producing of all the historic towns and places along New River. (Unless otherwise 

indicated, all photos by Mary Hufford) .................................................................................. 6

Figure 2. Map of study area. (Produced by Darryl Depencier for the Center for Folklore and 

Ethnography, University of Pennsylvania) ............................................................................. 7

Figure 3. Detail from Myer’s map of Indian Trails in the Southeast, with trails in the study area 

highlighted. Key to numbers in study area: 31) Great Indian War Path (Ohio Branch); 36) 

Great Indian War Path (Chesapeake Branch); 48) Pamunkey and New River Road; 52) New 

River and Southern Trail; 54) Big Sandy Trail; 55) Guyandot Trail; 56) Coal River Trail; 

57) Paint Creek Trail; 58) New River and Cumberland Gap Trail; and 59) North Fork of 

Tug River. (Source: Myer 1925)........................................................................................... 11

Figure 4. Survey made in 1795 by Edward Dillon, at the headwaters of the Big and Little Coal 

Rivers and the Guyandot, showing the location of “Farley’s Rooting Camp,” near the head 

of Buffalo Creek, where Boone, Logan and Wyoming County come together. (Source: 

Montgomery County Courthouse, Christiansburg, VA) ....................................................... 12

Figure 5. Detail from Lewis Evans 1755 map denoting the Ouasito Mountains and adjunct 

areas drained by the Kanawha River as uninhabited. (Source: Library of Congress) .......... 14

Figure 6. Detail from James Mooney’s 1900 map of the Cherokee Country, showing extent of 

original Cherokee claim, bounded to the north and east by the New and Kanawha Rivers in 

present-day West Virginia, and the cession of claims in present-day West Virginia, 

Kentucky and North Carolina by 1776. (Source: Mooney 1900) ......................................... 16

Figure 7. Chipper, a mountain feist, lived at the head of the Buffalo Fork of Rock Creek, in 

Raleigh County. He hunted squirrels for Ben Burnside. (Photo by Lyntha Eiler. Source: 

American Folklife Center, Library of Congress) .................................................................. 18

Figure 8. Detail of study area from Adair’s Map of North American Indians. (Source: Adair 

1775) ..................................................................................................................................... 24

Figure 9. Detail from Fry & Jefferson Map, showing “Great Konhaway called also Woods 

River and New River.” (Source: Library of Congress) ......................................................... 26

Figure 10. Routes taken by early settlers migrating from Pennsylvania into the southern 

mountains and the Ohio River Valley. (Source: Rice 1970) ................................................ 27

Figure 11. Statue of Mitchell and Phoebe Clay, grieving the death of their children in a Shawnee 

raid in 1783. Mercer County Courthouse. ............................................................................ 29

Figure 12. The Bluestone River, a fortified hearth area in the late 18th century, a primary source 

of 19th century settlement along the New, Coal, and Guyandot Rivers. (Produced by Darryl 

Depencier for the Center for Folklore and Ethnography, University of Pennsylvania)........ 31

Figure 13. Serpeta Wiley Gore (1834–1919). (Source: Sanders 1994) ...................................... 35

Figure 14. Postal Routes in West Virginia, 1792–1800, showing the line of travel along the New 

and Kanawha Rivers. (Source: Virginia Magazine of History and Biography) ................... 38

Figure 15. Quinnimont Missionary Baptist Church, with sign welcoming Pastor Charles Gore, 

1993. (Photo by Lyntha Scott Eiler) ..................................................................................... 42
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Figure 16. Rock piles like these, indicating former “newgrounds” where land was cultivated and 

then “let go,” are ubiquitous in the mountains of southern West Virginia. .......................... 44

Figure 17. Yucca plants, referred to by some people as “ghost plants,” are read as signs that a 

place was not only cultivated but inhabited. ......................................................................... 44

Figure 18. Paul Salstrom’s Three Appalachias (left), with detail (right) showing proximity of 

counties in study area (New Appalachia) to counties in Old Appalachia. (Source: Salstrom 

1991) ..................................................................................................................................... 48

Figure 19. Plan for the proposed James and Kanawha River canal, which never was completed. 

(Source: National Trust for Historic Preservation) ............................................................... 50

Figure 20. Capt. W.D. Thurmond, buried in Gethsemane Gardens, was born in Amherst County, 

Virginia. ................................................................................................................................ 52

Figure 21. Engraving of batteau men, shown running the rapids of New River. (Source: Harper’s 

Weekly February 21, 1874) .................................................................................................. 57

Figure 22. 1874 receipt showing acceptance of half a bushel of chestnuts in partial payment for 

merchandise. (Source: Donelly 1958) .................................................................................. 59

Figure 23. Scale for Weighing Cattle, Dry Creek, WV. .............................................................. 64

Figure 24. Detail from 1867 Title Map of the Coal Field of the Great Kanawha Valley, showing 

the revalidated “ancient titles,” by Major John Swann, a land attorney in Charleston. 

(Source: Library of Congress) .............................................................................................. 68

Figure 25. Percentages of slaves in the populations of Virginia counties in 1861 on the eve of the 

Civil War. The counties adjacent to the parks, along with many of the surrounding coalbearing counties, show relatively low percentages. The African American populations of 

these counties would increase following the Civil War, when slaves employed in the salt 

works of Kanawha and Mercer Counties, and the tobacco plantations to the east, would 

become available as free, but landless, labor for working in the mines. (Source: Detail from 

Graham, 1861. Library of Congress) .................................................................................... 69

Figure 26. Hotchkiss map of C & O Railway from Newport News, VA to Big Sandy, WV, 1884. 

(Source: The Virginias) ......................................................................................................... 71

Figure 27. Detail from Map of Great Kanawha Coal Field by Jed Hotchkiss, 1886. (Source: 

Library of Congress) ............................................................................................................. 72

Figure 28. 1843 deed and map of property sold for taxes in 1840 and surveyed by Samuel Tyree 

for Alfred Beckley. Tyree’s daughter would marry confederate General John D. Imboden, 

who became a driving force in the industrialization of the coalfields. Witness trees on this 

deed include beech, maple, and white oak. (Source: Fayette County Courthouse) .............. 79

Figure 29. Tombstone of Emelkul Altatta, Sts. Peter and Paul Cemetery, Hunk Hill in Scarbro, 

WV. ....................................................................................................................................... 80

Figure 30. Tombs of unknown miners on Beury Mountain, marked by roof bolts from the mines 

broken and welded into crosses. ........................................................................................... 82

Figure 31. Slave cemetery near the former Gore plantation and Cash’s Hill, Summers County.

 .............................................................................................................................................. 84

Figure 32. Member of Soak Creek Baptist Church, singing a hymn. (Photo by Terry Eiler. 

Source: American Folklife Center, Library of Congress) ..................................................... 86

Figure 33. Buckingham Lining Bar Gang, demonstrating track lining during Railroad Days in 

Hinton, 1992. (Photo by Terry Eiler. Source: American Folklife Center, Library of 

Congress) .............................................................................................................................. 88

Figure 34. Rev. William and Frances Carter, at their home in Prince, 1992. (Photo by Lyntha 

Eiler. Source: American Folklife Center, Library of Congress) ........................................... 90
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Figure 35. Reproduction of an 18th-century Clay family portrait displayed in the Springfield 

home. .................................................................................................................................... 92

Figure 36. Ernie Jones, Brooklyn, with a photo of his grandparents from Irish Mountain. ........ 95

Figure 37. Detail of study area from 1917 map of West Virginia, showing location of mines. 

(Source: White 1917).......................................................................................................... 100

Figure 38. Outline of mixed mesophytic forest region as defined by E. Lucy Braun, with 

counties surrounding the New and Gauley Rivers shown in black. Adapted by Mary Hufford 

from Loucks et al, 1994 and the Appalachian Regional Commission map of Appalachian 

Counties. (Courtesy Center for Folklore and Ethnography) ............................................... 106

Figure 39. Outline of mixed mesophytic forest region as defined by E. Lucy Braun, with counties 

surrounding the New and Gauley Rivers shown in black. Shown in gray is the Mountaintop 

Mining and Valley Fill Study Area as defined by the US EPA. Adapted by Mary Hufford 

from Loucks et al, 1994, US EPA 2003, and the Appalachian Regional Commission map of 

Appalachian counties. (Courtesy Center for Folklore and Ethnography) ........................... 107

Figure 40. The empty safe remaining at the site of the former Brooklyn Company Store. ........ 109

Figure 41. Chuck and Maxine Ross, harvesting produce from their garden on Dunloop Creek, in 

Glen Jean, which Chuck’s grandfather started. .................................................................. 114

Figure 42. Newspaper article about Maxine Ross, Glen Jean resident, who was the first black 

woman coal miner in the state. ........................................................................................... 115

Figure 43. The seasonal round of the mixed mesophytic community forest and watershed. 

(Source: Center for Folklore and Ethnography, University of Pennsylvania; adapted from 

original for American Folklife Center, Library of Congress, based on field sketches and 

interviews by Mary Hufford) .............................................................................................. 119

Figure 44. Detail of New River North and surrounding study area. (Produced by Darryl 

Depencier for the Center for Folklore and Ethnography, University of Pennsylvania)...... 123

Figure 45. Detail of New River South and surrounding study area. (Produced by Darryl 

Depencier for the Center for Folklore and Ethnography, University of Pennsylvania)...... 124

Figure 46. Home built of red dog blocks. Façade has been covered in permastone with a brick 

addition. Mount Hope, WV. (Photo by Karen Hudson. Source: American Folklife Center, 

Library of Congress) ........................................................................................................... 127

Figure 47. Cinderblock warmhouse with stone foundation. Salem-Gatewood Road, Oak Hill, 

WV. (Photo by Karen Hudson. Source: American Folklife Center, Library of Congress) 127

Figure 48. Jubilee Bells, a memorial honoring ethnic Catholic mission churches in Kilsyth, 

Scarbro, and Minden. .......................................................................................................... 128

Figure 49. The mosaic tile floor of the Winona National Bank, now an outdoor patio at Anna’s 

Country Crafts, Winona, WV. ............................................................................................ 129

Figure 50. Canned goods and potatoes stored in a root cellar on Dry Creek. (Photo by Lyntha 

Eiler. Source: American Folklife Center, Library of Congress) ......................................... 131

Figure 51. A bed of “virtually wild” ginseng in Summers County. (Photo by Karen Hudson. 

Source: American Folklife Center, Library of Congress) ................................................... 132

Figure 52. Privet hedge cultivated by Pauline Sexton from clippings from the hedge of a 

neighbor, Kaymoor Top. ..................................................................................................... 133

Figure 53. Pauline Sexton, Kaymoor, W.V. .............................................................................. 133

Figure 54. Catty Redden, Layland, with ramps, May 2005. ...................................................... 134

Figure 55. Dorothy Grubb, gathering chincapins in the grove planted near her home on Highland 

Mountain. ............................................................................................................................ 134

Figure 56. Mary Lou Walker, Jayne Payne, and Pee Wee Walker, apple picking on Beury

Mountain. ............................................................................................................................ 135
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Figure 57. Moss drying on a line along Route 41. (Photo by Lyntha Scott Eiler. Source: 

American Folklife Center, Library of Congress) ................................................................ 136

Figure 58. Nutting stones, used from pre-historic times down to the present. Artifacts collected 

on Clear Fork, including nutting stone, with walnut. (Photo by Lyntha Scott Eiler. Source: 

American Folklife Center, Library of Congress) ................................................................ 137

Figure 59. Herman Williams, on Clear Fork, cracking walnuts on a permanent cinderblock 

“nutting stone,” with his grandson, 1995. (Photo by Lyntha Scott Eiler. Source: American 

Folklife Center, Library of Congress) ................................................................................. 138

Figure 60. Camp Sunnyside, on New River below Fayette Station. (Photo by Lyntha Scott Eiler. 

Source: American Folklife Center, Library of Congress) ................................................... 139

Figure 61. Mike Menarchik, of Gone Fishing Guide Service, landing a smallmouth bass. (Photo 

by Lyntha Scott Eiler. Source: American Folklife Center, Library of Congress) .............. 141

Figure 62. Frank Hartkenstein, operator of Frank’s Bait Shop in Dewitt, shows off a customer’s 

catch. ................................................................................................................................... 141

Figure 63. Helgrammites, also known as “grampus” (the larva of the Dobson fly), in a bucket 

with moss at Frank’s Bail Shop in Dewitt, WV. ................................................................ 143

Figure 64. Cookout on the beach, New River. (Photo by Lyntha Eiler. Source: American 

Folklife Center, Library of Congress) ................................................................................. 145

Figure 65. Fishing camp along New River. (Photo by Lyntha Eiler. Source: American Folklife 

Center, Library of Congress) .............................................................................................. 146

Figure 66. Bass Lake, “where the Indians camped.” (Photo by Terry Eiler. Source: American 

Folklife Center, Library of Congress) ................................................................................. 147

Figure 67. Wesley Scarbro, watching for squirrels in a hickory grove, Rock Creek, WV. (Photo 

by Lyntha Eiler. Source: American Folklife Center, Library of Congress) ........................ 148

Figure 68. Sign advertising deer cane in August, near I-64. ..................................................... 149

Figure 69. Sign advertising deer processing in Shady Spring. .................................................. 149

Figure 70. Rev. Carter, retired from a career as a chef for the railroad, serving cherry pie for the 

Big Spring Hunt Club in 1992. (Photo by Lyntha Eiler. Source: American Folklife Center, 

Library of Congress) ........................................................................................................... 150

Figure 71. Rifle made by Mark Whitt of Shady Spring. (Photo by Lyntha Eiler. Source: 

American Folklife Center, Library of Congress) ................................................................ 150

Figure 72. Historic photo of Big Spring Hunt Club. Members travel from Fayette County to 

Virginia for the annual hunt during deer week. (Photographer unknown; copy photo by 

Lyntha Eiler. Source: American Folklife Center, Library of Congress) ............................. 151

Figure 73. Sign for Sewell Mountain Hunting Club, Route 41. ................................................ 152

Figure 74. Map showing concentration of landownership in West Virginia counties. (Source: 

Miller n.d.) .......................................................................................................................... 154

Figure 75. Bateaux by W.C. Parker, soaking near the beach at Avis. ....................................... 156

Figure 76. Coming into Fayette Station. (Photo by Terry Eiler. Source: American Folklife 

Center, Library of Congress) .............................................................................................. 159

Figure 77. Path leading to Gauley River at Swiss. (Photo by Rita Moonsammy) .................... 162

Figure 78. Detail of Gauley River and surrounding study area. (Produced by Darryl Depencier 

for the Center for Folklore and Ethnography, University of Pennsylvania) ....................... 163

Figure 79. Sam and Florence Haines, butchering a hog in Russellville. (Photo by Lyntha Eiler. 

Source: American Folklife Center, Library of Congress) ................................................... 170

Figure 80. Sales of hotdogs to whitewater rafters benefit the community at Swiss, the take-out 

point on the Gauley River. (Photo by Rita Moonsammy) .................................................. 173

Figure 81. Sherrie Koontz serving hot dogs at Swiss. (Photo by Rita Moonsammy) ............... 173
NERI and GARI Ethnographic Overview and Assessment 

xiv 

Figure 82. Photograph on bulletin board in New River Trading Company, Summersville, 

showing proprietor with a pair of trophy four-prong ginseng plants. ................................. 180

Figure 83. Fuzzy britches, also known as woolen britches, cow parsnips and Herculeum lanatum. 

(Photo by Lyntha Eiler. Source: American Folklife Center, Library of Congress) ............ 181

Figure 84. Rita Moonsammy, center, interviews Ken Roop (left) and his cousin Larry Roop 

(right) in Jodie. .................................................................................................................... 183

Figure 85. Cattle dogs on the Koontz farm. (Photo by Rita Moonsammy) ............................... 189

Figure 86. Cattle dogs on the Koontz farm. (Photo by Rita Moonsammy) ............................... 189

Figure 87. Allen Brown, proprietor of Quinnimont Lunch, kept the establishment going as a 

community center where teens could socialize until his death in the 1990s. (Photo by Lyntha 

Eiler. Source: American Folklife Center, Library of Congress) ......................................... 194

Figure 88. Bluestone Dam. (Photo by Karen Hudson. Source: American Folklife Center, Library 

of Congress) ........................................................................................................................ 196

Figure 89. Butternuts curing on the stoop of Howard and Sadie Miller, Drews Creek. (Photo by 

Lyntha Eiler. Source: American Folklife Center, Library of Congress) ............................. 200

Figure 90. Dinner on the Grounds at the New Life Baptist Church Homecoming in Shady Spring, 

2004. ................................................................................................................................... 201

Figure 91. Scale model of family homestead on Irish Mountain, made by Ernie Jones and 

displayed in front of his home in Brooklyn. ....................................................................... 202

Figure 92. Gene Hall and Billy Harris trading memories of friends buried in the Terry Cemetery, 

on Garden Ground Mountain. ............................................................................................. 202

Figure 93. Wilbur Berry, relating some of the history of Winona on the porch of Anna’s Country 

Crafts, August 2004. ........................................................................................................... 203

Figure 94. Fieldworkers Linda Lee and Cindy Murtagh, with members of the Plateau District 

Quilters who meet each Wednesday at the Glen Jean National Bank. ............................... 204

Figure 95. Fayette County magisterial districts, 1933. (Source: Ice 1933) ............................... 228

Figure 96. Raleigh County magisterial districts, 1933. (Source: Ice 1933) .............................. 229

Figure 97. Summers County magisterial districts, 1933. (Source: Ice 1933) ............................ 231

Figure 98. Nicholas County magisterial districts adjoining the Gauley River National Recreation 

Area: Jefferson, Grant, and Wilderness. (Source: Ice 1933) .............................................. 232
1

CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION 

The Purpose of the Ethnographic Study 

This Ethnographic Overview and Assessment of the New River Gorge and Gauley River 

National Recreation Area is intended to bring key information about traditional cultural 

knowledge and uses of park resources, along with the concerns of groups traditionally associated 

with the national rivers, to the attention of NPS managers, interpreters, and the public. Key 

findings and recommendations will be integrated into the revised General Management Plan. 

Ethnography can help identify ways to engage the local landscape and its population in the 

process of renewing and transforming regional identity. The New and Gauley Rivers participate 

in a landscape that served for thousands of years as commons, first for Native Americans, who 

negotiated use rights with each other, and then for European settlers, who regulated this commons 

within a corn-woodland-pastureland system. During the industrial period, from 1880–1960, 

residents of surrounding farms, towns, and coal and lumber camps continued to rely, through a 

social compact with absentee owners, on the resources of forest and watershed (excluding 

commercial timber and minerals). There may be few, if any, other regions in the United States 

where such vast parcels of land have been so absolutely controlled by so few private absentee 

owners. 

An unintended and perhaps ironic consequence of this absentee ownership has been the 

persistence of a remarkably intact community forest system in the southern West Virginia 

coalfields. This landscape and its communities have withstood and adapted to several centuries of 

radical social and economic change. Because the New and Gauley Rivers are located within this 

system, the park’s policies impact the system of community forestry in the surrounding counties 

(Summers, Nicholas, Fayette, and Raleigh). This system has persisted not only through the design 

of the powerful landholders and industrialists who held and controlled the region’s resources 

through the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries for their own purposes, but through the persistence of 

vernacular ways of knowing, speaking, and being in the landscape. This vernacular is resilient, 

opportunistic, and creative, and can thrive as long as there are social institutions with “long-range 

purpose” (Zukin 1992: 240) grounding communities within an unfolding history with a deep past 
NERI and GARI Ethnographic Overview and Assessment 

2 

and the prospect of a shared future. The social institution with long-range purpose in this region is 

the mixed mesophytic community forest and watershed system. Conserving such a system 

requires an integrated approach to natural and cultural resources, which the Park Service has 

tended to manage as though they are separable (Howell 1994). 

Integrating approaches to resource conservation begins with changing ways of seeing and 

thinking that are very entrenched in official practice. Ethnography seeks to identify alternative 

ways of seeing and thinking about the world, which can change our ways of engaging with it. 

Ethnography begins with the insight that the world produced and reproduced through daily 

interaction is not neatly divisible into such categories as culture, nature, and economics; that, in 

fact, all ways of categorizing the world are culturally constructed, and can therefore be culturally 

reconstructed. As the sociologist Werner Sombart put it: 

No forest exists as an objectively prescribed environment. There exists only 

forester-, hunter-, botanist-, walker-, nature enthusiast-, woodgatherer-, berry 

picker-, and a fairy tale forest in which Hansel and Gretel lose their way (von 

Uexkull 1982). 

Like the forest that Sombart writes about, the space of the park property anchors 

constituencies with very different perspectives on the landscape and its history. The task of 

ethnography is not to authenticate the perspectives of some constituencies at the expense of others, 

but to bring constituencies with different perspectives into dialogue. In southern West Virginia, 

two forests have been in competition since the beginning of the nineteenth century: a community 

forest and a commodity forest. Like the images that we see when we shift our perspectives on 

three-dimensional postcards, these forests are never shown simultaneously to the national public. 

Rather, they are kept separate through what Tara McPherson calls “lenticular logic,” which 

strategically shows one view or another in relation to different audiences (McPherson, 2003). To 

protect its ethnographic resources, the park needs to bring the community and commodity forests 

into dialogue. 

The park service has developed several concepts that encourage this rethinking of the 

environment, among them the concepts of traditionally associated peoples and ethnographic 

resources. In section 5.3.5.3 of the National Park Service’s guidelines on Cultural Resource 
NERI and GARI Ethnographic Overview and Assessment

3 

Management, we find the following definitions for ethnographic resources and traditionally 

associated peoples. 

“Park ethnographic resources are the cultural and natural features of a park that 

are of traditional significance to traditionally associated peoples. These people 

are the contemporary park neighbors and ethnic or occupational communities that 

have been associated with a park for two or more generations (40 years), and 

whose interests in the park’s resources began prior to the park’s establishment.” 

“Traditionally associated peoples generally differ as a group from other park 

visitors in that they typically assign significance to ethnographic resources – 

places closely linked with their own sense of purpose, existence as a community, 

and development as ethnically distinctive peoples.” (from NPS Guidelines on 

Cultural Resource Management). 

The communities in and around NERI and GARI are susceptible to these definitions, but in ways 

that require clarification. These definitions, and the use of ethnographic research to identify 

traditionally associated peoples and ethnographic resources, were developed out of the park 

service’s anthropology programs, which themselves have grown out of ethnography with Native 

American groups with a stake in parklands and resources mostly in the American West. The New 

and Gauley Rivers allow us to test the applicability of this model to non-native American 

communities without independent sovereignty, but with a strong sense of identity and purpose 

that is renewed through particular ways of engaging the resources in and around the parks. 

This report explores the questions: is there a “people” that is traditionally associated with 

the parks? If so, does this group see itself as a group? Can its historical formation be accounted 

for in relation to the landscape of the parks? If so, on what resources does the group rely for 

social and cultural renewal? Are any of these found within the parks? If so, what opportunities do 

these present for managing park landscapes? 

The remainder of the overview will 1) identify and characterize the archival resources for 

understanding the historical formation of traditionally associated communities surrounding the 

parks; 2) describe the historical process and outline formative stages in the history of the 

communities; 3) identify gaps in the research; and 4) bring the archive of historical records into 

dialogue with the collective memory that animates the archive of the landscape. The second and 

third sections of this report describe the ways in which community members engage the resources 
NERI and GARI Ethnographic Overview and Assessment 

4 

of the New and Gauley rivers. The concluding section describes the opportunity represented by 

the mixed mesophytic community forest and watershed as a focus for management and civic 

engagement, and frames the recommendations that follow. 

Engaging the Living Archive 

We use the term “archive” here to refer not only to the body of documentary materials 

distributed in local, state, and federal repositories, but in the living practices and expressions of 

communities that help us to glimpse the history of the New and Gauley Rivers. This body of 

materials is scattered throughout numerous repositories both public and private, and its contours 

are profiled in a growing collection of published historical studies. The archive is not static. Even 

as historians may be combing the major repositories at the University of West Virginia in 

Morgantown, the State Archive in Charleston, the Eastern Regional Coal Archives in Bluefield, 

the archives at Marshall University in Huntington, the state archives at Richmond, the National 

Archives and the Library of Congress in Washington, local and family historians are assembling 

genealogies, collecting historic photographs, newspaper clippings and ephemera, and cleaning up 

and documenting cemeteries. These kinds of collections would be well worth locating and 

inventorying while their collectors are still alive. 

Specific historical and ethnographic information on the communities along the Gauley 

and the New River is dispersed in deeds, wills, maps, depositions, and inventories in courthouses 

in Fayette, Summers, Nicholas, and Raleigh Counties in West Virginia, and in Montgomery 

County in Virginia. We were not able to visit every repository. We found historic maps at the 

State Archive, the Library of Congress, the University of West Virginia at Morgantown, the 

Fayette County Courthouse, the Montgomery County Courthouse, the Virginia State Library, and 

in numerous published histories. Many repositories have placed maps online during the course of 

this project. The U.S. Census records, available on microfilm at the West Virginia State Archive, 

would yield a great deal of information, but should be consulted with specific places, periods, and 

questions in mind. 

The published historical resources that we consulted included the Bureau of Census 

published reports on occupations and agricultural production, the state Gazetteer, Sims index to 

Land Grants in West Virginia, William Marshall’s 1880 census of West Virginia, Nellie Yantis’s 
NERI and GARI Ethnographic Overview and Assessment

5 

genealogy of 18th century Virginia, Krebs’ geological survey of West Virginia, frontier histories 

by Kegley, Doddridge, Rice, and Summers, and historical travel accounts including Adair’s 

History of the American Indians, the diaries of George Washington, and the annals of 

southwestern Virginia compiled and published by Lewis Summers. The county histories by Jim 

Wood (Raleigh), John Cavalier (Fayette), and Sanders’ New River Heritage have amassed much 

information from primary sources on early settlers and their descendants. David Hackett Fisher’s 

Albion’s Seed, while problematic, is valuable for the great deal of information he has culled from 

18th and 19th century sources on the Scotch Irish and Cavalier migrations, settlement, and lifeways. 

Otis Rice’s history of the Allegheny frontier is also extremely insightful, thorough, and useful for 

gaining a historical overview of the region. The works of local history enthusiasts like Shirley 

Donnelly and Melody Bragg have been widely read by people in the communities around the 

New and Gauley River, to the extent that their written accounts are thoroughly woven into the 

historical discourse that circulates through the community and landscape. Similarly, the statesponsored folklife magazine, Goldenseal, is widely read and appreciated by many who live in the 

region, and it regularly features the sorts of topics that the park could build into a program of 

documentation and archiving. Other useful resources include the proceedings of the New River 

Symposia (1982–1991), the journal West Virginia History, and The Virginia Magazine of History 

and Biography. 

The coal and timber industry has generated a body of documentation that is also of 

ethnographic interest, including land histories lodged at the Division of Environmental Protection 

in Nitro, nineteenth-century industrial publications such as The Virginias and Appalachian Trade 

Journal and their contemporary counterparts, The Coal Bell and Greenlands. Biographies of coal 

industry officials, though written in the form of the panegyric (praise literature), contain useful 

information on the origins and beliefs of entrepreneurs in the region. Fred Toothman’s Great 

Coal Leaders of West Virginia falls in this category, as does W.P. Tams’ The Smokeless Coal 

Fields of West Virginia: A Brief History. Such literature is of special interest ethnographically 

because it conveys, from the perspective of industry, attitudes toward coalfield communities and 

the agrarian interests linked to the community forest and watershed that have persisted into the 

present. 
NERI and GARI Ethnographic Overview and Assessment 

6 

The critical historiography of John Williams, David Whisnant, Sam Cook, David Allen 

Corbin, Paul Salstrom, Wilma Dunaway, Barbara Rasmussen, Altina Waller, Ronald Eller, and 

Ronald Lewis, ethnographic studies by Elizabeth Taylor, Kathleen Stewart, Benita Howell, Mary 

Hufford, Melinda Wagner, Michael Ann Williams and Rhoda Halperin, and the critical 

regionalism of Herbert Reid, Steven Fisher, and David Rouse have helped to establish a 

framework for thinking about history, culture, and issues of social class and landscape in the 

region, and the bearing on relationships to the parks. Each of these works offers an individualized 

field guide to an archive that wends through official repositories, private collections, personal 

experience, and engagement with communities in the region. 

The portion of this vast archive that is perhaps most critical for the purpose of the park, 

the archive of the community forest and watershed, is accessible only through engagement with 

local community life. Fieldnotes and transcriptions of interviews offer many glimpses of this 

archive, which is really the mere footprint of that “immense intelligence” of which Ralph Waldo 

Emerson wrote: “We lie in the lap of an immense intelligence,” to which John Dewey added, 

“But that intelligence is dormant, and its communications are broken, inarticulate, and faint, 

unless it possesses the community as its medium” (Dewey 1952). The question for ethnographers 

and park planners alike is how to enter into that medium. We will return to this question in the 

concluding section. 

Figure 1. In the Cathedral Café, fieldworker Dana Hercbergs interviews Rick Bays about a map he 

is producing of all the historic towns and places along New River. (Unless otherwise 

indicated, all photos by Mary Hufford) 
NERI and GARI Ethnographic Overview and Assessment

7 

Figure 2. Map of study area. (Produced by Darryl Depencier for the Center for Folklore and 

Ethnography, University of Pennsylvania) 
NERI and GARI Ethnographic Overview and Assessment 

8 
NERI and GARI Ethnographic Overview and Assessment

9 

CHAPTER TWO: HISTORICAL FRAMEWORK AND 

OVERVIEW 

THE LANDSCAPES OF NERI AND GARI

Since the 18th century, the region surrounding the New and Gauley Rivers has played a 

key role in the formation and industrialization of the United States. However, the historiography 

of the past decade provides a framework for challenging the traditional account of Appalachia as 

a frontier won by Europeans and their descendants from the Indians, the French, and the 

Confederacy, setting the stage for a theater in which Captains of Industry then tamed the 

wilderness and its occupants in order to recover the raw materials needed to fuel the nation on its 

path of progress. Wilma Dunaway, in The First American Frontier, argues that the American 

myth of the frontier, with its romanticized views of pioneering life, colonial conquest, and 

industrial domination, obscures the role that the Appalachian region has played in the global 

economy since the seventeenth century, as well as the ways in which Appalachian history has 

been driven by interactions in an international marketplace. Drawing on Immanuel Wallerstein’s 

world systems theory, she argues that since 1700, the history of the southern Appalachian region 

is a history of its systematic peripheralization in the emerging world economy. 

Unfolding as a periphery, the Appalachian frontier formed a space for economic 

expansion on the margins of two other zones: a core and a semi-periphery. The position of core 

was initially fought over by England and France, with England emerging as dominant, following 

the French and Indian War. The semi-periphery was occupied by Spain, Portugal, and other 

European nations, as well as by the British colonies on the New England and mid-Atlantic 

seaboard. The history of New and Gauley Rivers provides, over a period of approximately two 

centuries, localized detail on the dynamics of the interactions among core, semi-periphery, and 

periphery, and the impacts of these interactions on the community forest system. The contribution 

of ethnography is to retrieve perspectives on the dynamic as they were, and are, conveyed from 
NERI and GARI Ethnographic Overview and Assessment 

10 

multiple positions in American society, and to illuminate the role played by the National Parks in 

this world system. 

A word is in order about how the continuing dynamic interactions of core, semi-periphery, 

and periphery play out in a global context. Competing for hegemony in the world market, France 

and England expanded into the Appalachian frontier, seeking resources for the accumulation of 

wealth and power. They competed for trading relationships with the Iroquois, Cherokee, 

Delaware, and others, who in turn competed with each other for the advantage in trading 

European goods for deer hides and other extracted resources such as ginseng and gold. The Six 

Nations’ appropriation of southern West Virginia as its hunting ground in the early eighteenth 

century was a defining moment in that internal competition, as was its cession of that land to the 

colonists toward the end of the century. The semi-peripheries of the mid-Atlantic and New 

England regions extended the commodity chain as brokers and light manufactures (of, for 

example, iron, salt, tobacco, milled timber, bricks, homespun textiles, and liquor) in a bid to enter 

the core. As the core and semi-periphery expanded into the frontier, southern Appalachia, 

including southern West Virginia, “was incorporated as a peripheral fringe of the European 

colonies” (Dunaway 1997:11). Through these trading relationships, surplus value was transferred 

from the periphery to the semi-periphery and core. The system of extraction relied not only on the 

cultivation of dependence on European goods among Native Americans, but increasingly it relied 

on coerced labor in the peripheral zones, including slavery, indentured servitude, cash-cropping, 

and tenantry. The coercion of labor was enabled by the distribution of large parcels of land to 

absentee owners in the core and semi-peripheries. In present-day southern West Virginia, ninetypercent of the land is controlled by absentee companies. This pattern of landholding resulted early 

on in a large landless population, generating a ready pool of itinerant, seasonal labor for the larger 

plantations, farms, and extractive enterprises (coal and timber). The outcome of this dynamic for 

peripheral zones is an internally weak economy forced to rely on tourism amidst the continual 

degradation of an environment that is exploited beyond its capacity in order to feed the global 

market’s insatiable appetite for raw materials. 

The historical timeline in Appendix I, while not exhaustive, provides an overview of the 

interactions among core, semi-periphery, and periphery over the past 200 years. This section of 
NERI and GARI Ethnographic Overview and Assessment

11 

the report provides an overview of the exploration, settlement, and industrialization of the region 

surrounding the New and Gauley Rivers, which played a central role in that history. 

Early Trail Systems 

Connecting its tributaries with the Ohio River, via the Kanawha River, the New River 

defines a major two-way corridor along which flora, fauna, people, commodities and ideas have 

migrated from pre-historic times to the present day. In the network of trails used by Native 

Americans, as mapped by William E. Myer, the Ohio Prong of the Great Indian Warpath follows 

the New River. Myers’ map, compiled from historic maps and journals, provides an overview of 

the routes that Europeans would follow into what is now southern West Virginia. Myer and others 

have concluded that the numerous archeological remains along these trails indicate ancient 

patterns of use, but that the most “were so old that the Indians of the period of 1750 appear not to 

have had even a tradition regarding them”1

 (1925: 754). 

Figure 3. Detail from Myer’s map of Indian Trails in the Southeast, with trails in the study area 

highlighted. Key to numbers in study area: 31) Great Indian War Path (Ohio Branch); 

36) Great Indian War Path (Chesapeake Branch); 48) Pamunkey and New River Road; 

52) New River and Southern Trail; 54) Big Sandy Trail; 55) Guyandot Trail; 56) Coal 

River Trail; 57) Paint Creek Trail; 58) New River and Cumberland Gap Trail; and 59) 

North Fork of Tug River. (Source: Myer 1925) 
NERI and GARI Ethnographic Overview and Assessment 

12 

What Myer calls the Chesapeake prong of the Great Indian Warpath formed a major route 

of migration for Germans and Scotch-Irish who followed this route from Pennsylvania, through 

the Valley of the Virginias, and then branched off into the Carolinas, Tennessee, Kentucky, and 

present day West Virginia. This part of the New World does not begin to appear in detail on 

European maps until the 18th century. The first Europeans to enter the region were French and 

English explorers and traders, who were dependent on Native American guides for safe passage 

and orienteering. They were also guided by “long hunters,” (or “hermit hunters”) men from the 

colonies who would also go into the region on extended hunting trips, during which time they 

procured game and marketable goods such as furs and ginseng (Sanders I:8). The practice of long 

hunting not only provided a context for interactions with native groups, and ethnographic 

accounts such as the one offered by James Adair, but enabled hunters to identify places for 

further settlement. 

Figure 4. Survey made in 1795 by Edward Dillon, at the headwaters of the Big and Little Coal 

Rivers and the Guyandot, showing the location of “Farley’s Rooting Camp,” near the 

head of Buffalo Creek, where Boone, Logan and Wyoming County come together. 

(Source: Montgomery County Courthouse, Christiansburg, VA) 
NERI and GARI Ethnographic Overview and Assessment

13 

It is likely that unrecorded traders and long hunters had been venturing into the region 

since at least the early 18th century, well ahead of the explorers, who seem to have been wellinformed regarding the terrain of the country, and who were following known trails (Solecki 

1949: 334–36). These trails “followed lines of least resistance, avoiding rough and stony ground, 

briers, and close undergrowth such as is formed by laurel. They frequently followed buffalo paths 

as the easiest routes ... where there were fewer and smaller streams to cross and where possible, 

the paths went through the lower gaps of mountain ranges. Johnston’s History of Middle New 

River Settlements describes the trails used by Indians based in Ohio and the lower Kanawha 

Rivers: 

“These Indians with their prisoners passed down New River, crossing at the ford 

above the mouth of Bluestone thence across what is called White Oak Mountain, 

the northeastern extension of the Flat Top, by way of where Beckley, in Raleigh 

County, is now situated, the old Indian trail passes at what is now the junction of 

the principal streets of the town and on the head of Paint Creek and down to the 

Kanawha. 

“This trail up Paint Creek and either by Pipe Stem Knob or mouth of Big 

Bluestone was one of their frequently traveled ways to East River and New River 

settlements. Paint Creek took its name from several trees standing thereon 

painted by the Indians as one of their guides or landmarks on marauding 

expeditions into white settlements, and on their return they by marks on the trees 

would indicate the number of scalps taken.” (Johnston 1908) 

On one early map of the region, Paint Creek is called Yellow Creek. Another trail led up 

from Paint Creek, via Short Creek, “by way of Jarrolds Valley, going up Marsh Fork and Drews 

Creek, crossing Cherry Pond Mountain at Indian Gap to the head of Pond Fork. From thence it 

led to the waters of Guyandot River by way of Walnut Gap. Shards of flint found at the head of 

Drew’s Creek suggests that this was a place where Indians made their arrowheads. 

On the earliest maps of Indian Nations, the region appears strangely unclaimed, 

surrounded by Indian settlements, but not permanently occupied by any of them. On the map 

Lewis Evans published in 1755, the area now occupied by the New and Gauley National Rivers 

falls within “a vein of Mountains about 30 or 40 miles right across through which there is not yet 
NERI and GARI Ethnographic Overview and Assessment 

14 

any occupied path in these parts.” In his History of Southwest Virginia, Lewis Summers offers 

what has become the generally accepted explanation for this gap: 

“This vast park was filled with the finest game in great quantities, and, for more 

than one hundred years previous to its settlement by the Anglo-Saxon, it was 

jointly used, as if by common consent, as a hunting ground by the Cherokees, 

Shawnee and Six Nations, but the Cherokees were compelled to admit the 

superior title of the Six Nations to the sovereignty of the soil, which they did by 

frequent gifts of game killed within the territory.” (1903:25) 

Figure 5. Detail from Lewis Evans 1755 map denoting the Ouasito Mountains and adjunct areas 

drained by the Kanawha River as uninhabited. (Source: Library of Congress) 

According to Robert Jay Dilger, missionaries reported that several thousand Hurons 

occupied what is now West Virginia in the 16th century. They were driven out in the early 17th

century by the Iroquois Confederacy, which sought to use the area for a hunting ground in the 

spring and summer (Dilger 2003). Lewis Summers notes that sometime in the late 17th century, 

according to Cherokee tradition, the Cherokee drove out a group that lived in log cabins daubed 

with mud (“Xualans”), and that the region was principally used by the Cherokee (a Siouan group), 

and the Shawnee. Summers speculates that the rich resources of southwest Virginia were so vital 
NERI and GARI Ethnographic Overview and Assessment

15 

to both Cherokee and Shawnee that traditional hostilities were suspended among those who 

hunted and gathered in the region. 

“The tradition was that once of old there was a delegated assemblage of the 

chiefs of the Indian tribes for a conference with the Great Spirit, at which 

conference the Great Spirit detailed certain great calamities that had befallen 

them the paradise of Hogoheegee, which were traceable to the causes named 

above, and thereupon the Great Spirit ordered all their nations to remove beyond 

certain boundaries, out of the Eden, which the Great Spirit informed them was 

too easy of life for their content and happiness and their future security.” 

(Summers 1903:25) 

Though Summers calls it “nothing more than the common hunting ground of the 

Cherokee and the Shawnee” (1903:27), shared access to this Edenic buffer zone commanded by 

the Great Spirit was seen as the foundation for peace among traditional enemies. Although the 

Eastern Panhandle was opened for settlement as early as 1716 by Governor Alexander Spotswood, 

Cherokee and Shawnee claims to the region south and west remained in effect for much of the 

eighteenth century. In an effort to keep on good terms with the Shawnee and Cherokee, the 

British government issued the Proclamation of 1763, prohibiting settlement by British subjects 

west of the Alleghenies. This proclamation was overturned by the 1768 Treaty of Hard Labor, 

which extinguished Cherokee rights to all but the southwesternmost corner of present day West 

Virginia (Rice 1970:61–62; Summers 1903:97–102). 

Charles Callender notes that the Shawnee were “an exceptionally fragmented people,” 

who lived nomadically, and were found in Illinois, Ohio, Maryland, and along the Savannah 

River. In the second half of the 18th century they coalesced in southern Ohio, which may have 

been their precontact homeland (Callender 1978:622). During the precontact period, the Iroquois 

League drove the Shawnee out of the Ohio River Valley, conferring on them a subordinate status 

comparable to that of the Delaware. The Shawnee frequently clashed with other tribes in the 

southeast, and tried to bolster their standing by playing the French and English against each other. 

Among native peoples, the Shawnee were the most violently opposed to trans-Appalachian 

settlement, and waged attacks on settlers before, during, and after the Revolutionary War. In the 

histories of southern West Virginia counties, these attacks are recounted in great detail, and 

monuments to the pioneer families may be found along the Gauley and Bluestone Rivers. In the 

19th century, a large group of Shawnee joined the Cherokee Nation. 
NERI and GARI Ethnographic Overview and Assessment 

16 

Figure 6. Detail from James Mooney’s 1900 map of the Cherokee Country, showing extent of 

original Cherokee claim, bounded to the north and east by the New and Kanawha Rivers 

in present-day West Virginia, and the cession of claims in present-day West Virginia, 

Kentucky and North Carolina by 1776. (Source: Mooney 1900) 

Mississippi and Cherokee Antecedents of Mountain Culture and Agriculture 

“Native American history – cultural and agricultural – which extends back 

thousands of years and into the present within the southern mountains, provides 

an essential reminder of the long time scales and deep prior contexts prefacing 

the colonial “beginnings” of the region.” (Hatley 1991: 37) 

James Mooney’s map shows the expanse of Cherokee territory to a northeastern 

boundary formed by the New and Kanawha River. In 1770 the Treaty of Lochaber extinguished 

all rights of the Cherokee to land within present day West Virginia. But the persistence in oral 

tradition of claims that this region formed an unofficial refuge for displaced Cherokee invites us 

to examine the evidence for cultural continuity between the earliest Native Americans and 

present-day communities in the region. The first historical accounts of Native American life in 

the Appalachian south are provided by the four men who chronicled Hernando De Soto’s travels 

in 1540. In his environmental history of the southern Appalachians, Donald Davis extrapolates a 

view of the environment and culture of the Fort Ancient peoples, floodplain cultivators of eastern 

Kentucky and West Virginia. Fort Ancient represented one of four mountain centers of 

Mississippian culture, which had, since about 700 A.D. been centered in Cahokia, on the 

Mississippi River, near present-day St. Louis, Missouri. “The Fort Ancient peoples of Kentucky 
NERI and GARI Ethnographic Overview and Assessment

17 

and West Virginia, who never achieved the level of social organization of other Mississippian 

culture groups, lived outside the influence of a single paramount chief, or cacique, and thus 

maintained a much more decentralized body politic” (Davis, 2000:23). Archeological and 

historical evidence of cultural continuity suggests that the Cherokee, who are said to be Iroquoian, 

encountered and appropriated Mississippian ways (Davis, 2000: 29). 

Davis’s environmental history brings to light the extent to which mountain ecologies and 

landscapes are the expression of hundreds of years of interaction among human and non-human 

players, as well as the dramatic effect that trade with European countries would have on mountain 

ecologies. To begin with, Mississippian agriculture was, as Davis notes: 

“[M]uch more than the tending of a handful of individual crops. More accurately 

it was a cultivation system embedded in a diverse and dynamic local ecology. 

Many edible foods grew in abandoned fields or along the disturbed edges of the 

upland forest. When in season, passion flower and morning glory roots as well as 

mulberry, wild cherry, and scuppernong or muscadine grape might be gathered in 

large quantities. Likewise, the Mississippians prepared nutmeats of all kinds, 

including chestnuts, black walnuts, butternuts, hazelnuts, beechnuts, and 

chinkapins.” (Davis, 2000: 25) 

Mississippian practices of animal husbandry appear to anticipate the present-day use of 

“mountain fiests” for treeing squirrels (see Figure 7). They appear to have captured and raised 

wild turkeys in large enclosures, cleared land for the cultivation of multiple varieties of corn, and 

harvested timber to build palisades and dwellings. They used fires for hunting and for insect 

control in the crops. They practiced “phlogiston,” the annual burning of fields which both 

fertilized and preserved the clearings for crops, and to suppress competition for the river cane in 

the riparian lowlands which figured heavily in Mississippian life and culture. Such clearings also 

created habitat for shade-intolerant trees, such as the occasional pine forests that De Soto noted 

(Davis 2000: 29). 

The Mississipians hunted mammals and birds, including deer, elk, black bear, squirrels, 

passenger pigeons, ducks, geese, sandhill cranes and whistling swans. From the rivers they took 

paddlefish, gar, sturgeons, quillback, eels, drum, minnows, redhorse suckers, bass, mussels, 

turtles, and catfish, using cane spears and wire traps. They also harvested and consumed hundreds 

of species of freshwater mussels. 
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18 

Figure 7. Chipper, a mountain feist, lived at the head of the Buffalo Fork of Rock Creek, in 

Raleigh County. He hunted squirrels for Ben Burnside. (Photo by Lyntha Eiler. Source: 

American Folklife Center, Library of Congress) 

By 1630, less than a century after Spanish contact, the Mississippian culture had declined 

precipitously, due to Spanish incursions and the spread of diseases. The scholarly consensus is 

that the Cherokee express continuity with the Mississippian culture, and that the Shawnee are 

most likely descended from the Fort Ancient peoples in the Big Sandy and Kanawha River 

Valleys (Davis 2000:45). James Mooney records a detailed account of how the mounds were built, 

entitled, “the Mounds and the Constant Fire: the Old Sacred Things.” It begins: “Some say that 

the mounds were built by another people. Others say they were built by the ancestors of the old 

Ani’-Kitu’hwagi for town-house foundations, so that the townhouses would be safe when freshets 

came” (Mooney 1900: 395). 

Along with the disruption of Mississippian ways, the Spanish left a horticultural legacy 

that is still present in the vicinity of New River. During the 16th and 17th centuries, the Spanish 

introduced Old World crops, livestock, and agricultural practices, as well as crops cultivated by 

Indians and African slaves in the Caribbean. Livestock included Iberian cattle, hogs, horses, 

mules, donkeys, burros, sheep, goats, and chickens. Crops introduced early on included peaches, 

sweet potatoes, cowpeas and watermelons. The Spanish assisted in the introduction of foods 

brought from Africa to feed the slaves, including yams, sorghum, okra, and castor beans. (Davis 

2000: 46). All of these are presently grown in southern West Virginia. Both peaches and sweet 
NERI and GARI Ethnographic Overview and Assessment

19 

potatoes became major staples in Cherokee food production (Davis 2000: 48) and peach trees 

became a sign of a Cherokee landscape. Along the Coal River Trail, which followed the Coal 

River within the boundary of Cherokee territory (see Figure 6), the name of Peach Tree Creek is 

said to have been given by the first white settlers who came there and found peach trees growing 

(Hufford 1998: 148). 

Davis notes also that the clearings left in the wake of the Mississippians provided an 

entrée for significant migrations of buffalo into the region in the 17th century. The movement of 

buffalo through the region would have aided in the renewal of clearings where they grazed and 

the maintenance of a trail system. The compaction of soils by buffalo and deer around mineral 

springs and salt licks created the conditions for ponds and lakes, such as the one at Mercer 

Springs. 

In the mid-18th century the fur trade between Native Americans and the English and 

French intensified to the point that after three decades the population of large fur-bearing 

mammals was severely depleted. The most serious impact of the fur trade on forest and stream 

ecology was the decimation of the beaver population. Over many centuries, ponds impounded by 

beaver dams made of saplings had produced a system of floodplain meadows and wetlands, 

which supported populations of freshwater fish, reptiles, amphibians and water fowl. Davis writes 

that: 

“Beaver ponds and their network of channels and dams also helped prevent 

widespread flooding, equalizing stream flows during both spring freshets and 

summer droughts. In addition, this open habitat also provided feeding places for 

deer, bison, and elk, as meadow grasses and other plant species flourished in the 

moist alluvial soils of the creek and river bottoms surrounding each dam.” 

(2000:69) 

Ginseng was an important trade commodity, beginning in the early 1700s, when Joseph 

Lafiteau, a French Jesuit in Canada, recognized a plant used by the Iroquois to be the same as that 

which commanded high prices in China (Lafiteau 1718). According to Davis, the Chinese lost 

confidence in the Canadian product, due to its improper processing, and turned to the southern 

Appalachians where the Cherokee, who knew and used the plant medicinally, were willing to 

harvest and sell the root. To this day, the Central Appalachian region that was controlled by the 

Cherokee in the 18th century continues to supply more than half of the wild ginseng exported by 
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20 

the United States. More than half of what is exported from West Virginia comes from the 

counties to the south and west of the New and Kanawha Rivers (Hufford 2003: 267). 

With the depletion of deer, elk, and bison, the Cherokee began incorporating cattle and 

hogs into their system. Davis observes that the free-range grazing practiced on the frontier was 

first introduced by the Spanish in northern Florida, where it was adopted by the Florida Indians, 

from whom the Cherokee learned it. With the return of cattle year after year to the canebrakes 

that once dominated many river banks, river cane (Arundinaria gigantea) was eventually reduced 

to remnant patches along the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts (Davis, 2000: 76–77; Bolgiano 1998: 45). 

Cane had been a valuable, multi-purpose resource for the Cherokee, who used it to build houses, 

and to make sleeping mats, bowls, and baskets. 

The Cherokee, as James Adair notes in his ethnographic account published in 1775, were 

mountain people. Mountains and lowlands worked together in their system, integrated through 

waterways. 

“Their towns are always close to some river, or creek; as there the land is 

commonly very level and fertile, on account of the frequent washings off the 

mountains, and the moisture it receives from the waters, that run through their 

fields. And such a situation enables them to perform the ablutions, connected 

with their religious worship.” (Adair 1775:226). 

These “ablutions,” known as “going to water,” continue to be an important practice in Cherokee 

communities. Adair reports that forty years earlier the Cherokee were a populous nation with 

sixty four towns and villages. “According to the computations of the most intelligent old traders 

of that time, they amounted to upwards of sixty-thousand fighting men; a prodigious number to 

have so close on our settlements, defended by blue-topped ledges of inaccessible mountains.” 

(Adair 1775:227) 

Adair’s writings give us a glimpse of the mixed-mesophytic community forest and 

watershed that the settlers appropriated. The Cherokee, Adair noted, had a striking relationship to 

the rivers, sources of spiritual and material sustenance: 

“They are also strongly attached to rivers, – all retaining the opinion of the 

ancients, that rivers are necessary to constitute a paradise. Not is it only 

ornamental, but likewise beneficial to them, on account of purifying themselves, 

and also for the services of common life – such as fishing, fowling, and killing of 
NERI and GARI Ethnographic Overview and Assessment

21 

deer, which come in the warm season, to eat the saltish moss and grass, which 

grow on the rocks, and under the surface of the waters. Their rivers are generally 

very shallow, and pleasant to the eye; for the land being high, the waters have a 

quick descent; they seldom overflow their banks, unless when a heavy rain falls 

on a deep snow. – then, it is frightful to see the huge pieces of ice, mixed with a 

prodigious torrent of water, rolling down the high mountains, and over the steep 

craggy rocks, so impetuous, that nothing can resist their force. Two old traders 

saw an instance of this kind, which swept away great plantations of oaks and 

pines, that had their foundation as in the center of the earth.” (Adair 1775: 228) 

The community forest and watershed of the Cherokee supported a corn-woodland-pastureland 

economy that the European settlers moved into. Adair notes the prevalence of hogs, poultry, “and 

everything sufficient for the support of a reasonable life ... at the fall of the leaf, the woods are 

full of hickory-nuts, acorns, chestnuts, and the like; which occasions the Indian bacon to be more 

streaked, firm, and better tasted, than any we meet with in the English settlements” (Adair 1775: 

230–31). 

The implication of Cherokee knowledge and landscape practices were not lost on Adair: 

“The Cheerake country abounds with the best herbage, on the richer parts of the 

hills and mountains; and a great variety of valuable herbs is promiscuously 

scattered on the lower lands. It is remarkable, that none of our botanists should 

attempt making any experiments there, notwithstanding the place invited their 

attention, and the public had a right to expect so generous an undertaking from 

several of them; while at the same time, they would be recovering or renewing 

their health, at a far easier, cheaper, and safer rate, than coasting it to our 

northern colonies.” (Adair 1775: 229) 

While much of Adair’s discussion is centered on the mountains of Tennessee, North 

Carolina, Georgia, and South Carolina, the region surrounding the present national rivers would 

have afforded the same amenities. On Hutchins’ 1775 map of The Western Parts of Virginia, 

Pennsylvania, Maryland and North Carolina, the name “Ouasioto,” a Shawnee term for deer, 

labels the mountains of the Cumberland Plateau, which are annotated: 

“The Ouasioto Mountains are between 50 to 60 miles wide at the Gap, where the 

War Path leads to the Cuttowa Country; these Mountains abound in Coal, Lime, 

and Free Stone; the Summits of them are generally covered with good Soil, and a 

variety of Timber; and the low or interval Lands are rich and remarkably well 

watered.” 
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22 

It was such land that George Washington set out to survey in 1770. His journals contain a 

running list of the forest species he saw from his canoe, especially those that indicated rich soil: 

beech, walnut, poplar, black oak, hickory, locust, cherry, sugar trees, ash, sycamore (one nearly 

forty five feet in diameter), Near the mouth of the Kanahwa River he received invaluable advice 

“on the Subject of Land” from Kiashuta, a Six Nation Indian Chief who told Washington about 

the rich soils located on level benches at the heads of the creeks. Kiashuta also told him what he 

would find if he followed the Kanawha River to its falls. He would find that the bottom on the 

west side continues “all the way to the Falls without the Interposition of Hills,” that “the Bottoms 

on the East side of the River are also very good, but broken with Hills,” and that “the river is 

easily passed with Canoes to the Falls which. Cannot be less than 100 Miles, but further it is not 

possible to go with them, and that there is but one ridge from thence to the Settlements upon the 

River above” (Fitzpatrick 1925: I, 431). 

Near the falls of which Kiashuta spoke to George Washington in 1770, the New and 

Gauley River basins form the headwaters of the Kanawha River, or “Conoway” River as it 

appears on 16th and 17th century maps, a name for a group that the Seneca claimed to have 

vanquished from the region. The Ohio Branch of the Great Warrior Trail was used by the 

Shawnee to get to their hunting grounds along the Greenbrier River, where the “Settlements upon 

the River above” were encroaching. In these settlements were the ancestors, mostly Scotch Irish, 

English and Irish, of many who live in present-day southern West Virginia. 

Exploration, Speculation, Warfare, and Settlement in the 

Colonial Period: 1641–1775 

When Europeans came into the region in the 17th century, the New River was known to 

some Native Americans as “Mondongachate.” The Upper New River, flowing through North 

Carolina and Virginia, was first encountered by English explorers Walter Austin, Rice Hoe, 

Joseph Johnson, and Walter Chiles in 1641. Because the river drained to the West, England saw 

this as an opportunity to expand its territory by claiming all the lands drained by this river. The 

following year, King Charles I commissioned William Berkeley, a young nobleman from the 

south of England to be the governor of Virginia. Over the next 35 years, as governor of a colony 

that included all of present-day West Virginia, Berkeley would draw on the sons of the Cavaliers, 

as those who were loyal to Charles I were called, to establish a ruling oligarchy of Tidewater 
NERI and GARI Ethnographic Overview and Assessment

23 

planters. Out of the resulting class system grew a key part of the semi-periphery that would 

transfer the wealth of the Allegheny frontier to England, along with the products of its plantations 

and iron works. Explorers from these colonies paved the way. 

In 1671 Thomas Batts and Robert Fallam set off, along with their indentured servant Jack 

Neasam, and with funding from Abraham Wood of Amherst County, to explore the Woods River, 

as the New River was then called. The Appomatock Indians who accompanied them fed them on 

turkey, grapes, and deer. “Presently afterwards,” writes the journalist, “we had sight of a curious 

River like Apomatack River. Its course here was north, and so as we suppose runs west about a 

certain curious mountains we saw westward.... We understand the Mohecan Indians did here 

formerly live. It cannot be long since for we found corn stalks in the ground.” They had caught 

sight of Peter’s Falls, where the New River breaks through Peters’ Mountain near Pearisburg, 

Virginia. The journalist relates having to assuage the anxieties of the Mohecan Indians “who 

having intelligence of our coming were afraid it had been to fight them.” He also mentions 

hearing “that there were a great company of Indians that lived upon the great Water” (Summers 

1929). 

In 1674, Gabriel Arthur, a trading agent of Abraham Wood, was captured by Cherokee 

and taken to a Mohetan Village near present day Marmet, on the Kanawha River. In 1742, John 

Peter Salley became the first Englishman to cross the New River and follow the trail on its 

western side, eventually spotting the coal outcroppings for which Coal River is purportedly 

named. Other travelers of this time period allude to the signs of seasonal use by Indians. 

Christopher Gist relates staying in “old Indian cabins” during his 1750–1751 journey, during 

which he crossed the New River at Crump’s Bottom, following the Great Indian Warpath to that 

fording place (Solecki 1949: 338). 

The outcomes of the explorations were not only diaries, but maps, and as we’ve seen, the 

earliest maps record observations about the lands themselves. In Virginia’s upper valley, the 

westernmost European settlers indicated on Evans’ map of 1755 were noted as those of Keeny, 

where the Greenbrier joins New River, and Samuel Stalnaker, on the Middle Fork of the Clinch 

River. In an account of his travels during the spring of 1750, the explorer Dr. Thomas Walker 

wrote that he met Samuel Stalnaker “on his way to the Cherokee Indians” (Walker 1888:42). 
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24 

Westward expansion from here would bring the settlers into conflict with the Cherokee and the 

Shawnee for whom the region surrounding the present day parks served as a kind of hunting 

reserve even then. While long hunters, trappers, and traders from the settled portions of Virginia 

could continue to venture into this region, efforts to colonize it would be met with fierce and 

bloody resistance from the Shawnee. 

Stalnaker and Keeny were the advance guard of the German and Scotch-Irish pioneers 

migrating south from Pennsylvania along the Great Indian War Path. Between 1683 and 1775, 

100,000 German Protestants left Germany, fleeing from conscription, high taxes, war, and 

religious persecution. Germans who settled in Virginia, beginning in the 1730s, between 

Strasbourg and Harrison, and on the Piedmont, came from the mountainous region of southwest 

Germany. Though German was spoken by 28 percent of Virginians in 1790, by 1800, most spoke 

English. 

Figure 8. Detail of study area from Adair’s Map of North American Indians. (Source: Adair 1775) 
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25 

Between 1715 and 1775, 250,000 people migrated from Ireland to the U.S. Many of the 

earliest immigrants from Ireland came from the North of Ireland, and were descended from 

Lowland Scotsmen who had been settled in Ulster by the British after 1603 in order to control the 

rebellious native Irish population. The Lowland Scots were historically well practiced in this 

buffering function, having lived between England and the Highland Gaels for centuries, and then 

having been settled on lands in Northern Ireland (Ulster) that had been confiscated from Irish 

Catholic Earls and given to British Protestant landlords, to whom they paid rent. Because of the 

relocation they were known as the “Scotch Irish.” In 1717 thousands of the leases expired, and in 

the face of rackrenting, poor harvests, and the collapse of the woolen industry due to English 

price-fixing practices, they chose to emigrate. Those who set out for America entered at ports in 

New England and Philadelphia, where Provincial Secretary James Logan had invited them, 

thinking to position them between the colonies and the frontier. “At the time, we were 

apprehensive from the Northern Indians,” he wrote in 1720. “I therefore thought it might be 

prudent to plant a settlement of such men as those who formerly had so bravely defended 

Londonderry and Iniskillen as a frontier, in case of any disturbance.” But he was reluctant to issue 

them patents on the land, and later blamed them for making trouble with the Indians (Leyburn 

1962: 191–92). Bypassing the fertile lands already taken by Germans, “they seemed to prefer 

slate hills, where there was an abundance of pure springs, and where the air of the hills and the 

rolling countryside may have reminded them of their native scene in Northern Ireland.” Many 

places surrounding the headwaters of the Susquehanna River are named after places in Northern 

Ireland: Londonderry, Donegal, Fermanagh, and Eniskillen. 

The Scotch Irish began moving from Pennsylvania down the Great Wagon Road into the 

Shenandoah Valley in the 1740s, where many of them bypassed the German settlements to settle 

in southwestern Virginia, where “western lands” of Tidewater planters were made available to 

those who would settle there and build forts to defend Virginia against the Indians. In 1755, the 

settlement of Draper’s Meadows was attacked and massacred by Shawnee Indians.2

Meanwhile, three land companies, the Greenbrier, the Ohio, and the Loyal Company, 

were eager to begin settling tenants on the lands they had been granted by the English Crown, but 

were frustrated by the competition between England and France over good trade relations with 
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26 

the Indians. During the French and Indian War (1755–1763) the British colonies signed several 

conciliatory treaties. In 1758, at the treaty of Easton, the Proprietors of Pennsylvania signed an 

agreement with the Six Nations to leave land west of the Alleghenies as Indian hunting grounds, 

not open to settlement. The Ohio, Greenbrier and Loyal Land Companies vehemently opposed 

the agreement, and transgressions against the treaty were not long in coming. In 1761 Archibald 

Clendenin settled two miles west of Lewisburg, and Frederick See and Felty Yocum settled not 

far from there on Muddy Creek. In 1763, the Ottowa attacked Detroit, the Shawnee and Delaware 

attacked Fort Pitt, and the Shawnee Chief Cornstalk destroyed the Clendenin, See, and Yocum 

homesteads. The ensuing proclamation of 1763 strictly prohibited further surveys on “Western 

Waters,” including New River, but was overturned five years later by the Treaty of Fort Stanwyx, 

which extinguished the rights of the Six Nations to western (transallegheny) Virginia, and the 

Treaty of Hard Labor, which pushed the Cherokee boundary to the western edge of the New and 

Kanawha Rivers. 

Figure 9. Detail from Fry & Jefferson Map, showing “Great Konhaway called also Woods River 

and New River.” (Source: Library of Congress) 
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27 

From 1769 to 1777, settlers, mostly Scotch Irish, poured into the valleys of the 

Greenbrier and Kanawha River tributaries. European settlement of the region proceeded through 

the 18th century along the New River from Draper’s Meadow in present-day Pulaski County, 

Virginia, along the Middle New to where the Greenbrier and Bluestone Rivers empty into it just 

south of Hinton, in the vicinity of Crumps Bottom in present day Summers County. The Shawnee 

continued to conduct raids on the settlers, even after 1774, when the Shawnee were defeated at 

the Battle of Point Pleasant, at the confluence of the Ohio and Kanawha Rivers. 

In the mountains the trails often led along the higher ground and ridges where the 

undergrowth was not so dense, and where there were fewer streams to cross.” John P. Hale (in 

Trans-Allegheny Pioneers) describes the path taken by Mary Ingle’s captors from Crumps’ 

Bottom, where they left New River, went up Bluestone over Flat Top Mountain to the head of 

Paint Creek and down to the Kanawha River. The trail did not hew closely to the New River, 

which was a formidable obstacle course of unfordable creeks and dangerous currents. . 

Figure 10. Routes taken by early settlers migrating from Pennsylvania into the southern mountains 

and the Ohio River Valley. (Source: Rice 1970) 
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28 

Between 1769 and 1777 settlers – most of them Scotch-Irish – poured out of Virginia into 

the valleys of the Greenbrier and Kanawha Rivers, taking up residence in the broad fertile 

bottomlands. In 1773 Walter Kelly, the first European to settle in Fayette County, was killed in an 

Indian attack. The Shawnee, who had not been party to the treaties, continued to strike against 

settlers encroaching on their hunting grounds, even after Cornstalk’s defeat at the Battle of Point 

Pleasant (1774). In 1775 Thomas Farley built Farley’s Fort above Bull Falls and Warford Ferry, 

after Walter Kelly had been killed in Fayette County by Indians for trespassing (1773). As Farley 

was building his fort, Mitchell Clay was settling his family at Clover Bottom, also known as 

Shawnee Lake, near Spanishburg. Following Farley, Andrew Culbertson established a settlement 

at Culbertson’s Bottom at the mouth of Indian Creek, the site of what is now known as Crump’s 

Bottom. 

Notorious assaults in the New and Gauley River basins included the murder of the 

children of Mitchell Clay (1783), at the headwaters of Bluestone River, and the daughters of 

Henry Morris (1792), near Lockwood, on Peter’s Creek of the Gauley River. Morris planted a 

dogwood tree where he buried his children, which bloomed for nearly a century, and was then 

replaced by a marble headstone near the Fairview Baptist Church on Route 39 (Brown 1925: 29). 

This tragedy of peripheralized peoples set against each other by interests in the semi-periphery 

and the core is also commemorated by a sandstone statue that was raised in front of the Mercer 

County Courthouse in 1977. The work of sculptor Eric Dye, the figure shows a pioneer couple, 

Mitchell Clay and his wife Phoebe Belcher Clay, grieving over the death of their children Bartley 

and Tabitha in a Shawnee raid. Their son Ezekiel, according to the plaque at the statue’s base, 

was taken to Chilicothe and burned at the stake. Clay’s descendants in southern West Virginia 

number in the hundreds. 
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29 

Figure 11. Statue of Mitchell and Phoebe Clay, grieving the death of their children in a Shawnee 

raid in 1783. Mercer County Courthouse. 

Patterns in the Scotch-Irish Dispersion 

In The Scotch-Irish of Colonial Pennsylvania, Wayland Dunaway traces the dispersion of 

the Scotch-Irish out of Pennsylvania, from the headwaters of the Susquehanna toward headwaters 

throughout the southern mountains, over the course of several generations. This in itself is a mark 

of an interest in sustaining a sense of identity among people who share not only origins but 

destiny. 

“The movement from Pennsylvania ... was unquestionably a controlling 

circumstance in the settlement of a large area in the Old Dominion. When this 

area had itself become thickly settled, it sent forth many of the second and third 

generations to share in the occupation of the South and West, although the 

original impulse came from Pennsylvania” (1944: 106). 

Dunaway notes, however, that the settlement of the Pennsylvania Scotch-Irish in what is now 

West Virginia: 

“[W]as not altogether in line with the main southern movement, but proceeded 

under somewhat different conditions. As the settlements in the Shenandoah 

Valley thickened, pioneers began to cross the mountains into west Virginia and 

to people the region drained by the Southe Branch of the Potomac, while others 

occupied the valleys of the New, the Greenbrier, and the Kanawha. ... In the 

New River region, settlement began somewhat later and received its initial 

impulse chiefly from the explorations of Christopher Gist, who traversed these 

wilds in 1750 and made a report which stimulated further emigration from the 

Valley of Virginia and from Pennsylvania. Among the pioneers was Andrew 
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30 

Culbertson of Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, who located in the present county of 

Summers in 1753. Other Scotch-Irish settlers entered this region by way of the 

Greenbrier and the upper reaches of the James River” (1944: 107). 

In 1745, James Patton, an Irishman, received a 100,000 acre land grant at the headwaters of the 

New, Holston, and Clinch Rivers. Settlement eventually proceeded from the vicinity of 

Pearisburg moving steadily down the New River and up its tributaries (Sanders I:61). 

This eventually became a hearth area for the settlement of the New River area in present 

day West Virginia. The character of communities in and around the Parks is deeply influenced by 

New River’s historic and economic relationships to communities upstream. As families expanded, 

descendants moved down the New River, and then up the Greenbrier and Bluestone, following 

migratory routes that were named after the families that created them. Sanders, for example, 

writes of the Lilly, Ellison, and Farley family migration routes along specific benches and streams 

(Sanders 1992). In this way the rivers closest to Virginia’s present boundary with southern West 

Virginia were settled before families moved toward the Kanawha and Ohio Rivers along the New 

north of Hinton. 

The Gorge itself has prompted unusual patterns of travel and settlement. In this region, 

Indian trails, which elsewhere follow rivers as the path of least resistance, veered onto the ridges 

of the Allegheny plateau between the Bluestone and Paint Creek in order to circumvent the Gorge. 

It is because of the gorge and the routes taken to get around it that the town of Beckley is 

distinguished as the only major city in West Virginia that is not directly on a river. 

The settlers who came into the region represented different social sectors, including fur 

traders, long hunters, planters with slaves, yeoman farmers, pioneer farmers, and freed and 

escaped indentured servants and slaves. While life in the backcountry allowed for more upward 

mobility, particularly for those who settled on fertile bottomlands, people also brought with them 

the institutions and beliefs that would reproduce and transform class society in the mountains 

(Anderson-Green 1978:430–31). During the early period of European settlement, it was a shared 

purpose that gathered extended families into community with other extended families, as 

Anderson-Green observes of the first generation settlers of the New River Valley on the VirginiaNorth Carolina border: 
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31 

Figure 12. The Bluestone River, a fortified hearth area in the late 18th century, a primary source of 

19th century settlement along the New, Coal, and Guyandot Rivers. (Produced by Darryl 

Depencier for the Center for Folklore and Ethnography, University of Pennsylvania) 
NERI and GARI Ethnographic Overview and Assessment 

32 

“The first-generation settlers were extended families of predominantly English 

and Scottish “plain folk” background, who had the determination to establish a 

solid, middle-class agricultural lifestyle. The families who entered this western 

Virginia-North Carolina area ranged from those whose progenitors had arrived 

on the coast of America over one hundred years earlier to those who had made 

the crossing themselves: all of these pioneers were intent on becoming 

independent landholders. Although some of the men who first penetrated into the 

New River region probably preferred a solitary wilderness existence, that type 

soon moved on West through the nearby Cumberland Gap. The ones who 

remained in the New River settlement were generally people characteristic of the 

yeoman world: Ephraim Osborne, Sr., fur trader; Ezekiel Young, indentured 

servant turned frontier hunter and homesteader; John Hashe, farmer; the Cox 

brothers, militia leaders during the Revolution” (1978:431). 

HISTORICAL DISCOURSE: FOUNDATION NARRATIVES FROM THE 

INTERVIEWS AND ORAL HISTORIES

The first European settlers left their names on the streams, bottoms, knobs, ridges, and 

thousands of descendants who articulate their connection to this landscape through narratives of 

their ancestors. Contemporary telephone directories and maps of the region are saturated with the 

names of early settlers. Much of the most specific information about history and landscape 

circulates orally, through historical discourse (Briggs 1988). Foundation narratives are a distinct 

genre of historical discourse. These are stories passed down within families and communities 

about how a family or community came to be in southern West Virginia, about how land came 

into the hands of a particular family or community, and how its places were created and named. 

Often these narratives will identify specific sites as touchstones to family or community history. 

Of particular importance within this genre are place names and stories about how places got their 

names. In historical narratives told by people around Hinton, the place names of early settlements 

appear frequently: Bull Run, Crump’s Bottom, Indian Creek, and Warford. 

In foundation narratives, a key genre of historical discourse encountered in communities 

around the rivers, descendants relate themselves to the settlement of the land by associating the 

names of its features with ancestors and specific historical events, making the landscape and its 

names touchstones to family identity – accounting both for the naming of landscape and for their 

own presence here. Published local histories contain many of these foundation narratives, which 

are tied to features on the landscape. Sanders in particular is worth noting, for his use of 
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33 

landscape elements, including cemeteries, place names, dams, trees, rocks and roads, as 

thresholds to family, regional and national history. Many of our consultants cited ancestors who 

settled there in the 18th century: “long hunters” like Sam Pack whose name lingers on the long 

creek that threads its way past Packs Branch and Pax into Paint Creek, “Indian fighters” like 

Thomas Farley and Mitchell Clay, Revolutionary War soldiers like William Richmond, or land 

grantees like Brooks who settled at the falls and creek on New River that bear his name, James 

Ellison, for whom Ellison Ridge is named, or Ballengee, a Frenchman who settled near Ballengee 

Knob on Keeney’s Mountain, the Penningtons, who came in from Pennsylvania, Blumes who 

came from the lands of Count Zinzindorf in Germany in the 16th century, the Morrises who 

settled on Peter’s Creek and many others. The early settlers took up land in the southern part of 

New River around the Greenbrier, and around the Gauley and Meadow Rivers before settlement 

commenced around the northern part of the New, beginning with Peter Bowyer at the mouth of 

Mann’s Creek. 

“There’s a place called Paine’s Mountain on Paint Creek,” said Billy Aliff, of Oak Hill. 

“And that’s where my grandfather Paine was raised, and that’s why they called it Paine’s 

Mountain, because it was the Paines lived up there.” 

Paul Fox, spinning out colonial and natural history in the machine shop at Dun Glen: 

“My family was already here before the mines. My family came here in 1803. 

Lived at Lansing. My fifth great grandfather is buried there at Lansing.... I’m 

pretty sure the Fox that came here from England was an indentured servant. I’m 

pretty sure they moved to this area to get away from the people that they’d been 

working for in the East, because it was a form of slavery, so they wanted to get as 

far away as they could. My 6th great grandfather’s name was Samuel Fox, and he 

came to America as an indentured servant. And his son John moved to Lansing.” 

Harold Duncan, who grew up in Minden, tells how his ancestor, Bartley Pack, was a long 

hunter who canoed the New River in the 1700s. Cela Burge’s ancestor was the Samuel Stalnaker 

who helped Thomas Walker get to the Cumberland Gap. Following the routes taken by 18th

century German and Scotch Irish immigrants, the first Stalnaker to arrive from Germany traveled 

from Philadelphia into the Shenandoah Valley. After serving as Captain in the Revolutionary War 

he moved to southwestern corner of Virginia and survived as a trader and a scout. According to 

Dr. Thomas Walker’s journal which is in the National Archives, he stayed at the cabin of Samuel 
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34 

Stalnaker, who lived the furthest west that any white man had settled. Spencer Hill, a 

revolutionary war soldier, is buried at Belva, on Twenty Mile Creek. Teddy Farley, of Rock 

Creek, recounted the story of Farley’s Fort, built by his ancestor. Sammy Plumley, who was born 

in 1930 at Glade, said that his ancestor, John Plumly, came from Plum Grove, England, in the 17th

century. “Go up here on Plumley Mountain, to New Salem graveyard. There’s a big old 

tombstone up there. John Plumley. He was supposed to be the first one in the county.” The 

Plumley cemetery is now part of the park. 

 

Ann McCutcheon: “Aunt Gertrude and I ... found it difficult to understand why someone 

would leave that beautiful flat farmland of Shenandoah Valley and come into these hills. And 

there were lots of reasons that drove the families.” She goes on to tell how German-speaking 

people were isolated and didn’t want their sons serving in that war (the revolution). “They 

probably also felt more comfortable in the hills than they did on the flat land. And we know that 

feeling ourselves. We feel more comfortable in mountain country than we do in flat land.” 

Robin Crawford, a leader in the African American community in the Hinton area, pointed 

out that “lots of African Americans here are Native Americans.” His family traces its lineage 

back to Tom Pack, the son of an “Indian Scout” who had a black family and a white family. 

“Tom Pack was my great-grandfather. He lived from 1796–1869. I think that Tom Pack was more 

Native American than African American.” 

Because it was illegal throughout the 19th century for Native Americans to own land, no 

one would officially claim to be Native American after the battle of Point Pleasant. No longer 

officially recognized as sovereign subjects in this area, those with Native American lineage had to 

suppress evidence of it, while codifying information about it within their family histories. To this 

day, codes for Native American lineage include terms like “Black Dutch,” and “Black Irish.” 

Therefore, the question of whether Cherokee families continued to live in the region following 

the treaties must be dealt with through oral tradition and the accounts that appears in some of the 

historical literature (see Figure 15). 

An example appears in William Sanders’ A New River Heritage. Sanders notes that the 

oldest families who settled the region’s hearth at the confluence of the New and Bluestone Rivers 
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35 

had intermarried extensively with Native Americans, and that these families had been somehow 

spared in the Indian Raids (Sanders 1994:222–24). The earliest traders in the region, whose 

names are now common throughout southern West Virginia, were known to have married Indian 

women. Indian women, Sanders argues, helped the first families “prevail in the wilderness at a 

time when women were most courageous to accompany their men in such a wild environment” 

(1994:223). Sanders mentions the presence of the remains of an Indian village and Indian graves 

in the vicinities of Island Creek, Crump’s Bottom, and Warford, and he includes as further 

testimony a photograph of Serpeta Wiley Gore (1834–1919), sister of Rachel Caperton, and wife 

of Henderson French Gore. They had ten children. The persisting oral tradition concerning Native 

American lineage and land use in the region will be below (see “Perspectives on Native American 

History from the Interviews”). 

Figure 13. Serpeta Wiley Gore (1834–1919). (Source: Sanders 1994) 

Such accounts display what Appalachianists Herbert Reid and Betsy Taylor term 

“cosmogenic agency:” the ongoing integration of communities into their landscapes through 

practices that posit and renew a sense of belonging to a particular place (Reid and Taylor 2003, 

Taylor 2002). Such practices include not only verbal lore – such as the telling of foundation 
NERI and GARI Ethnographic Overview and Assessment 

36 

narratives, tracking of genealogical connections, recounting of origins of place names – but a set 

of practices that affirm a sense of belonging through participation in the system of the community 

forest and watershed, including gathering, hunting, fishing, camping, gardening, homemaking and 

the like, along with associated traditions of storytelling and talk that represent and reflect upon 

interactions with the community forest. We will return to these traditions throughout the report. 

THE ENGROSSMENT: SETTLER VS. SPECULATOR CAPITALISM IN THE 

PRE-INDUSTRIAL PERIOD 1790S–1870S

Southern West Virginia, including the region surrounding the New and Gauley Rivers, 

has been integrated into the world economic system in a series of stages. In the first stage, which 

Wilma Dunaway terms “Settler Capitalism,” the region’s resources and labor were engaged in the 

international fur trade, which included ginseng. Interactions with the Iroquois, Shawnee, and 

Cherokee were crucial to English and French explorers, traders, and long hunters who vetted this 

first phase that incorporated this region as a source of raw materials and labor for international 

trade. This phase cleared the way for the second phase of Settler Capitalism, wherein the settlers 

who displaced the Native Americans would generate the “agricultural and extractive raw 

materials for export to distant markets.” The process of economic, political and cultural 

peripheralization has been driven by politicians and investors from the core (France, England, and 

then the cities on the Atlantic seaboard). The process entails a competitive struggle among those 

situated in the semi-periphery aspiring to enter the core, those in the periphery aspiring to enter 

the semi-periphery, or to maintain their status in the semi-periphery, and those struggling against 

deepening peripheralization. In the New and Gauley River region, we see the particularities of 

this struggle in the pre-industrial period of the 19th century. To secure control of resources, 

legislators at the core awarded vast parcels of land to themselves and to members of a merchant 

class in the eastern states. Much smaller parcels were awarded to soldiers who had served in the 

Revolutionary War. Land was also given to “Indian fighters” and settlers who would form a 

buffer between the colonies and the hostile Shawnees, but most of the land had been “engrossed” 

by the time they began settling the region around the New and Gauley Rivers. The struggle 

involved establishing clear titles to land, and garnering support from the Virginia legislature for 

road-building, postal service, court houses and other amenities. The most peripheralized in this 
NERI and GARI Ethnographic Overview and Assessment

37 

system were those whom Dunaway terms the “landless poor,” who provided a pool of labor for 

large scale farmers. The ranks of the landless poor included freed and fugitive slaves, tenant 

farmers who rented land from distant landlords, and Native Americans who were barred from 

owning land. 

The eagerness of pioneers to break through the boundaries set by treaties was in part an 

expression of the fierce competition between speculators seeking land to invest in and sell or rent 

at a profit, and settlers looking for a place of their own in which to raise their families. This 

struggle forms a backdrop against which mountain society took shape in the early 19th century. 

The settlers were moving into the region to take up residence following the Battle of Point 

Pleasant had their own ideas for economic growth and prosperity rooted in farming and trade via 

roads and waterways connecting them to markets in Virginia, Ohio and Pennsylvania. Some 

settlers who had access to the most fertile lands near to transportation were able to accumulate 

enough surpluses to become brokers, forming a local merchant class by the start of the Civil War. 

Land Distribution in the Federalist Period 

Revolutionary war soldiers were paid for their services in land. Many sold their lands, but 

some ventured into the west to settle them, including William Richmond, who settled in 

Sandstone around 1808, and James Sims, who is buried in a cemetery at Swiss. By the time 

Richmond and Sims began homesteading, most of the land had already been granted to members 

of the ruling aristocracy of eastern planters, legislators, and merchants such as Albert Gallatin, 

Henry Banks, DeWitt Clinton and others. Within the princely parcels given to absentee 

speculators were small holdings claimed by settlers, but these were rendered insecure by land 

policies such as the Land Office Act of 1779 that favored the absentee owners (Rasmussen 1994: 

35). Appalachian historians term this period of land acquisition “the engrossment” because it 

encompassed the lands of settlers within larger properties. The engrossment laid the foundations 

for conflicts over land use in southern West Virginia and on the New and Gauley Rivers down to 

the present day. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the engrossment of the 18th century would 

enable an industrial economy to cannibalize an agricultural one (Dunaway 1995, Williams 1984, 

Rasmussen 1994). 
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38 

.

Figure 14. Postal Routes in West Virginia, 1792–1800, showing the line of travel along the New and 

Kanawha Rivers. (Source: Virginia Magazine of History and Biography)

The amount of land given to revolutionary war soldiers in payment for service, and to 

people who established “corn” or “tomahawk rights” (by clearing land and/or carving initials in a 

tree) was small in comparison to the land given to speculators, which was far beyond the reach of 

most settlers. Settlers who wanted to buy land found themselves outcompeted in a world market. 

Speculators wishing to cash in their assets preferred to sell to speculators in Europe, where they 

could get more money for the land. Because the land was locked up in the hands of a relative few, 

a large percentage of the population in West Virginia and throughout Appalachia remained 

landless and, therefore, difficult to track before the 1870 census. In West Virginia, for instance, 

between 1790 and 1810, 324,388.5 acres of land were owned by residents, while absentee owners 

held 4,525,153 acres, or 93 percent of the land (Dunaway 1995: 53). This percentage has 

remained stable over the past two centuries. 

In the decades following the war of independence, corporations like the Ohio, Loyal, and 

Greenbrier land companies maneuvered to protect assets that had been awarded to them by the 

Crown. In addition, the state of Virginia sold large parcels of land very cheaply to speculators, 

many of them prominent citizens from Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York. 
NERI and GARI Ethnographic Overview and Assessment

39 

Some of the speculators were businessmen, like Henry Banks, a Richmond merchant who was 

awarded some 47,000 acres along the New, Gauley, and Greenbrier Rivers in payment for the use 

of his ships during the war of Independence. Others were elected officials like Dewitt Clinton, 

Gideon Granger, and George Washington, who wrote in 1767: “Any person ... who neglects the 

present opportunity of hunting out good lands and in some measure marking and distinguishing 

them for his own, in order to keep others from settling them, will never regain it” (Williams 

1984:14). As he surveyed and laid claim to 30,000 acres of prime bottomland on the Kanawha 

River, the father of our country worried in his journal that the presence of squatters, the “poor 

swarming with large families,” would destroy the commercial value of his tracts. Between 1785 

and 1797, the larger grants made by Virginia in the vicinity of New River (then Montgomery and 

Greenbrier Counties) included 25,050 acres of Loop Creek and the Waters of New River to Henry 

Banks (who also owned more than 170,000 acres in Greenbrier County), 163,000 acres to Robert 

Morris on the Greenbrier and the Gauley, 170,038 acres to Andrew Moore and John Beckley 

(Alfred Beckley’s father, who was the first Librarian of Congress), 11,500 acres at the mouth of 

Meadow Creek to Samuel M. Hopkins, 50,000 acres of Loop Creek and Arbuckle Creek to 

Andrew Reid et al, 50,000 acres of Loop Creek and Pipe Creek to John Stewart et al, and 17,000 

acres along the waters of New River to James Welch (Tessiatore 2003: 804–816). On the Gauley 

River, Jacob Skiles was awarded 40,000 acres in 1795, including 8,000 acres already claimed by 

settlers, and John Steele in that same year was given 28,572 acres, with 9,005 of those claimed by 

settlers. Many of these grants were impossibly large and overlapped, as Rasmussen puts it, “like 

shingles on a roof.” Many settlers did not apply for grants until they had lived on the land for 

years. Henry Morris, for example, who settled on Peter’s Creek in 1791, did not procure a grant 

until 1820. Though it was noted that portions of the engrossed lands were already being claimed 

and settled, surveys often did not match, and conflicts were common between claims filed at the 

county and state levels. 

Some speculators acquired property with the intention of developing it in order to 

enhance its value. In the early 1820s, Abraham Vandal obtained property in present-day 

Fayetteville, then called “Vandalia.” Benjamin Franklin and the Wharton brothers of Philadelphia 

became involved in a scheme to turn Vandalia into the fourteenth state. Other Philadelphia elites 

and their descendants would remain involved over the long duree, including the Parker-Foulkes 

family who hoped to establish a county seat near their Meadow River property (Rasmussen 1994). 
NERI and GARI Ethnographic Overview and Assessment 

40 

Some speculators held onto their parcels for decades, waiting for the value to increase. 

Because they could get better prices from foreign investors, they preferred to sell to buyers in 

Europe than to settlers on the land. “Consequently,” writes Williams, “nearly half the region’s 

households remained landless in 1860.” (1995: 67) Some failed to pay taxes and forfeited their 

lands. Absentee landowners who held onto their lands employed elites within the region to collect 

their rents, and sell timber and real estate. Alfred Beckley, for example, brokered the extensive 

real estate of New Yorkers Gideon and Francis Granger, while the Parker-Foulkes family of 

Philadelphia entrusted their affairs on Meadow River to the Bayes family (McCreesh 1983). 

Some householders were able to purchase their lands from absentee owners and at 

sheriff’s sales. From 1820 until the 1860s, the deed books are full of more modest grants (less 

than three hundred acres) to people who actually settled and farmed the region, built gristmills, 

churches, schools, and taverns. Their names, which fill the present telephone directories, have 

proliferated on the landscape as names for streams, settlements, hollows, ridges, and knobs: 

Scotch-Irish names such as Morris, McClung, McCutcheon, Hughes, Campbell, Craig, Dunbar, 

Foster, Keenan, Brown, Bell, and Neal; German names such as Amick, Buckner, Cottle, Cutlip, 

Copenhaver, Dotson, Breckenridge, Drennen, Halstead, Harday, Herold, Huffman, Nutter, Rader, 

Redden, Sebert, Skaggs, Snuffer, Stalnaker, Summers, Van Bibber and Vaughan; English names 

such as Alderson, Beckley, Brock, Bobitt, Boggs, Clay, Ellison, Gore, Hill, Mason, Meadows, 

Simms, Stephenson, Wiseman, and Walker; French names such as Ballengee, Bennett, Burdett, 

Dorsey, leMasters, Rippetoes; Welsh names such as Jones; and Irish names such as Sullivan. 

Great Awakenings: Religious Freedom and Ethnogenesis in 

Transallegheny Virginia 

Many of the Scotch Irish, Germans, and English from who migrated from Pennsylvania 

to settle in the counties surrounding the New and Gauley Rivers were motivated by the desire for 

the religious freedom that they had known in Pennsylvania. While tidewater and Piedmont 

Virginia did not tolerate divergence from the established Anglican church, it accepted religious 

dissent in the backcountry, under the provisions of the English Toleration Act of 1689. This 

acceptance helped to establish the buffer population protecting the plantations from attacks (Rice, 

267–68). 
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41 

Backcountry society was amenable to the Presbyterianism of the Scotch-Irish and to the 

German sects that included Dunkards—so-named for the practice of triune submersion in 

Baptism, “the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit” (Titon 1988)—Mennonites, 

Moravians, and the Church of the Brethren. The earliest practitioners worshipped in their homes. 

The dissident churches that dominated in the back country rejected Anglican forms of worship 

and hierarchy, emphasizing instead the personal and emotional character of salvation, the 

experience of grace and conversion as a form of baptism in the spirit, the centrality of biblical 

scripture, and forms of evangelical worship and experience (such as the call to preach the gospel). 

Such beliefs and practices, and the conviction that salvation is freely available to everyone 

without the mediation of a hierarchical institution were consistent with political values that were 

more egalitarian and democratic than those upheld by the oligarchical planters. The Great 

Awakenings of the 18th and 19th centuries found fertile ground here for the formation of new 

Methodist and Baptist congregations, and Nicholas County historian William Griffee Brown 

offers an illuminating reflection on this key moment in the formation of a southern West Virginia 

identity: 

“How quickly these Scotch-Irish Covenanters, German Mennonites, and English 

Episcopalians became Baptists and Methodists; how soon they adopted the same 

dress and modes of living; and how quickly they forgot race and language, 

because of common danger, common hardships, and common ambition to create 

a new way of life in this new world!” (Brown, 145) 

The history of church formation is inscribed on the landscape in place names. The town 

of Alderson is named after John Alderson, who established the first Baptist Church in the region 

there on the Greenbrier River in 1777 (Wood 1994: 565–66). Sam Black Church is named for a 

Methodist circuit-riding minister who traveled around to congregations in Fayette County in the 

mid-19th century (Peters and Carden 1926: 656). The first Catholic Church in Raleigh County was 

St. Coleman’s, located on land that Maurice Sullivan had purchased in 1855, (well in advance of 

the railroad construction in the region, as Wood notes (1994: 589). The proliferation of churches 

on the landscape and the continual emergence of new churches alongside churches that were built 

by pioneers attest to the continuing centrality of churches in community life, even as they index 

the role of churches in providing space for the continuing expression and negotiation of ethnic 

diversity. James Wood notes that in Raleigh County in 1936 a census on church membership 

yielded the following figures: 
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Total membership 13,164 

Northern Baptist 2,029 

Negro Baptist 3,383 

Brethren 60 

Church of Christ 27 

Disciples of Christ 1,140 

Jewish congregations 65 

Methodist Episcopal 902 

Methodist Protestant 2,041 

Presbyterian 1,377 

Episcopal 231 

Roman Catholic 600 

All others 1,309 

Figure 15. Quinnimont Missionary Baptist Church, with sign welcoming Pastor Charles Gore, 1993. 

(Photo by Lyntha Scott Eiler) 
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43 

The Development of Settler Capitalism 

Early settlers included two distinctly different kinds of farmers: the settler or yeoman 

farmers, who homesteaded and held onto their land, and the pioneer farmers who farmed until the 

land wore out and then moved on to another patch of land. The absentee ownership of most of the 

land supported the use of large tracts of land as a “de facto commons.” As Salstrom observes, 

“many residents of the mountains paid little heed to such land privatization and continued to 

make use of untended private tracts as though they remained public commons” (Salstrom 

1997:223). 

Historian Ron Eller identifies five kinds of settlement in Appalachia: gap, cove, hollow, 

ridge, and meadow. The dominant forms found in southern West Virginia were cove and hollow, 

and began with the selection of fertile lands near the mouth of a hollow. As the generations 

multiplied, descendants would gradually move upstream, and each hollow would become 

associated with particular families and clusters of families. Usually in this pattern, commercial 

establishments and institutions would be located at the mouths of hollows, a pattern evident along 

some of the tributaries of the New River, but on the plateau around the New River Gorge, 

settlements were located at the heads of the creeks, in Beckleyville, on Garden Ground Mountain, 

Irish Mountain, in Gatewood, Fayetteville, Ansted, and Clifftop, for example. 

The streams were fed by springs that, as Brown put it, “gush ... from almost every 

hillside.” The clear springs had their source in shale, the chalybeate (mineral) springs had theirs 

in sandstone (Brown 1925). Salt seeps, such as one located along Indian Trail, were welltrampled by deer. Sanders notes that families expanding into the region located their new 

homesteads on benches, “where the bench springs made dwelling possible and where they 

harvested the first virgin timber and farmed the newground bench and hillside land, piling the 

rocks as they went” (Sanders). 
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Figure 16. Rock piles like these, indicating former “newgrounds” where land was cultivated and 

then “let go,” are ubiquitous in the mountains of southern West Virginia. 

Figure 17. Yucca plants, referred to by some people as “ghost plants,” are read as signs that a place 

was not only cultivated but inhabited. 
NERI and GARI Ethnographic Overview and Assessment

45 

During the first half of the nineteenth century, settler farmers built communities and 

developed an agricultural land-base, wherein they were able to provide for their own needs, and 

produce enough surplus to barter home-made crafts as well as produce for services and pool their 

labor for the work of raising barns and harvesting and putting up produce. As the state of Virginia 

authorized the construction of turnpikes, access to distant markets improved and farmers were 

able to sell livestock, grain, and other products in large quantities. They established gristmills, 

churches, schools, public houses, stores. Initially, church communities were served by itinerant 

preachers. As the population grew and the more desirable bottomlands filled up, clusters of 

extended families moved higher into the nearby mountains and then into the western counties of 

Boone, Wyoming, and Logan, or even farther away, into Ohio and the western states. 

Between 1800 and 1850, a number of settlers and their families located near to New 

River as follows: 

Ben Taylor, on Garden Ground, near present-day Glen Jean (known in the early 

period as Leblong) 

William Richmond, in Richmond Falls, now Sandstone Falls 

William Blake, near present-day Mount Hope 

Peter Bowyer, in present day Fayetteville 

John Spangler, Kincaid 

Aaron Stockton, Glen Ferris 

Richard Tyree, near present-day Clifftop 

Abraham Vandal, Fayetteville 

Jacob Smith, Quinnimont 

Jacob Kelly, Robson 

Alfred Beckley, Beckley 

Charles Bibb, Gatewood 

Philip Thurmond, Sanger 

Griffins, Calebs, Livelys, Hutchinsons in Meadow Bridge 

Irish railroad workers lived in two places that now bear the name Irish Mountain – one in 

the Richmond District, the other near Springdale. Foulkses from Philadelphia owned a large tract 
NERI and GARI Ethnographic Overview and Assessment 

46 

on Meadow River, which they hired the Bayes family to manage. In the 1840s, Llewellyn Jones, a 

tobacco planter from Amherst County moved to Sanger, on Meadow Fork Creek, joining 

Thurmond and Bibb, who had also come from Amherst County. 

The county histories by Brown, Sanders, Wood, and Peters and Carden provide complete 

lists of the early grantees and families who settled in the region, along with accounts of the 

establishment of churches, gristmills, schools, courthouses, post offices and other institutions, 

drawn from county records and federal census returns. 

The Implications of Family Settlement Patterns for Ecological and Historical 

Memory in the Region 

Wayland Dunaway’s observation that West Virginia settlement took a slightly different 

turn is worth revisiting in the light of Paul Salstom’s thesis of migratory patterns in Appalachia. 

Salstom’s thesis points toward cultural implications of a difference that becomes more apparent 

in light of our research. Between the end of the war of Independence and 1850, when the first 

censuses were published by county, the population in the counties surrounding the Lower New 

River expanded through a continuing influx of settlers from the region that historian Paul 

Salstrom terms “Older Appalachia” (the Virginia Blue Ridge and Piedmont) through “Middle 

Appalachia” (North Carolina) into “Newer Appalachia” (West Virginia) (Salstrom 1995). 

Salstrom’s thesis offers a further context within which to view the delayed settlement of 

the Appalachian plateaus. Salstrom argues that these three Appalachias, which were settled, via 

Pennsylvania, by immigrants from Germany and the British Isles formed a succession of frontiers 

during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. As the first two subregions lost their frontier 

fluidity through maximal settlement, they found outlets for growing populations in the frontier 

regions to the west and southeast. Older Appalachia, the broad, fertile, lime-bedded valleys 

surrounding the Shenandoah, closed as a frontier between the 1770s and 1830s. Intermediate 

Appalachia, the mountains and valleys of North Carolina and Georgia, closed its frontiers during 

the period from 1830 to 1870. Newer Appalachia, the intensely dissected tablelands of the 

Cumberland and Allegheny Plateaus, officially closed as a frontier in the 1880s, but, as Salstrom 

points out, “displayed frontier characteristics at the end of the nineteenth century.” 
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47 

Throughout the 19th century, many of the settlers in the New River area seem to have 

come directly from Monroe and Greenbrier Counties, which Salstrom places in the area of Older 

Appalachia. Summers County was formed in part from Monroe County. Those who came in to 

the Gauley region came over the mountains from the South Branch of the Potomac (Brown 

1925:23), while those who came to the Hinton area made their way down the New River 

(Sanders). This pattern was partly fueled by a persistent tradition of using the region for hunting 

and gathering, reminiscent of pre-contact Native American practice. Along with explorers like 

Gist and Washington who opened the region for settlement, were the long hunters, men who left 

their settlements for hunting and gathering expeditions during the summer months. These hunters 

came from adjacent counties, and developed relationships with the places in which their 

descendants eventually settled. 

Well into the 19th century, a pattern persisted of using the region, as the Indians and long 

hunters had, for periods of hunting and gathering. The well-known example of Sewell and Marlin 

exemplifies a pattern that has persisted. John Cavalier relates that the community of Milburn took 

its name from a stream that was named for a ginseng hunter who camped along its bank for 

several months each year, bringing with him his family and several cows (Cavalier 1985:295). 

“Pen Knob” on Laurel Creek of Gauley is named after a pen where a man named Fitzwater 

trapped for bears and wolves in the late 18th century. Beard’s Fork is likewise supposed to be 

named for a man named Beard who regularly camped in a rock shelter near there while 

ginsenging and hunting. When, in the 1840s, Philip and Mary Thurmond came into the vicinity of 

Sanger, the creek running through their property was already named Arbuckle, for the brothers 

who had come there to hunt and gather, and built a cabin and stayed. 

Many families, some of them with considerably more wealth, followed the long hunters 

to settle the region from the adjacent county of Monroe. In 1816, Richard Tyree moved his family 

from Lewisburg to settle along the Old State Road, east of Bowyer’s Ferry. Donnelly reported in 

1966 that Tyree’s apple orchards were still standing. 

In this pattern, there is no interim “middle Appalachia,” only the older and newer 

Appalachias, which are intimately related through a history of use. Cavalier mentions several 

people from Monroe County who came into the region to hunt and ginseng, and camped along 
NERI and GARI Ethnographic Overview and Assessment 

48 

particular streams. This early use of the New River area as a long hunting region for counties in 

Older Appalachia, which later sent settlers into the region, replicates the general pattern of 

frontier settlement described for the previous century in Virginia. This longer historical 

association, and its persistence in memory, and the continuing practice of older traditions has 

contributed to the deep sense of place and remarkable ecological memory characteristic of this 

region. This strength is more obvious in the older farming areas around Summers and Nicholas 

County but is present in the mining districts of Fayette and Raleigh Counties as well. 

Figure 18. Paul Salstrom’s Three Appalachias (left), with detail (right) showing proximity of 

counties in study area (New Appalachia) to counties in Old Appalachia. (Source: 

Salstrom 1991) 
NERI and GARI Ethnographic Overview and Assessment

49 

Integrating the Region into the National and Global Economy: 

19th Century Routes 

From the earliest days of independent nationhood, George Washington and other leaders 

were eager to find a route through the mountains to the Ohio River. Toward this end, under a joint 

resolution of both houses of the Virginia legislature, Marshall and Alexander surveyed the 

headwaters of the James and the Kanawha River in 1812. The dream of a canal that would link 

the James and Kanawha Rivers was only partly realized in the construction of a canal that linked 

the headwaters of the James with the Greenbrier, but ultimately realized in the railroad following 

the Civil War. 

The region remained sparsely settled during the first half of the 19th century. The 1850 

population for Raleigh County, for example, was 1,765, a density of 3.46 persons per square mile 

(Wood 112). The first settlers in the region settled the fertile river bottom areas along existing 

routes in present day Summers and Nicholas Counties, around the Greenbrier, Meadow, and 

Gauley Rivers. Many of them used a route known as the James River and Kanawha River 

Turnpike, now better known as “The Midland Trail,” that connected Lexington to Montgomery’s 

Ferry in the mid-18th century (Donnelly 1948:128). It would have provided a route to the Gauley 

River. In 1798 the state of Virginia officially opened as a wagon route called “The Koontz New 

Road” (Donnelly 1948:127). Several other roads were critical for settlement of the plateaus 

around the lower New River in the first half of the nineteenth century. One was the Old State 

Road, which swung off from that turnpike and followed Mann’s Creek down to Bowyer’s Ferry, 

passing through Vandalia (now Fayetteville) to Cotton Hill and then following the Kanawha on 

the south side. Another, completed in 1848, was the Giles, Fayette, and Kanawha Turnpike, 

which connected the Giles Courthouse to Fayetteville, Oak Hill, Mount Hope, and Beckley. 

(Donnelly 128). Prior to this, in Raleigh County, a road called the Old Farley Trace, proceeded 

from the mouth of Bluestone, across White Oak Mountain to present day Beckley, and then north 

to Lower Loop Creek and to the town of Montgomery. 

All of these routes helped pave the way for a modified replication of the Old Dominion, 

its social values and politics. 
NERI and GARI Ethnographic Overview and Assessment 

50 

Figure 19. Plan for the proposed James and Kanawha River canal, which never was completed. 

(Source: National Trust for Historic Preservation) 

Tuckahoes, Cohees, and the Incubation of West Virginia’s Class Society 

“Western Virginia was dominated by an Appalachian version of the traditional 

Virginia oligarchy, an elite whose power was rooted in the economic 

circumstances of the mountains but also in the same inegalitarian constitutional 

features that sustained the plantation oligarchy of eastern Virginia.” (Williams 

1995:210). 

The names on the list of settlers from 1800–1850 include those of descendents of 

Virginia tidewater planters into the Fayetteville region, via Amherst County, Virginia. The 

Joneses, Thurmonds, Bibbs, Higginbothams, and Imbodens (and, some speculate, the Beckleys) 

were descended from the earlier Cavaliers, loyal subjects of King Charles I who had migrated 

from the south of England in the 17th century (Fisher 1989). This group had encountered the 

Scots-Irish and German immigrants who had migrated south from Pennsylvania through the 

Shenandoah Valley, and a history of friction between the slave-owning planters and the yeoman 

farmers and herdsmen had already begun to unfold in the 18th century as a tension between the 

“tuckahoes” (English gentry planters) and “cohees” (Scots-Irish backwoodsmen) of Virginia 

(Seamon). The Cohees, wrote Fishwick, “hated the highhanded Tidewater slaveholders” 

(Fishwick 1959:40). 

The first industry to draw the members of the Tidewater planting class into West Virginia 

in a significant way was the Great Kanawha salt industry, which developed dramatically after 

1808 and peaked before the Civil War, in 1850 (Stealey 2003:1). The chemical and coal 

industries are rooted historically, socially, and politically in the industry that took shape in the 
NERI and GARI Ethnographic Overview and Assessment

51 

Kanawha Salines around the Great Buffalo Lick near present day Malden. In one of the great 

ironies of the state’s history, coal mining began as a subsidiary to the salt industry when the 

reliance on cordwood for fuel produced a barren landscape. To spare the forest and save on the 

increasing costs of shipping cordwood from farther and farther away, the salt manufacturers 

converted their furnaces to bituminous coal (Stealey 2003:5). The salt industry relied mainly on 

slave labor: 

“Drawing on surplus slave labor from the Virginia Piedmont’s declining tobacco 

economy, Kanawha salt producers created an African American society that was 

distinctive in the commonwealth and the Appalachian South.” (Stealey 2003:10) 

Stealey notes that in 1850, the salt industry and related activities employed nearly twothirds of the 3,140 slaves in Kanawha County; 1600 of whom worked for only thirty-three 

Kanawha salt producers. Leased slaves were given more dangerous work than the slaves that 

were owned by the salt producers. (Stealey 2003:10). Slave labor helped to accumulate wealth 

that would later be invested in the coalfields by salt manufacturers like John Q. Dickenson, who 

for many years controlled the salt industry in the Valley. The salt manufacturers petitioned the 

Virginia legislature for navigation improvements on the Kanahwa, and for banking facilities, with 

little satisfaction. Preoccupied with a gathering crisis over slavery, the planters of eastern Virginia 

were slow in responding to the devotees of industrialization (Stealey 2003). 

Fayette County also attracted descendants of Tidewater planters during the first half of 

the 19th century. Tuckahoes arrived in the vicinity of Oak Hill, bringing slaves, their knowledge 

of tobacco culture and their skill at managing plantation-style enterprises. Pressured out of 

Amherst County by tobacco’s depletion of soil, the system of primogeniture, and the prospect of 

wealth on the frontier, the Tuckahoes and their descendants would extend the semi-periphery of 

the old Dominion into the frontier periphery. They would fight with Virginia in the Civil War, 

they would name their businesses, homes, and company towns for places in Amherst County, and, 

in the waning years of the 20th century their descendents would continue to celebrate and renew 

their Virginia origins through annual retreats in the mountains around Clifton Forge during deer 

season. 
NERI and GARI Ethnographic Overview and Assessment 

52 

Figure 20. Capt. W.D. Thurmond, buried in Gethsemane Gardens, was born in Amherst County, 

Virginia. 

Imported from Britain: A Class-based Culture of Deference and Condescension 

The cavalier culture of deference and condescension persisted among the plantation 

gentry who came with slaves to manufacture salt, mine coal, and raise tobacco, and in the 

relationship between absentee landlords and tenants. This culture had been deliberately fostered 

in the 17th century by governors under the British Crown. Seeking to establish a ruling elite in 

Virginia, Governor William Berkeley enticed the younger sons of English gentry who would 

inherit nothing under the system of primogeniture to come to Virginia, where they could be rulers. 

This group from the south of England, formed of supporters of Charles I in the civil war, and 

known as “Cavaliers,” would rule Virginia through the 18th century. Thomas Jefferson voiced his 

awareness of the very different interests of mountain farmers and Virginia’s planter class 

observing that “19,000 men living below the falls of the rivers ... give law to upwards of 30,000 

living in another part of the country.” (Rasmussen 1994:36). 

Whom would they rule when they crossed into western Virginia? The culture of 

deference and condescension depended on a fixed and rigid hierarchy: beneath the dynastic 

families were the yeoman farmers, and beneath them, indentured servants and convicts, and at the 

bottom, eventually, slaves. In this culture, owning “western lands” was a necessary sign of status 

and privilege. Western lands would also provide a source of income, from tenants who would 

help shield them from the indigenous people they had displaced. In line with this reasoning, the 
NERI and GARI Ethnographic Overview and Assessment

53 

Virginia rulers would also permit the immigration of non-Anglican Protestants, Germans and 

Scotch Irish. An added benefit of owning western lands was that younger sons of Virginia’s 

ruling elite, forced out of the nest through primogeniture, would be able to establish their own 

fiefdoms in the western lands. The immigration of elite tobacco planters from Amherst County, 

Virginia, into Fayette County, where they formed the communities of Sanger and Gatewood, in 

the decades leading up to the civil war seem to exemplify this pattern. 

In the 1840s gentlemen from the planter class of Amherst County Virginia and 

surrounding counties began to settle around present day Oak Hill, bringing with them the 

appurtenances of wealth and class. Llewellyn Jones, whose slave hacked out the first road into 

Sanger, built his home not from logs but from bricks fashioned in a nearby field. Gethsemane 

Cemetery, at Sanger, forms a monument to some in this group, which included Thurmonds, 

Joneses, Gentries, Bibbs, Capertons, Higginbothams, Huddlestons, and Settles. Maps of the 

region are now riddled with their names and the names of places from antebellum Virginia. 

Boomer is named for John Boomer Huddleston, son of one of the three wealthiest families in 

antebellum Virginia. Caperton is named for George Henry Caperton of Amherst County. In 1843 

a group of about a dozen families formed a Baptist congregation, naming their church the Fancy 

Hill Baptist Church, after the area of Amherst County they came from. The Star mining company 

founded in the early 1900s by the sons of Llewellyn Jones likewise memorialized a place in 

Amherst County. Lundale farm, also named after a place in Amherst (Toothman) has been 

officially recognized as a soil conservation district. 

The Mixed-Mesophytic Community Forest and Watershed in a Pre-Industrial Settler 

Capitalist Society 

“Some think that coal is all we have and do not know that West Virginia can 

produce more and better bluegrass than the world-famed Kentucky.” – George W. 

Summers, editor, Charleston Daily Gazette (1893:98) 

The county histories usually devote a chapter to the forest, offering details of the 

conquest of the wilderness or celebrating the magnificence of the forest and lamenting its passage, 

depending on the author’s perspective. Fitzpatrick, in his edition of George Washington’s diaries, 

notes that Washington was unusual in his knowledge of the varieties of trees. William Griffee 

Brown, author of the Nicholas County history, is similarly a connoisseur of the mixed mesophytic 
NERI and GARI Ethnographic Overview and Assessment 

54 

forest. He wrote in passionate protest of its wasting in 1925, and, like other county historians, 

passes along what he has gleaned from the memories of elders who recalled in detail the taking 

out of specific mammoth trees, and the skies dark with passenger pigeons on their annual 

migrations along the New River corridor. With evident pleasure, Brown lists “the most important 

native trees” shrubs, vines, and medicinal plants in general use: 

“Oaks, half dozen species, poplar, chestnut, maples, both sugar and soft, black 

and white walnut, beech, elm, linn, birch, hemlock, pine, spruce, cedar, cherry, 

ash, hickory, sycamore, locust, black gum, sweet gum, buckeye, and magnolia 

were the principle large trees; sassafrass, sourwood, dogwood, holly, serviceberry, persimmon, mulberry, crabapple, ironwood, pawpaw and willow were 

smaller trees. Many shrubs as alder, witchhazel, hazelnut, chinquapin, haw, 

thornbush, elder, spicewood, sumac, chokecherry, red bud, rhododendron, 

mountain laurel, buckberry, mountain ash and huckleberry were found in the 

undergrowth. Wild grape vines festooned the trees and shrubs along the streams 

and on the hillsides. Virginia creeper, wreathing dead trees in the forest, glowed 

with crimson leaves in autumn. Native medical plants were numerous and in 

general use by the settlers: boneset, bloodroot, ginseng, calamus, dandelion, 

elecampane, everlasting, mullen, comfrey, goldenseal, ground-ivy, Indian physic, 

lobelia, May-apple, mountain tea, pennyroyal, horsemint, pipsisiway, red 

puccoon, sarsaparilla, snakeroot, spignet, witchhazel, elm bark, wormwood, and 

squaw vine were the principal” (Brown 1954: 176). 

The county histories are interesting for the etiologies they provide on land forms. For 

instance, Sanders mentions that a lake near the salt furnace in Mercer County was created in part 

because cattle were salted there, and their hooves compacted the earth, enabling water to pool. 

Brown mentions that the rattlesnake population was kept down by the roaming of hogs through 

the forest as they grazed on mast. He reports that old world herbs that now proliferate in the 

region were brought by early settlers: catnip, peppermint, mullen, yarrow, ground ivy, bouncing 

bet, ragweed, Spanish needles and thistles (1925: 18). He relates that the red fox was brought 

from England by Virginia sportsmen. (Washington’s diaries record his importation of red fox for 

the chase). 

“The streams were alive with fish,” Brown notes. “Gauley River and its largest 

tributaries literally teemed with catfish, trout, eels, suckers, chubs, sunfish and 

minnows. Bass and pickerel were not brought into these waters until many years 

after the country was settled. Even the small branches were filled with trout, 

chubs, sunfish and minnows. Turtles, tortoises, frogs, toads, and lizards were 

found everywhere” (1925:19). 

In a full-fledged fish story, Carden and Peters record a similar claim for New River: 
NERI and GARI Ethnographic Overview and Assessment

55 

“In the early days New River abounded in all kinds of fish found in mountain 

streams and even today black bass and both kinds of catfish, blue and mud-cats, 

are caught in great numbers. The early settlers depended to a very great extent on 

the fish they caught from the river and mountain streams for their change of diet. 

As the country became more and more populated, many men devoted a great part 

of their time to fishing for the market. Among those who became noted, if not 

famous, was one “Dick” Peters, who lived for the whole of his long and 

adventurous life on the hill above Sewell overlooking New River and Manns 

Creek. It has been said of him that he could catch fish whether there were any in 

the stream or not. He sold fish to the railroad camps, when the Chesapeake and 

Ohio was being built, and later to the men who worked in mines at Sewell and 

surrounding works. He knew where the good fishing grounds were and had trot 

lines set at each during the fishing season. He took from New River the largest 

fish ever taken from that stream. From a line he had set just east of the station at 

Sewell he took several mud cats weighing sixty pounds. The story has been told 

that from a line just above the eastern end of the ovens at Sewell he took a mudcat that weighed over one hundred and ten pounds. If this be an exaggeration, it 

cannot be very much of one, for it is well known that he caught and sold many 

tons of fish from New River and Manns Creek, the latter of which, then as now 

was full of mountain trout” (Peters and Carden 1926). 

Community forestry and a host of other expressions bear the stamp of cross-cultural 

encounters between European settlers, Africans, and Native Americans in the 17th and 18th

centuries. The indebtedness of European settlers to Indian knowledge of the land is often 

remarked upon. As we’ve seen in the brief excerpt from the Batts and Fallam journal, in the early 

period of exploration, Native American guides eased the way for the explorers. Settlers also 

learned life skills from the Native Americans, and hybrid Cherokee/European methods for 

survival emerged. The Scotch-Irish outfield system of farming and settlement, which they 

adapted to mountain conditions, drew upon the Indian method of deadening trees and planting the 

“three sisters” crops of corn, beans, and squash. The Scotch-Irish, writes E. Estyn Evans, “were 

not tied to a plot of earth by a regular system of crop-rotation or any tradition of fruit growing. 

The Indian methods of ‘deadening’ the woodlands served their purpose.” (1992:81) He goes on to 

point out that the hunting and utilization of the forest “owed much to the Indians,” and cites the 

often heard formula “plant corn when the dogwoods are in bloom” as another tradition borrowed 

from the Indians by the Scotch Irish. The present community forest harks back to a system of 

forest farming stabilized during this period. Featuring decades of forest fallowing between 

periods of cultivation, this system combined subsistence gardening with reliance on the resources 

of a diverse mixed mesophytic forest system. 
NERI and GARI Ethnographic Overview and Assessment 

56 

It must be emphasized that although the mountain terrain discouraged the kind of 

plantation agriculture that would have profited from slavery, this was not a classless society. 

Wilma Dunaway argues that settler capitalist agriculture depended on the availability of “coerced 

labor” – including not only slaves, but freed slaves, mulattos, and Native Americans who were 

denied the right to own land. The salt industry, concentrated not only in Kanawha County (just 

below the confluence of NERI and GARI), but also in Mercer County relied on slaves rented 

from planters in Virginia counties. In the 1830 census, slaves were reported in all counties 

surrounding the park: 

Greenbrier: 1,159 slaves; population 9,006 

Kanawha: 1,117 slaves; population 9,326 

Logan: 163 slaves; population 3,680 

Monroe: 682 slaves; population 7,798 

Nicholas: 121 slaves; population 3,346 

Boorstin, Daniel J. ed. 1976 [1830]. Abstract of the Fifth Census. New York: Arno Press. 

But there was also a mobile agricultural proletariat, Dunaway contends, drawn from those 

who rented from absentee landlords, or who simply moved onto lands without checking for titles, 

or who worked for and lived with landed farmers. The memorandum books of Alfred Beckley 

contain hundreds of entries detailing his transactions with tenants on the lands of John and 

Francis Granger from Canandaigua County in New York (Beckley). 

Sanders provides a glimpse of where some of the laborers came from: 

“Early freed slaves and post-Civil War blacks formed ... small communities 

around their churches and worked on the large plantations of that area. The 

practice of racial interbreeding was widespread: they carry the names of the 

largest landowners of the area. Many moved to the Beckley and Hinton-Talcott 

areas. A large portion of the black and white Gores moved to Boone County long 

ago.” (I:227) 

Local tradition also alludes to the presence of fugitive slaves, some of whom made their 

way down the Greenbrier River poling James River tobacco batteaus, which they turned into 

housing on reaching safety (Interview with Robin Crawford, Hinton). Thus, following the James 

and Kanawha River Branch of the Underground Railroad, some slaves made their way to freedom 

in Ohio, aided by Quakers living in Washington County. 
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Figure 21. Engraving of batteau men, shown running the rapids of New River. (Source: Harper’s 

Weekly February 21, 1874) 

At the same time, particularly in the coves and hollows of the Allegheny tablelands, the 

domestic economy of small farms and forest products relied principally on the work of family 

members, in families that were quite large. At this scale, culture, society, and economy were 

intertwined with and deeply embedded in land-use, with the primary cultural institution being 

extended kinship networks concentrated within hollows. While an elite class of landowners 

existed (many descended from the earliest farmers with access to good bottomland), in the 

context of dispersed homesteads the political tendency was toward egalitarianism and reciprocity 

rather than class hierarchy and privilege. Moreover, the concept of husbandry as a farmer’s loving 

relationship to land that symbolizes God’s loving relationship to his people, had, and continues to 

have, a spiritual resonance in mountain communities (Titon 1988). 

Mountain farmers combined the resources of bottomland and tributary with those found 

higher up on the mountains, which were treated as commons on which neighbors could hunt and 

gather and graze their livestock. Mast from a wide variety of nut-trees – chestnuts, acorns, 

walnuts, and hickories – produced “some of the best grazing land in the South,” according to 

historian Frank Owsley (Eller 1982:19). William Griffee Brown writes: 

“Cattle and sheep ranged the woodlands. Hogs fattened on ‘mast’ – chestnuts, 

acorns and beech-nuts, that carpeted the ground in the fall and winter. Fruits and 

vegetables were grown with little injury from insects and blight, and required no 

control by dusting and spraying.” (Brown 1925:149) 
NERI and GARI Ethnographic Overview and Assessment 

58 

So productive were these forests as fodder during this period that in 1880, before 

timbering eliminated the forest pasture, the southern mountain states yielded one and a half 

million head of hogs (Eller 1982:21). For them the roads provided access to markets back east, an 

outlet for cash crops and livestock. Salstrom tells us that the Midland Trail teemed in the fall with 

hogs being driven to distant markets. In an interview with Linda Lee, Dave Arnold mentioned 

that he heard that farmers from the Gauley basin used dogs to drive their turkeys to market along 

the James and Kanawha Turnpike. The roads also afforded an opportunity for farmers to sell 

produce to people passing through. 

The deep unglaciated loam of the Allegheny hills and hollows supported a biologically 

diverse hardwood system that farmers drew upon to build their homesteads and families. Rotresistant mountain locust was perfect for posts, chestnut for rails, in fences designed to keep 

livestock out of the garden rather than to fence them in. Women and children worked the kitchen 

gardens, while men cleared, plowed, and planted “newgrounds” on the rich benches for growing 

“heavy vegetables” – corn, beans, and squash. Indians told George Washington of the rich 

“glades” high up in the mountains, where the soil was even richer than the bottomland that 

Washington sought to acquire (Williams 1984). Place names like “Cottle Glades,” “Lower 

Glades” on Glade Creek, and “McClung’s Meadows” commemorate openings in the primeval 

forest that were receptive to cultivation (Brown 1954:17). Corn was (and still is) often planted 

together with beans, both to save space and to fix nitrogen. Small service industries developed in 

relation to farming and the cove and hollow topography, including gristmills and sawmills. 

William Griffee Brown describes how the fences materialized the ideas governing cornwoodland-pastureland farming in the mountains: 

“In all these steps ... there was a system. Grain fields and meadows were fenced 

to keep out depredatory animals, not to keep in the live stock of the owner. From 

the ‘brush’ fence, and the ‘buck’ fence (two rails held in place one above the 

other at each joining by four cross sticks), to the ‘worm’ rail fence that was 

required to be ‘pig-tight,’ ‘horse-high,’ and ‘bull-strong,’ even our fences might 

be called historical monuments, as the wire fences of today show the decrease of 

wood and the increase of mineral supplies. The methodical construction of the 

worm fence is worthy of mention. By a rule of unknown origin, the rails for the 

fence were eleven feet in length, and with about twelve inches of lap at the 

corners, forming an angle of about forty-five degree. A double panel of the fence 

was a rod. This gave a basis for calculating the area of the field. The rails were 

five or six inches in diameter and seven rails of the proper size made a legal 
NERI and GARI Ethnographic Overview and Assessment

59 

fence. An old writer of the time said, ‘I judge of the progress of a settlement by 

observing the fences.’” (Brown 1925: 128) 

When the harvest was done, men, and sometimes families, would set off on camping 

expeditions to gather roots, including bloodroot (referred to by several of our consultants as 

“puccoon,” an Indian term), golden seal (aka “yellow root”), may apple, wake robin (aka 

“stinking Benjamin”), and especially ginseng, which merchants would accept in exchange for 

goods that the farmers could not produce themselves. “In passing over the Mountains,” George 

Washington wrote, “I met numbers of Persons and Pack horses going in with ginseng, and for salt 

and other articles at the Markets below” (Fitzpatrick 1925: II 289). They would stay under rock 

shelters, where they would find arrowheads and other relics of people who camped there 

thousands of years before. The forests of the region are known to support some 1,200 species of 

medicinal plant. Men and women would gather and use a wide variety of leaves, roots, bark, sap, 

flowers, and seeds for maintaining health and treating illness. 

Brown notes that at this time, money was scarce and that farm products were bartered for 

necessities at the local stores in Kessler’s Cross Lanes, Gauley Bridge, and Summersville. 

Storekeepers traded commodities for produce, livestock, furs, and ginseng, which they sent via 

their wagons to the Kanawha Valley. One man received enough cash for ginseng alone to buy a 

“negro woman and her child” (Brown 1925:161). 

 

Figure 22. 1874 receipt showing acceptance of half a bushel of chestnuts in partial payment for 

merchandise. (Source: Donelly 1958) 
NERI and GARI Ethnographic Overview and Assessment 

60 

The census figures for these decades attest to the productivity of an economic system that 

Salstrom describes as a partly monetized system of barter and borrow. This system persists into 

the present as “the livelihood of kin” (Halperin 1990). In this system: 

“[F]ull-time subsistence farmers practiced systems of economic relations based 

inside the region – based, indeed, in their own local neighborhoods—and their 

systems could operate more or less autonomously so long as the total 

landholdings among the participants continued to remain adequate to support 

competencies. Their systems were characterized by an incessant borrowing and 

bartering of both objects and labor. To participate usually required a small 

amount of money, but ... lacking money raised only a minor obstacle.... The 

only serious obstacle ... was that these subsistence-barter-and-borrow systems 

required the use of enough land to support competencies. But given adequate 

land (which grew more problematical for each new generation), Appalachian 

families practicing subsistence farming full time could stay virtually autonomous 

vis-à-vis economic forces beyond their localities.” (Salstrom 1994:54) 

This land and family based economic system continues into the present, functioning now 

as it did then, particularly within extended families. 

The Productivity of the Mixed Mesophytic Community Forest 

Agricultural products and manufactures routinely identified in the U.S. census returns 

indicate the early integration of the mixed mesophytic community forest into national and world 

economic systems. In addition to livestock fed on forest mast, there is maple sugar, maple 

molasses, ginseng and other roots, honey, and sawn lumber. The rich soils of the mixed 

mesophytic forest system should be counted as well among the inputs that made farming 

profitable, contributing to the reproduction of community life and identity. 

In the census of Virginia for the year 1850, there were 226,875 working males in the state. 

The top occupation was farming (106,807), followed by laborers (46,989), who may represent 

Dunaway’s category of the landless poor. There were 348 miners. Summers County did not yet 

exist, so we have included Monroe County, partly because Summers County would be created out 

of Monroe County, and partly because Monroe County, like Summers County, had very little in 

the way of minerals. Monroe County was therefore able to hold onto an agricultural base that was 

damaged by the coal industry in the other three counties, where the surplus values of soil were 

depleted by the pressures of a rapidly expanding labor force. 
NERI and GARI Ethnographic Overview and Assessment

61 

Table 1. Agricultural Economy – 1850 Census 

County Fayette Monroe Nicholas Raleigh 

Improved acreage 19,912 94,311 19,335 7,325 

Unimproved acreage 116,293 174,890 132,349 43,178 

Value of Farms 489,935 2,039,101 361,636 151,873 

Value of Implements 16,055 61,233 12,939 5,981 

Horses 999 3,354 940 444 

Asses and Mules 5 44 5 1 

Milk Cows 1,569 4,027 1,717 755 

Working Oxen 174 211 197 30 

Other Cattle 2,817 9,943 3,299 1,233 

Wheat 8,414 51,436 6,209 2,803 

Rye 1,718 6,881 3,318 1,567 

Indian Corn 111,064 250,456 83,273 49,511 

Oats 56,037 97,460 31,377 19,253 

Tobacco (lbs) 170 4,017 2,670 0 

Wool (lbs) 10,862 44,282 13,649 4,929 

Peas & Beans 22 1,010 896 198 

Irish potatoes 2,453 7,564 2,136 714 

Sweet potatoes 1,591 2,098 1,761 435 

Barley 0 209 0 0 

Buckwheat 1,417 6,131 1,501 1,590 

Orchard products $$ 460 2,226 953 0 

Wine (gallons) 0 73 0 0 

Market Gardens $$ 0 0 0 0 

Butter (lbs) 56,409 175,254 41,976 31,289 

Cheese (lbs) 260 8,602 2,507 0 

Hay (tons) 950 6,073 2,001 279 

Clover seed 270 317 4 8 

Other grass seed 2 639 7 18 

Hops (lbs) 0 12 81 0 

Flax (lbs) 3,392 11,547 5,897 3,790 

Flaxseed 648 1,458 253 37 

Silk cocoons (lbs) 16 51 0 0 

Maple sugar (lbs) 4,705 62,992 17,245 0 

Molasses (gal) 45 2,030 421 0 

Beeswax, honey (lbs) 7,062 4,255 4,255 6,117 

Value homemade mfs 14,705 11,533 11,533 5,008 

Sheep 6,529 21,789 7,501 2,845 

Swine 7,269 14,307 7,368 4,416 

Livestock value 107,069 387,030 108,723 49,625 

Value of slaughtered 21,567 69,872 18,676 9,077 
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The figures are interesting for what they assume, which is that the monetized economic 

system is the only one of consequence, because it is the production of goods for sale that must be 

measured, not the production for domestic consumption. Apart from the production of maple 

sugar and honey and beeswax, prodigious by today’s standards, the figures fail to register the 

harvest of non-timber forest products for barter, sale, or domestic use and the reliance on the 

forest for fodder for livestock and for dietary staples, including nuts, fruits and game, for humans. 

The productivity of the community forest and watershed is not considered, and is therefore 

invisible. We get a sense of the attitude governing this omission in the centennial inventory of the 

resources of West Virginia, written by Maury and Fontaine. Championing the point of view that 

market productivity is the only productivity that counts, they complain that: 

“Almost every condition requisite for the present full development of [West 

Virginia’s] abundant resources is wanting. Her population is sparse, much of her 

land is still in the primeval forests, and her people have not confined their 

attention to special fields of labor and striven to perfect them. There has also 

been a great deficiency of capital and labor.” (1876:62) 

The report they give on crops, tree species and forest products in West Virginia conveys a sense 

of the distinctiveness of West Virginia forests, particularly in the southwestern counties, where 

they observe that white oak “attains magnificent proportions” and is especially abundant. 

Likewise Sassafrass grows larger west of the Alleghenies, “attaining in West Virginia their height 

of 70 or 80 feet,” and of the tuliptree: “Nowhere does the Poplar attain greater dimensions than in 

West Virginia.” The report also gives a foretaste of the impending clash between a pre-capitalist 

society embedded in the community forest and the business-minded capitalists prepared to 

maximize the returns on their investments, which is the measure of productivity. Of beekeeping 

in the mountains, Maury and Fontaine observe: 

“Although bees thrive almost without care in this State, honey raising has not 

formed in any quarter, one of the industrial pursuits. On most farms where bees 

are kept they receive little attention, and are provided only with the rudest hives. 

The principal stock comes from the wild swarms, and the young swarms 

frequently return to the woods.” (1876:80) 

Maury and Fontaine offer a similar observation about fruit: 

“Over the State in general, no great amount of fruit is raised for sale, on account 

of the lack of cheap and ready transportation. What surplus is disposed of, is 

mainly in the dried condition. But while the lack of markets prevents exportation, 

no people raise a greater abundance, or make a freer use of fruit in their 

household economy than West Virginians. In all the multitudinous modes of 
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preserving and utilizing fruit, they excel. Every housewife lays up abundant 

stores of pickles, preserves, jams, fruit butters, besides drying, canning, and 

storing in bulk. In this respect they stand in strong contrast with the people of the 

Atlantic slope. A failure of the fruit crop is a misfortune to the West Virginian, 

but little less grave than that of the grain crop. While the people themselves, 

owing to the impress of Pennsylvania German tastes, make such large use of fruit, 

they are alive to the great benefits derived from a liberal feeding of it to stock. As 

a consequence, an orchard is everywhere an appendage to a well-ordered farm.” 

(1876:81–82) 

In 1893, George Summers noted that “Wild berries may be had for nearly six months in 

the year by following them from the warmer parts through cooler ones and up the mountains, 

where they ripen many months later than in the lower parts” (1893:102–03). The enthusiasm for 

wild fruits and even feral orchards, to which we will return, is still much in evidence in the region. 

“There is nothing that I can’t can!” declared Donna Wills, an elderly woman living on Coal River 

during an interview conducted in 1994. 

The 1870 census reported the amount of land in each county that was “unimproved 

woodland.” The ratios of improved farmland acreage to unimproved woodland acreage were as 

follows: 

Fayette: 36,410/5,658 (with a high yield of tobacco) 

Monroe: 104,760/161,630 

Nicholas: 24,455/122,120 

Raleigh: 20,969/148,413 

It is possible that what was inventoried as “unimproved woodland” was in fact land that 

was supporting livestock, game animals, and non-timber forest products for domestic and 

commercial use, stands of deadened timber in the first stage of “newground” clearance, or the 

soils of worn out “newgrounds” being replenished through the practice of forest fallowing (which 

took decades). How much of the “waste” land was actually land that was being processed through 

the forest fallowing cycle? The term “unimproved woodland” could be a way of denigrating 

subsistence-based lifeways by proving them to be unproductive and wasteful. In the gray 

literature of environmental review housed at the Division of Environmental Protection in Nitro, 

the same rhetoric routinely dismisses patches of community forest as “unmanaged forest.” 
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Yet forest resources were managed from the perspective and needs of the corn-woodlandpastureland system. Trees that had domestic and market value were conserved. The timber of 

mountain locust and chestnuts, for example, was reserved for farm use. Brown reports the custom 

of tending “chestnut orchards,” perhaps the antecedent of the chincapin grove still maintained in 

the 21st century on Highland Mountain. 

What did the community forest contribute at that time? The large numbers of cattle and 

swine in all four counties were most likely raised on what economic geographer J. Russell Smith 

(a contemporary of Krebs) termed “tree crops,” including mulberries, persimmons, chestnuts, 

honey locust, acorns, and paw-paws. “In the country where hog and hominy are the staples, the 

hogs are turned loose to turn a livelihood, and the farmer raises a little corn to keep himself, his 

family, and his stock until the next year’s crop is ripe” (Summers, 1893:104). 

Figure 23. Scale for Weighing Cattle, Dry Creek, WV. 

Maury and Fontaine also identify seventy-six medicinal plants which were gathered for 

sale and domestic use, shown in Table 2. 
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Table 2. Medicinal Plants Gathered for in the 19th Century 

Scientific Name Common Name(s) 

Achillea millefolium milfoil, yarrow 

Acorus calumus sweet flag 

Aletris farinosa unicorn, cholic root 

Alnus serrulata smooth alder 

Apocynum androsaemifolium dogsbane 

Archangelica atropurpurea master root, masterwort, angelica 

Artemisia absinthium common wormwood 

Aralia hispida dwarf elder 

Arisaema triphyllum Indian turnip, fool’s seng, jack-in-the-pulpit 

Aristolochia serpentaria Virginia snakeroot 

Asarum Canadense wild ginger

Asclepius cornuti common milkweed 

Asclepius incarnate swamp milkweed 

Asclepius tuberose pleurisy root, butterfly weed 

Baptisia tinctoria wild indigo 

Cassia Marylandica wild senna 

Ceonothus Americanus New Jersey tea 

Chimaphila umbellate pipsissewa 

Chinopodium botrys Jerusalem oak 

Comptonia asplenifolia sweet fern 

Cornus florida Dogwood 

Corydalis Formosa turkey corn 

Cypripedium parviflorum small yellow ladies slipper 

Cypripedium pubescens large yellow ladies slipper 

Datura stramonium Jamestown weed, jimson weed 

Daucus carota wild carrot, Queen Anne’s lace 

Epigea repens trailing arbutus 

Eupatorium perfoliatum Boneset 

Galium aparine goose grass, cleavers 

Gaultheria procumbens creeping wintergreen, teaberry 

Gentiana puberula gentian blue 

Geranium maculatum spotted crane’s bill 

Hepatica triloba Liverwort 

Hydrastis Canadensis yellow root, goldenseal 

Hammamelis Virginica witch hazel 

Juniperus Sabina savin 

Inula Helenium elecampane 

Symplocarpus foetidus skunk cabbage 

Juglans cinerea Butternut, white walnut 

Lappa officinalis Burdock 

Liatris spicata button, snake root 

Liriodendron tulipifera poplar, tulip tree 

Lobelia inflate Indian tobacco 

Lindera benzoin spicewood 

Marrubium vulgare horehound 

Mentha viridis spearmint 

Monarda punctata horsemint 

Nepeta glechoma ground ivy 

Nymphaea odorata white water lily 
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Scientific Name Common Name(s) 

Conophilis Americana beech drops 

Aralia quinquefolia Ginseng 

Pinus strobes white pine 

Phytolaccha decandra poke weed 

Polygala Senega Seneca snakeroot 

Podophyllum peltatum may apple 

Prunus serotina wild cherry 

Ptelea trifoliate Trefoil 

Polygonatum biflorum small Solomon’s seal 

Ranunculus bulboses Crowfoot 

Rumex crispus curled dock 

Rumex conglomeratus narrow-leaved dock 

Rubus villosus blackberry 

Salix alba white willow 

Sabbatia angularis American centaury 

Sassafrass officinale sassafrass 

Solanum dulcamera bitter-sweet 

Sambucus Canadensis Elder 

Sanguinaria Canadensis blood root, red root, red puccoon 

Taraxicum Dens Leonis Dandelion 

Vibernum opulus high cranberry 

Verbaseum thapsus mullein 

Veratrim viride white hellebore 

Veronica Virginica culver’s root 

Zanthoxylum Americanum prickly ash 

Cimicifuga racemosa black snake root, black cohosh, seng pointer 

Lycopus Virginia bugle weed 

No note is made in the 19th century resource inventories of the resources of the streams 

and rivers that define the terrain and name the settlements. Yet the ethnographic and oral history 

interviews suggest that historically fishing has been an important activity. And Sanders observes 

that from the earliest times, the New River was a centerpiece for community life in Mercer, 

Monroe, and Summers Counties (Sanders 1994:188). 

The Civil War, Statehood, and the Consolidation of Absentee Control of 

Land and Resources 

As John Williams has argued, the traditional notion that West Virginia’s statehood 

represents the liberation of an Appalachian smallholder democracy from the rule of an oligarchy 

based in the plantation districts of Tidewater Virginia” is untenable. Rather: 

“[A] western Virginia elite, having fought sectional battles with its counterpart in 

eastern Virginia for the better part of two generations, both opposed and survived 

the creation of West Virginia, fighting on with considerable success to preserve 
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its leadership for a generation after 1863, at the expense both of the leaders who 

created the new state and of industrialists who asserted their own claim to 

leadership shortly after the Civil War.” (Williams 1995:210–11) 

If this is so, then the western elites, land attorneys, judges, military officers, welleducated men who were themselves descended from the ruling and merchant classes from 

Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New England, and Great Britain, were successful in adapting the 

politics of Virginia, as Williams argues, to the social and environmental conditions of the 

mountains. During the years leading up to the Civil War, their primary efforts involved resolving 

the massive welter of disputed land titles, getting Virginia to authorize and support transportation 

improvements, and to further the work of surveying the timber and mineral resources of western 

Virginia. 

One way in which these efforts shaped the region surrounding the parks may be seen in 

the work of land attorneys John and Thomas Swann, brothers from Virginia who opened a 

practice in Charleston. In the decades leading up the civil war, their litigation of land titles diverts 

contested tracts of mineral and timber wealth into the hands of absentee owners. One of their 

clients, W. H. Edwards, was granted 30,000 acres in Fayette County, much of it along the Gauley 

River. He dealt with conflicting claims of people who lived on the land by filing ejectment suits 

against them. But in every case, a few days before the court date, he would go to the defendant 

and propose a compromise. The compromise involved the drawing up of a new Broad Form Deed, 

which allowed occupants to remain on the land as long as they ceded mineral and timber rights to 

Edwards. This arrangement, referred to in state documents as the “severance of ownership from 

occupancy,” was made with thousands of people living in the southern West Virginia coalfields. 

It was articulated in maps drawn up by Swann, showing that his clients were the rightful owners 

of the “ancient titles.” Swann’s 1867 Title Map of the Coal Field of the Great Kanawha Valley, 

based on his research for clients during this period, forms a historically reconstructed plat map of 

some of the early land grants in southern West Virginia (Cometti: 1941). 
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Figure 24. Detail from 1867 Title Map of the Coal Field of the Great Kanawha Valley, showing the 

revalidated “ancient titles,” by Major John Swann, a land attorney in Charleston. 

(Source: Library of Congress) 

For the leadership on both sides, eager to begin extracting minerals and timber, the 

planters’ attachment to slavery and the way of life it supported was an impediment. Jedediah 

Hotchkiss, an engineer who fought for the confederacy (he was Stonewall Jackson’s mapmaker) 

had been frustrated by a stalled geological survey. Like General John Imboden, David Ansted, 

and others who would join his cause after the war, Hotchkiss believed “that the economic 

salvation of Virginia required a shift from the agrarian slaveholding past toward an industrial 

future” (Thomas 1976:190). In their view, the ante-bellum value on land and slaves had stunted 

the natural industrial growth of the region, and that if slavery were to end the supply of labor 

would increase, and former slaves would expand the market for manufactured goods (Thomas 

1976:191–192). 
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Figure 25. Percentages of slaves in the populations of Virginia counties in 1861 on the eve of the 

Civil War. The counties adjacent to the parks, along with many of the surrounding coalbearing counties, show relatively low percentages. The African American populations of 

these counties would increase following the Civil War, when slaves employed in the salt 

works of Kanawha and Mercer Counties, and the tobacco plantations to the east, would 

become available as free, but landless, labor for working in the mines. (Source: Detail 

from Graham, 1861. Library of Congress) 

Western Virginia supplied 32,000 troops to the Union and only 10,000 to the confederacy. 

The Civil war pitted neighbors along New River against one another. Fayette County supported 

the confederacy. Captain Thurmond, demonstrating his loyalty to the Old Dominion, burned 

down Lewis Gwinn’s farm in 1860 because Lewis Gwinn sympathized with the Union. Settlers 

from Gatewood (with roots in Amherst County) joined Thurmond in subsequent Yankee raids. 

The Civil War left its mark throughout the New River region. Bowyer ferried Yankees and 

Confederates across New River. General Robert E. Lee found his celebrated horse, Traveller, 

while encamped there. “Lee’s Tree” was a landmark at Maywood until it had to be cut down. 

Stonewall Jackson’s mother is buried in Ansted Cemetery. Battles were fought at Kessler’s Cross 

Lanes and Carnifex Ferry, Confederates attacked the Yankees at Gauley Bridge, and Yankees 

burned the town of Jumping Branch and defeated the Confederates at Lewisburg. Specific battles 

fought in the vicinity of the parks are described in abundant detail in the county histories of 

Carden and Peters, Brown 1925, Sanders, and Wood and illustrated with site maps. Lists of those 

who fought in the wars and their burial places are also provided. 
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INDUSTRIALIZATION

By far the biggest impact of the Civil War on this region was that it removed 

impediments to making the region’s timber and mineral wealth central to a national plan to 

industrialize the economy. William Griffee Brown, writing in 1925, said that the greatest change 

in the natural features of the region was “the passing of the original forest.” 

“At the close of the Civil War, the cleared lands on the farms were surrounded by 

woodlands in which scarcely any of the great, virgin trees had been destroyed. 

Giant yellow poplars grew on the north side of the hills and in the rich coves and 

on the benches. Immense chestnut trees stood thick on the south slopes and level 

stretches. Oak trees hundreds of years old could yet be found in the forest.” 

(Brown 1925:176). 

Men with dreams of industrializing West Virginia were well aware of the condition of 

this forest, and frustrated as well. Since the 1840s, they had been pushing to replace an agrarian 

economy dependent on slaves with an industrialized system and work force. Historian Ronald 

Eller argues that after the Civil War the sons and daughters of the southern plantation gentry were 

looking for arenas in which to invest their wealth. 

“Their wealth could not be maintained in slaves and expansion of the plantation 

economy. In many cases (they) were the second and third sons of wealthier 

individuals who had to make it on their own. West Virginia was the new frontier 

after the war. It was the new frontier for industrialization, for the resources that 

would build industrial America, and so it’s not surprising that they would come 

back after the war to the land in which they had engaged in combat and struggle. 

Come back after the war and try to make their fortunes through the purchase of 

land, using their resources to purchase tracts of land and then to develop that land. 

It happened again and again and again throughout the mountains, throughout 

southern West Virginia especially.” (Source: West Virginia Division of Culture 

and History, WV History Film Project. 

In West Virginia, the new entrepreneurial class, made up of officers from the Civil War, 

sons of tidewater planters, engineers, surveyors, with support from investors in Boston, 

Philadelphia, Baltimore, Williamsport (PA), and England, implanted an industrial version of the 

old plantation order. When in 1873 the C&O Railway finally materialized the dream of the James 

and Kanawha Canal, the coalfields were opened up as an industrial frontier. Local elites Mose 

Dameron, Alfred Beckley, Elan Scarbrough, Captain W.G. Reynolds, and many others, helped to 

broker deals between local farmers and absentee speculators. Azel Ford, a banker from Hinton, 

would be elected to the state legislature. Samuel Tyree surveyed lands for Alfred Beckley. In the 
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mix of real estate, government, and the professions of engineering, prospecting, and surveying, 

and local elites – members of a merchant class built out of settler capitalism – were crucial for 

leveraging the region’s transformation in the 1880s. 

Figure 26. Hotchkiss map of C & O Railway from Newport News, VA to Big Sandy, WV, 1884. 

(Source: The Virginias)

Place names also register the impacts of resident planters and industrialists working in 

tandem to secure land, minerals, and timber from the mid-19th century on (see Timeline, 

Appendix III). 
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In the titles of the Civil War officers who head up the industrial endeavor, perhaps we 

glimpse an early incarnation of the military/industrial complex and the tight revolving door it has 

erected between industry and the state: Captain W.N. Page, Colonel George Anderson, Captain 

Thurmond, General John Imboden (who would launch the Gauley Mountain Coal and Coke 

Company), General Alfred Beckley, Major Jedediah Hotchkiss, and Captain John S. Swann. 

Hotchkiss, who was born in New York State in 1828, had adopted Virginia as a 

homeland. In 1872 he opened an engineering and topographical office in Staunton, Virginia, and 

began a campaign to attract outside capital to develop the resources of the Virginias. In 1880, 

Hotchkiss started a monthly publication out of Staunton, Virginia: The Virginias: A Mining, 

Industrial, and Scientific Journal Devoted to the Development of Virginia and West Virginia. The 

journal contains many articles with information about the status of timber and mining 

opportunities in the New River area. It ran until 1886. 

Figure 27. Detail from Map of Great Kanawha Coal Field by Jed Hotchkiss, 1886. (Source: Library 

of Congress) 
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Hotchkiss’s promotional efforts helped to stimulate a wholesale land grab. Rasmussen 

argues that because of the work done by land attorneys before the Civil War, the requisite control 

of the land was already in place by the 1880s (1994). That the land was occupied was not an 

insurmountable problem for robber barons, who devised a variety of ways to make clear titles 

look fuzzy (Rasmussen 1994). This made it possible for outside investors to establish a claim to a 

property by paying back taxes, and offering to compromise with the occupants who farmed the 

land. Ceding surface rights in exchange for timber and mineral rights through the instrument of 

the Broad Form Deed, entrepreneurs leveraged rights of access as long as there were minerals and 

timber, which the farmers promised to watch over for the absentee owners. This arrangement, 

enacted through thousands of deeds, put into place a social compact that allowed residents 

continued access to non-timber forest products throughout most of the twentieth century. 

After Hotchkiss’s death in 1899, the Appalachian Trade Journal credited Hotchkiss with 

industrializing the Virginias, noting that neither “the stolid hill dwellers” of the mountain counties, 

nor the “agricultural, foxhunting, ex-slaveholding people of Central and Eastern Virginia” would 

ever have developed anything, because neither group was affected by “the spirit of modern 

industrial enterprise” (Thomas 1976: 202). They would have to be brought on board in the 

upcoming struggle over the control of labor. In the course of this struggle, the captains of industry 

would systematically devalue the production of the community forest. Hence, while Summers and 

Maury and Fontaine criticized the irresponsible methods of timbering, they also criticized the 

farmers for taking only what they needed. “Too much of West Virginia land has been tilled 

merely for subsistence, the owner only caring to raise enough to live on” (Summers 1893:104). 

Summers’ comment was not altogether true. Settler capitalism was alive and well in 

southern West Virginia. Denigrating it as “subsistence” provided the industrialists with an excuse 

to commandeer the land and resources. The taking was not without protest, and the courts were 

occupied for decades with land litigation as descendants of settlers contended with powerful 

absentee owners over the status of “unimproved lands” crucial to the local system of farming. In 

one case along the Gauley River, absentee heirs of the Jacob Skiles tract of 32,907 acres (see 

Swann map above) filed a suit against residents living on Twenty-Mile Creek, Peters Creek and 

other tributaries. In 1892 the suit was finally settled. 
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“The object of the Maury Heirs was to define the boundaries of the tracts of the 

various settlers, and save for themselves the unoccupied wild lands in their grant. 

No question arose as to the title of the defendants to lands actually held in 

adverse possession; but how far did this possession extend to surrounding 

uncultivated lands? On Twenty Mile it was agreed that the possession of 

defendants should extend a distance of ninety poles measured from the Creek up 

the mountains on either side; which explains the ‘90 pole line’ so often 

mentioned in conveyances in that area” (Brown 1925:153–54). 

The case provides one specific example of how the penetration of industrial capitalism 

created new interrelations among agents of the core, semi-periphery, and periphery. The settlers 

losing ground in the mountains were literally peripheralized in the world system, confined more 

closely to the streams, as the absentee owners consolidated their claims to property in the 

mountains. The example illustrates an initial move in the capture of the upper-elevation commons 

as property of the new class of industrial land barons. Because residents continued to have access 

to the land, except for the timber and minerals, the displacement signaled in the Broad Form 

Deeds would not be completed for many decades. In many cases, not only were property lines 

redefined, but descendents of settlers all over the coal fields were redefined as tenants. 

There were outspoken critics of the form taken by industrialization, even at that time. In 

his inaugural address of March 4, 1893, Governor McCorkle warned of the consequences of so 

much absentee ownership: 

“Whilst we welcome the incoming of the wealthy landowner, still in my opinion 

he should not be welcome alone, but every intelligent effort should be made by 

the State to induce the small landowner and actual settler to come amongst us. I 

believe that this is the best corrective of the influence of large, non-resident 

ownership of lands in this state, the burden of which we shall in a short time 

feel.” (Summers 1893:99–100) 

In 1885, Glenville native Ellen King wrote a poem entitled “The West Virginia Hills.” 

Mostly celebratory, it contains the line: “Many changes I can see, which my heart with sadness 

fills.” The lyrics were later set to music and adopted as the official state song in 1963. 
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ORIGINS OF NEW RIVER BASIN SETTLERS ON THE EVE OF 

INDUSTRIALIZATION

In the late 19th century, West Virginia was, as Cometti and Summers point out, “the most 

native state in the Union” (1966). The birthplace most reported in the censuses from 1850–1880 

for residents in counties encompassing the New and Gauley River Basins is West Virginia, 

followed by Virginia. Other birthplaces include a variety of states and countries, in single and 

double digits. The figures given in the 1880 census (see Appendix I) are representative. Out of a 

total of 35,266 residents in the four counties surrounding the parks, 26,833 reported that they 

were born in West Virginia; 6,444 claimed Virginia as their birthplace; and the remaining 1,989 

were born outside the region, in other states and in other countries, including the British Isles, 

Canada, and Europe. 

As the population grew, as the size of farms distributed to offspring dwindled, and as the 

rights to timber were sold to lumber companies, settler families who had expanded into all the 

coves and hollows found themselves in a Malthusian squeeze: poised at a historic bench mark, for 

the first time in generations, a frontiering population was trapped on a shrinking frontier with no 

place to go. We would argue that this was a psychically formative moment in collective history; 

that it bears on the striking commitment to place and land expressed in southern West Virginia, 

and that it bears on the outrage expressed at the waste, deterioration, and destruction of houses in 

the present, because of the depletion of resources for survival. 

The Community Forest in the 1880s 

Jedediah Hotchkiss, writing in the Baltimore Sun in 1893, includes two tables showing 

the results of timber counts made in the southern West Virginia Counties of Logan and Wayne, 

on the West Fork of Twelve-Pole River, and Greenbrier, at the head of Cherry River, a tributary 

of the Gauley. As the vegetation in Logan County would be more representative of the western 

area of Raleigh County, and because the difference in tables conveys a sense of the variety found 

in the mixed mesophytic region, we include them both (see Tables 3 through 6). The count 

included trees eighteen inches in diameter and higher, four feet off the ground, except for 

hickories, locusts, and black walnuts, which were measured at ten inches off the ground. 

 
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Table 3. Wayne and Logan Counties: Hardwoods, 12,263 Acres on West Fork of Twelve-Pole River. 

Tree Type Count 

White Oaks 24,760 

Chestnut Oaks 38, 848 

Black Oaks 8,525 

Red Oaks 943 

Hickories 21,298 

Chestnuts 7,681 

Locusts 1,996 

White Maples 1,583 

Sugar Maples 450 

Birches 1,344 

Gums 1,044 

Black Walnuts 393 

Sycamores 13 

Total: 108,878 

Source: Summers 1893:32–33. 

Table 4. Wayne and Logan Counties: Softwoods, 12,263 Acres on West Fork of Twelve-Pole River. 

Tree Type Count 

Tulip-Poplars 12,450 

Pines 3,472 

Lindens 2,325 

Cucumbers 240 

Buckeyes 28 

Hemlocks 903 

Total: 19,689 

Source: Summers 1893:32–33. 

Table 5. Greenbrier County: Hardwoods, 1,000 Acres at the head of Cherry River. 

Tree Type Count 

White Oaks 132 

Chestnut Oaks 159 

Red Oaks 889 

Hickories 86 

Chestnuts 1,513 

White Maples 3,258 

Sugar Maples 7,291 

Locusts 4 

Beeches 1,965 

Birches 1,120 

Gums 104 

Cherries 349 

White walnuts 1 

Total: 16,871 

Source: Summers 1893:32–33. 
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Table 6. Greenbrier County: Softwoods, 1,000 Acres at the head of Cherry River. 

Tree Type Count 

Tulip-Poplars 529 

White Lindens 1,014 

Yellow Lindens 937 

Ashes 576 

Hemlocks 2,303 

Yew pines 34 

Total: 5,393 

Source: Summers 1893:32–33.

THE HIDDEN LANDSCAPE OF FOREST FARMING

While we have not found timber counts for Fayette, Raleigh, or Nicholas Counties at that 

time, as demonstrated in Table 7, a cursory look at the witness trees recorded on property maps 

on file at the Fayette County Courthouse gives a sense of the range of species found, many within 

the boundaries of park property. 

Table 7. Sample of Witness Trees Marking Property Boundaries, 1896–1912 

Year Property Witness Trees Waterway 

1896 Gauley Coal & Goke Beech Laurel Creek 

1896 Gauley Coal & Goke Chestnut Laurel Creek 

1896 Gauley Coal & Goke Gum Laurel Creek 

1896 Gauley Coal & Goke Hickory Laurel Creek 

1896 Gauley Coal & Goke Locust Laurel Creek 

1896 Gauley Coal & Goke Spruce Laurel Creek 

1896 Gauley Coal & Goke Sugar trees Laurel Creek 

1896 Gauley Coal & Goke White oak Laurel Creek 

1896 Gauley Coal & Goke Yellow lynn Laurel Creek 

1896 Gauley Coal & Coke Ironwood pointers Laurel Creek 

ca. 1900 Thayer Pine Slater Creek 

1904 Cataract Colliery Co. black oak Marr’s Branch 

1904 Cataract Colliery Co. Chestnut Marr’s Branch 

1904 Cataract Colliery Co. chestnut oak Marr’s Branch 

1904 Cataract Colliery Co. lynn Marr’s Branch 

1904 Cataract Colliery Co. maple Marr’s Branch 

1904 Cataract Colliery Co. pine Marr’s Branch 

1904 Cataract Colliery Co. poplar Marr’s Branch 

1904 Cataract Colliery Co. red oak Marr’s Branch 

1904 Cataract Colliery Co. Sugar trees Marr’s Branch 
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Year Property Witness Trees Waterway 

1904 Cataract Colliery Co. White oak Marr’s Branch 

1905 John Q. Dickinson Buckeye Twenty-Mile Fork 

1905 John Q. Dickinson Mulberry Twenty-Mile Fork 

1905 John Q. Dickinson Sugar trees Twenty-Mile Fork 

1905 John Q. Dickinson Tulip poplar Twenty-Mile Fork 

1905 John Q. Dickinson Walnut Twenty-Mile Fork 

1907 Sturgeon Lands Buckeye Gauley 

1907 Sturgeon Lands chestnut Gauley 

1907 Sturgeon Lands chestnut oak Gauley 

1907 Sturgeon Lands dogwood Gauley 

1907 Sturgeon Lands gum Gauley 

1907 Sturgeon Lands Hickory Gauley 

1907 Sturgeon Lands ironwood Gauley 

1907 Blume Coal & Coke Lynn Gauley 

1907 Sturgeon Lands poplar Gauley 

1907 Blume Coal & Coke White oak Gauley 

1912 Guthrie Tract Buckeye Gauley 

1912 Guthrie Tract Chestnut Gauley 

1912 Guthrie Tract Gum (sweet) Gauley 

1912 Guthrie Tract poplar Gauley 

Nd Southside Junction Cherry Arbuckle Creek 

Nd Caperton Chestnut Bennett’s Branch 

Nd Thayer Chestnut Slater Creek 

Nd Southside Junction Hickory Arbuckle Creek 

Nd Caperton Hickory Bennett’s Branch 

Nd Southside Junction Maple Arbuckle Creek 

Nd Southside Junction Sourwood Arbuckle Creek 

Nd Caperton Sourwood Bennett’s Branch 

Nd Caperton Tulip poplar Bennett’s Branch 

Nd Thayer White oak Slater Creek 
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79 

Figure 28. 1843 deed and map of property sold for taxes in 1840 and surveyed by Samuel Tyree for 

Alfred Beckley. Tyree’s daughter would marry confederate General John D. Imboden, 

who became a driving force in the industrialization of the coalfields. Witness trees on this 

deed include beech, maple, and white oak. (Source: Fayette County Courthouse) 

IMMIGRATION TO THE NEW RIVER BASIN DURING THE INDUSTRIAL 

GOLDEN AGE (1880–1930) 

“Although the region is commonly described as a reservoir of homogeneous 

Anglo-Americans, one study revealed that 34,400 of 53,000 new jobs in West 

Virginia mines between 1890 and 1910 were filled by immigrants from southern 

and eastern Europe. Later southern blacks also augmented the labor force: in 

southern West Virginia they constituted nearly a quarter of the mine workers in 

the 1920s.” (Billings and Walls 1981:126) 

At the beginning of the industrial period in the 1870s, the population pressure on the land 

created conditions ripe for exploitation by the local elites, in collaboration with outside investors. 

The mobilized work force did not come entirely from Europe and from the American south. 

Many consultants in the oral history and fieldwork projects report moving down out of the 

mountains to live in coal towns, and the transcriptions from our interviews suggest the likelihood 

that descendants of pioneer settlers are presently found in every town and along every tributary of 

the New and Gauley River Basins. 
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80 

Over the next forty years, the population descended from settler families would be 

augmented by thousands of immigrants from Europe, who poured into southern West Virginia in 

the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Though further research would be necessary to verify this, 

the relatively large number of immigrants shown in the 1880 census from the British Isles (375) 

to the districts of Kanawha, Sewell Mountain, and Mountain Cove would most likely have been 

brought in by industrialists to work in the mines during the 1870s, as the number of foreign-born 

residents for the 1870 census in Fayette County was 32: 14 in Falls, eight in Fayetteville, eight in 

Mountain Cove, and two in Sewell District. The practice of bringing in immigrants to augment 

the local workforce would yield a striking change in the demographics during the next forty years. 

Figure 29. Tombstone of Emelkul Altatta, Sts. Peter and Paul Cemetery, Hunk Hill in Scarbro, WV. 

The contrast between the figures in the 1880 and 1920 census returns provides a snapshot 

of the dramatic increase in population and equally dramatic demographic changes that occurred 

within a forty year span in these four counties of southern West Virginia. What was the 
NERI and GARI Ethnographic Overview and Assessment

81 

relationship between the rapid industrialization of the region and the land-based familism that 

sank its roots into the Allegheny plateau throughout the nineteenth century? What was the 

character of the encounter between so many different ethnic groups? Where did they end up in the 

region, and what were the cultural effects? And what role did the renewable resources and 

waterways and associated collective memory play in this intercultural encounter? 

This is a period that has been fairly well studied by historians of labor and industry, and 

by Appalachian scholars. Well known works dealing with the momentous transformation of a 

rural agrarian population into a rural industrial working class include David Corbin’s Life, Work, 

and Rebellion in Southern West Virginia, Ronald Eller’s Miners, Millhands, and Mountaineers,

Joseph Trotter’s Coal, Class, and Color, and John Williams’ West Virginia: A History. These 

works provide useful frameworks for understanding the changes within regional, national, and 

world historical context. The proliferation of histories that circulate locally about life in particular 

coal camps and towns are valuable for the access they provide to local views and perspectives and 

the photographs of places that have vanished (Bragg 1990, Shuff ND, Sullivan 1989). 

While the difference in numbers of foreign-born citizens shown in the censuses of 1880 

and 1920 is indeed striking, in the region surrounding the New and Gauley Rivers the actual 

percentage of foreign born residents seems not to have exceeded five percent of the total 

population. Many of the people interviewed in the park’s oral histories gave accounts of having 

moved into the coal camps from mountain farms. Some returned to those farms or sent wives and 

children back there. Men moved from one town to another, sometimes as the employees of a 

company that owned mines in several places, sometimes on their own, just looking for a better 

deal. When a mine worked out, an operator would move the entire population to another 

community, as when Nuttall moved people from Sewell to Nuttall Top, or when Erskine moved 

workers and their families from Concho to Terry in the 1930s. The one hundred and seven oral 

history interviews conducted in the 1980s focused mainly on memories of those who participated 

in lumbering, railroading, and coalmining. Their places of birth reveal a very southern West 

Virginian population. Most of those interviewed were born in southern West Virginia, to parents 

who were also born in West Virginia, though some were born elsewhere, including Virginia, 

Kentucky, Ohio, North Carolina, Italy, Hungary, and Poland. 
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82 

Figure 30. Tombs of unknown miners on Beury Mountain, marked by roof bolts from the mines 

broken and welded into crosses. 

Coalfield Ethnogenesis: Land Use and the Livelihood of Kin 

What are the grounds for considering neighbors of the park as a culturally distinct group? 

Ethnography takes up this question by listening for distinctions that people draw themselves, and 

how they use the distinctions. The two affiliations that consistently emerge in interviews are 

attachment to “the land” and to family. Land and family are so intertwined that they extend and 

express each other. Ethnogenesis names a process whereby people express and renew a sense of 

social belonging through participation in shared times and spaces. In the vicinity surrounding the 

New and Gauley Rivers, ethnogenesis, a sense of belonging to this place and these people, 

happens through practices that renew the sense of collective participation in the historical 

processes of frontier settlement, industrialization, outmigration, and return. 

David Corbin observes, and this is borne out in our interviews, that people in southern 

West Virginia were slow to organize because they had a variety of options. People with land in 

the area worked in the mines in order to make some money, but once they made what they needed, 

they would stop. They were not yet dependent on jobs. Bringing in immigrants was one way of 

creating a reliable work force, and immigrants would help to bring in family members and 

neighbors from homes abroad or in the southern states. According to the oral histories, there were 
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83 

different ratios of native-white, foreign born, and blacks. A look at the census for Fayette County 

in 1900 showed that most miners were from West Virginia, with scattered immigrants from 

Germany, Italy, Ireland, Greece, Spain, Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Wales, England, and 

Russia, with the exception of Quinnimont and Sewell, both of which had high concentrations of 

black people from Virginia. John Redman explained this in an interview with Ken Sullivan: 

“That’s the reason you find so many people that are so closely kin in different communities, 

because they were brought by relatives that were already out here working.” 

In the oral histories, significant black populations were recalled to have been at Edmond, 

Elverton, South Fayette, Fire Creek, Glen Jean, Hinton, Kaymoor Bottom, Layland, Nuttallburg, 

Red Ash, Red Star, Terry, Thayer, South Thurmond, and Winona. Significant foreign populations 

were recalled for the following groups and locations: Spaniards (Erskine, Layland, Minden, 

Hinton, Nuttallburg); Polish (Fayette, Nuttalburg, Terry, Thayer, Thurmond, Scarbro), Italian 

(Fayette, Nuttallburg, Terry, Kilsyth), Hungarian (Minden, Terry, Thurmond), Russian (Layland), 

Greek (Hinton), German (Thurmond). There were Catholic Churches in Scarbro, Kilsyth, Winona, 

Minden, Hinton, and on Irish Mountain. The mission churches at Scarbro, Kilsyth, and Minden 

were incorporated into the community at Sts. Peter and Paul Catholic Church in Oak Hill, 

according to a monument there, which enshrines the bells from the three mission churches. Each 

church was named for a patron saint drawn from the immigrants’ home country, including the 

Italian Saint Anthony in Kilsyth and the Polish Saint Casimir from Minden. 

African Americans, Native Americans, and Mulattos in Southern West Virginia 

In the histories and in conversation with descendants, the region is said to have been 

settled by African Americans who came in both as slaves and as freed slaves, and by Native 

Americans who resisted and survived the removals. The history of African Americans in the 

region during the years leading up to the Civil War and after industrialization deserves much 

more study. The persistent myth that blacks are a negligible presence in Appalachian, which 

Edward Cabell terms “Appalachia’s black invisibility factor” is belied in southern West Virginia, 

where close to twenty-five percent of the population has been black for more than a century. 

(Inscoe 1995). Jedediah Hotchkiss was at pains to show the proper place of African Americans in 

the industrial workforce, featuring in The Virginias articles by Louis Agassiz on the biological 

justifications for discrimination by race. 
NERI and GARI Ethnographic Overview and Assessment 

84 

We know from historical records that some settlers brought slaves with them into the 

mountains, and that freed slaves came into the mountains to take up homesteading. Rev. Donnelly 

tells us that the road to Sanger, was hacked out by the slave of Llewellyn Jones, a tobacco farmer 

from Amherst County, and that Peter’s Creek was named for Peter Morris, who was the slave of 

Henry Morris, the first settler there. Joseph Trotter reports that in the 1850s, 3,000 slaves were 

used for producing salt and for mining coal in the Kanawha coalfields. Cavalier notes that Col. 

Christopher Q. Thompkins, “a gentleman of the old aristocratic school” who had married a 

“beautiful and cultured lady of Richmond who owned a great many slaves and property” lived in 

a house near a bluff on Gauley Ridge “surrounded by a fertile farm tilled by many slaves.” 

Thompkins aided the confederacy and tried in vain to get Beckley to join, but Beckley refused. 

Thompkins lost his estate as a result (Cavalier 1985:180–88). Where were Thompkins’ slaves 

buried, and what became of their descendants? 

Figure 31. Slave cemetery near the former Gore plantation and Cash’s Hill, Summers County. 

Surveying the state’s resources for the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 1865, J.R. 

Dodge commented that the Kanawha Valley, including all of the New River, contained a large 

portion of all the slaves that had been owned within the boundaries of the new state. He lists the 

numbers of slaves (“as a relic of the old regime”) for 1860 in each county: Monroe – 9,536 whites, 

1,114 slaves; Raleigh – 3,291whites, 57 slaves; and Fayette – 5,716 whites, 271 slaves. In 

Kanawha County, where slaves had been used to work in the mines, there were 2,184 slaves in a 

population of 13,785 (Dodge 1865:121). 
NERI and GARI Ethnographic Overview and Assessment

85 

As shown in Table 8, in the 1880 census, blacks and mulattos are reported to be living in 

the districts surrounding the park as follows: 

Table 8. People of Color in Counties Surrounding NERI and GARI in 1880, by District 

Fayette County 

District Falls F-ville #1 F-ville #2 Kanawha Sewell Mt Mt Cove Totals 

Blacks 20 7 52 175 394 201 849 

Mulattos 23 16 42 7 91 44 223 

Totals 43 23 96 182 485 245 1,072 

Nicholas County 

District Grant Hamilton Jefferson Kentucky Summersville Wilderness Totals 

Blacks 2 7 5 5 19 

Mulattos 1 2 10 24 37 

Totals 3 2 17 29 5 57 

Raleigh County 

District Clear 

Fork 

Marsh 

Fork 

Richmond Slab 

Fork 

Shady 

Springs 

Town Trap 

Hill 

Totals 

Blacks 1 3 1 13 8 28 

Mulattos 1 8 15 15 39 

Totals 2 11 16 13 23 67 

Summers County 

District Forest 

Hills 

Greenbrier Green 

Sulphur 

Jumping 

Branch 

Pipestem Talcott Totals 

Blacks 44 148 29 1 93 127 442 

Mulattos 39 120 2 26 10 29 323 

Totals 83 268 31 27 103 156 765 

Source: Adapted from Marsh, 1880 Census of West Virginia

The census figures show that nearly a quarter of the population of the nine counties of 

southern West Virginia (Kanawha, Mingo, Logan, MacDowell, Mercer, Raleigh, Fayette, 

Wyoming, Boone) was black. Between 1880 and 1910, Fayette and Raleigh County showed the 

highest percentage of blacks in the nine-county region. The black population today still hovers at 

nearly a quarter of the population in this region, in a state where overall only three percent of the 

population is black. While the black communities have, since the 1960s, been integrated into the 

schools, they express a distinctive religious and musical culture largely because of the churches. 
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86 

They also share with the majority of our consultants attachments to the land and resources that 

they express through practices of hunting, fishing, camping, gardening, hiking, and worshipping. 

Figure 32. Member of Soak Creek Baptist Church, singing a hymn. (Photo by Terry Eiler. Source: 

American Folklife Center, Library of Congress) 

In the oral history transcriptions, those interviewed report that there were sizeable black 

populations (forty to fifty percent) at Quinnimont, Kaymoor, Elverton, Ames, Nuttalburg, Fire 

Creek, Winona, Edmond, and Claremont, a number of which are in the Sewell Mountain and 

Mountain Cove Districts. Oral history consultants also recalled Thurmond and Hinton as places 

with a large number of black residents. In the 1880 census, most black and mulatto residents 

reported that they were born in Virginia or West Virginia. Other states mentioned include North 

Carolina. The communities with the largest numbers of black residents in 1880 included those 

associated with mines operated by Colonel Beury, who is said to have sent to Virginia when he 

needed more workers. 

But John Cavalier’s Panorama of Fayette County suggests that the black population was 

diffused much more widely. He identifies 48 communities with black schools in Fayette County 

alone (1985). These were generally opened from the 1920s until the 1950s, when integration 

began, though some remained open and segregated into the 1960s. The schools were located in 

Ansted, Beard’s Fork, Boomer, Cannelton, South Caperton, Elverton, Concho, Deepwater, 

Edmond, Gamoca, Glen Ferris, Glen Jean, Greentown, Ingram Branch, Lochgelly, Longacre, 
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87 

McDonald (for black students from Dunloop, Derryhale, McDonald, and Kilsyth), Milburn, 

Minden, Montgomery (where Simmons, the first school for blacks in Fayette County, opened in 

1879), Mount Hope (Dubois High School), Nuttalburg, Page, Powellton, Quinnimont, Hilltop, 

Sanger, Scarbro, Sewell, Summerlee, Thayer, Winona, Beelick Knob, Brooklyn Bottom, 

Claremont, Cunard, Donwood (on Morris Creek), Elkridge, Kimberly, Harewood, Harrah, Laurel 

Creek, Lawton, Lick Fork, Long Branch, Mahan, Harlem Heights and Sun. 

Table 9. Fayette County Communities with Black Schools 

Community Year Opened Year Closed Comment 

Ansted 1964 

Beard’s Fork 1920 1960 

Boomer 1912 1965 

Cannelton 1926 1964 

S. Caperton 1920 1947 

Elverton 1914 1951 

Concho 1944 

Deepwater 1964 

Edmond 1951 

Gamoca 1926 1937 

Glen Ferris 1918 1956 

Glen Jean 1922 1956 

Greentown 1909 1961 

Ingram Branch 1937 1965 

Lochgelly 1956 

Longacre 1903 1953 

McDonald Early 1920s Late 1920s Children from Kilsyth, Dunloop, 

Derryhale, & McDonald attended here 

Milburn 1921 1956 

Minden 1906 1957 

Montgomery 1879 1956 Simmons High School, first school for 

blacks in Fayette County 

Mount Hope 1919 1956 Dubois High School, named for W.E.B. 

Dubois 

Nuttalburg 

Page 1903 1956 

Powellton 1926 1954 

Quinnimont 1921 1941 

Hilltop 1912 1965 Children from Sanger went here when 

school was not in Sanger 

Sanger 1931 1948 

Scarbro 1937 1965 

Sewelll 1904 1959 

Summerlee 1921 1963 

Thayer 1929 1956 

Winona 1880 1964 

Beelick Knob 1941 1956 

Brooklyn Bottom 1945 1961 
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Community Year Opened Year Closed Comment 

Claremont 1921 1962 

Cunard 1911 1959 

Dunwood 1949 

Elkridge 1911 1945 

Kimberly 1911 1961 

Harewood 1901 1938 

Harrah (Backus) 1916 1954 

Laurel Creek 1931 1941 

Lawton Late 1920s 1952 

Long Branch 1952 

Mahan 1935 1962 

Harlem Heights 1947 1967 

Sun 1930 1964 

Cavalier mentions that in 1958 the former Estuary School was moved next to the 

Fayetteville Consolidated School “to accommodate the seventh and eight grade black students.” 

Figure 33. Buckingham Lining Bar Gang, demonstrating track lining during Railroad Days in 

Hinton, 1992. (Photo by Terry Eiler. Source: American Folklife Center, Library of 

Congress) 

John Redman, in an oral history interview with Ken Sullivan, reported that most of the 

black coal miners he knew came from the Virginia, from the three contiguous counties of 

Appomattox, Nelson, and Buckingham. These counties are clustered in Virginia not far from 

Lexington, near the head of the Midland Trail, and near to other counties with a history of 

interaction with the New River area, including Amherst, Pulaski, and Alleghany. Glen Gore, a 

consultant from Glen Jean, reported that his parents moved to Pence Springs, from a farm on 
NERI and GARI Ethnographic Overview and Assessment

89 

Cash’s Hill. Cash’s Hill was given to freed mulatto people by a descendant of George Gore 

(Sanders 1994). They were said to be his offspring. In 1870, Robert Gore deeded Cashier’s Hill to 

Sarah Gore and her children. By this time, descendants of George Gore and his slave were living 

in Boone County, on Pond Fork of Guyandott River, and elsewhere in southern West Virginia, 

and may bear some relationship to Solecki’s observation: 

“In one particularly remote and almost inaccessible area on the west bank of the 

New River between Round Bottom Creek and Mercers Saltworks were noted a 

few cabins of natives, whose dark skinned facial features seemed to show a racial 

admixture. It is reported locally that some descendants of slaves crossed with 

native Indians are in the New River Valley. These people farm small patches of 

hillside and bottomland there. It is possible that these people were offshoots of 

the Melungeons, described for the Virginia Appalachians” (1949:328). 

Other black and white families mentioned by Sanders include Walker, Shanklin, Davidson, Pack, 

Smithers, Palmer, Goins, Harris, Austin, and Smith (1994). 

“Mulatto” appears to be a strangely ambiguous word. It could designate the offspring of 

white and black couples, or of black and Indian couples, white and Indian couples, or of any 

Native Americans abiding by the law in Virginia that ordered Indians to identify themselves as 

mulatto. The Monacans living in Amherst County Virginia, which is bordered on the south by the 

James River, had been employed under conditions of peonage by tobacco growers there (Bear 

Mountain, the central place for Monacans in Amherst County, is one of the “Tobacco Row 

Mountains”), and were known to work in the mines as well (Cook 2000). Lewis Evans’ 1755 map 

locates the Monacans and Tuscaroras in the Amherst, Nelson, and Bedford areas. If Beury and 

others were sending back to these counties for workers, it is possible that some who came were 

Monacans. Amherst County itself was late in being settled, because of its ruggedness, providing a 

refuge for the Monacans who chose to remain in Virginia. By the time the county was created out 

of Albemarle County in 1774, the region was populated with offspring from the intermarriages 

between Monacans and early trappers and traders in the region. Because the Monacans had never 

been recognized by the colonial government through treaties, the Monacans were not recognized 

as a tribe, but as members of the “free colored” population: like freed slaves, they could pay taxes 

but they could not vote. Updating anti-miscegenation laws of 1705 and 1787 designed to keep 

property in the hands of the white elite, in 1823 the Virginia legislature passed a Race Law, 

which required descendants of Indians as well as Negros, up to the great-grandchild, to be 

counted as mulattos. In the post-Civil War society and economy, Monacans and former slaves 
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90 

found themselves locked into share-cropping as a means of survival. Sharecroppers were among 

those targeted for recruitment into the mines. 

Through a series of 18th century treaties, the state of Virginia was officially depopulated 

of Indians, who supposedly moved or were removed to Ohio, or New York, or Oklahoma. Oral 

tradition is full of accounts of people with Indian ancestry who remained in the area, and who 

blended in as well as they could with their neighbors (Cook 2000:56–57). Cook mentions Johns, 

Branham, Redcross, Hicks, and Adcox as Monacan surnames. There are, in the 1880 census, 

black and mulatto residents with the surnames of John and Hicks in the Sewell and Kanawha 

Districts of Fayette County. Recently, a white ancestor was traced by black Higgenbotham 

descendants back to Amherst County, where a Higgenbotham sired children through one of his 

slaves. Descendants living in Greentown, a settlement sold off in parcels by a man named Green 

to black families moving out of Elverton, have recently celebrated their common ancestry with 

Higgenbotham’s white descendants at the cemetery of the original Higgenbotham in Amherst 

County. 

Figure 34. Rev. William and Frances Carter, at their home in Prince, 1992. (Photo by Lyntha Eiler. 

Source: American Folklife Center, Library of Congress) 
NERI and GARI Ethnographic Overview and Assessment

91 

Perspectives on Native American History from the Interviews 

Appalachian environmental historian Donald Davis points out that by the mid-19th

century, many Cherokee were utilizing the landscape in much the same way as the European 

settlers, and that in fact the extensive cultivation of peaches and even apples (introduced by the 

British) was due to Cherokee farming, which was the province of women (Hatley). 

In most local county histories, Indian presence vanishes from the region sometime in the 

late 18th and early 19th centuries. But in historical discourse, accounts of what became of Native 

Americans at the headwaters of the Kanawha River persist. Collective memory of a time when 

Native Americans moved through the area is attached to such landscape elements as peach trees, 

place names like “Indian Creek,” or “Indian Gap,” charred rocks where Indians are said to have 

cooked flat-bread, newgrounds where they planted corn and beans to harvest on their way back 

through an area, bowls carved into rocks where they ground corn, red mushrooms that they were 

supposed to have preferred, the “puccoon” that people still dig, and a spring green called 

“shawnee lettuce” or just “shawnee.” Other signs are read out of people themselves, whose high 

cheek bones, dark eyes, and straight black hair form thresholds to Native America. Such 

statements of affiliation are worth noting in relation to a landscape ethos that some people also 

associate with Native American antecedents. “We still find Indian culture very strongly in the 

valley,” commented Beckley resident Murray Shuff (formerly of Stone Cliff) in an interview in 

1992. 

The difficulty of proving Indian ancestry relates to the fugitive status of Native 

Americans in the region following the battle of Point Pleasant, and the task of deconstructing the 

Anglicized or Africanized ethnicities of ancestors. Lucille Springfield, née Richmond, grew up in 

Ramp, on Laurel Branch. Springfield is trying to locate information on Henry Dugger Clay, the 

ancestor that she suspects links her family to the Cherokee. She said: 

“The verbal stories from my grandfather are that the Cherokee Indian blood was 

there. But there’s nothing written anywhere, until I ran across this little bit of 

information that says that during the time that they were taking the Indians out to 

the reservations and things, they stopped recording the races here. And the only 

way to trace back to get your Indian background is to know the names that you’re 

following and hope that you can run into someone or something.” 
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Figure 35. Reproduction of an 18th-century Clay family portrait displayed in the Springfield home. 

A number of the practices common in the region today, such as drying beans (leather 

britches), planting the rootlets of ramps near the home, and replanting ginseng by the “curl,” are 

known to have been practices of the Cherokee. Peach Tree Creek, a tributary of the Coal River, is 

said to have been so named by the first white men who arrived there and found peach trees 

growing. The Cherokee encouraged the growth of wild fruit and nut orchards, and transplanted 

ramps to patches near their homes. The practice of drying green beans on strings called “leather 

britches” hails from the Cherokee, as does tapping “sugar” (maple) trees for sap. According to 

Davis, apple orchards survived in the mountains because the Cherokees “made them central to 

regional horticulture after 1750” (Davis 2000:80–81). Heidi Altman describes two methods of 

fishing that her older Cherokee consultants in Cherokee, North Carolina described to her: trotlines 

and seining (Altman 2006: 53–54). On New River, trotlines are a traditional mode of fishing. On 

Coal River, seining is the method used for catching hellgrammites. Although practiced on a 

smaller scale than the method described by Altman, (two men instead of six) it is the same 

technique. 

There are many other Cherokee antecedents for landscape practices of the present 

throughout the Appalachian Mountains (Davis 2000, Hatley 1991, Finger 1995). The following 

plants from Witthoft’s list of Cherokee potherbs are also gathered and consumed in the region: 
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93 

Pokeberry (Phytolacca Americana) 

Ramps (Allium tricoccum) 

Crow’s Foot (Ranunculus spp.) 

Wild Turnip (Brassica rapa) (Cherokee term noted by Witthoft, “Turmip,” is used rather 

than the more common “wild mustard”) 

Johnny jump-ups (viola spp.) 

Creasies (Barbarea spp.) 

Solomon’s Seal (Polygonatum biflorum) (gathered commercially) 

Shawnee Lettuce (Saxifraga micranthidifoli) (Cherokee term noted by Witthoft, 

“Shawnee Lettuce,” is used, rather than the more common “branch lettuce”) 

Witthoft notes that naturalized plants used by the Cherokee most likely represent contact 

during Federal times, and that more recently introduced potherbs, like dandelions and chicory, are 

not trusted by his Cherokee informants. Witthoft notes two foci among the Cherokee that 

coincide with foci along Coal River: 1) a forest and forest edge focus, and 2) a focus on the edges 

of gardens and yards, where volunteer potherbs may be protected and encouraged (Witthoft 1977: 

254). The relationship between cultivation and the serendipity of volunteer potherbs was 

expressed by an elderly woman on Drew’s Creek who commented that “Creasies won’t grow 

unless you till the soil” (Hufford 1998). 

Since in the 19th century it was illegal for Native Americans to own property or to vote, it 

would have been expedient to conceal Native American identity. If, as Lucille Springfield pointed 

out, Native American landowners reported themselves as white, black, or mulatto, this ancestry 

would not be documented in the census. “Their lives depended on not letting their race be written 

down somewhere,” explained Lucille Springfield, a descendant of William Richmond and 

Mitchell Clay. 

Mike Springfield, her husband, added: 

“During that time, all the people that were here, you either had to register as 

white or colored. There was no black or Indian. If you registered at all it had to 

be in the white category or the colored category. So now, when you tend to want 

to go back, and trace your family history, if you want to get into the Indian aspect 

of it, it’s an entirely different ballgame now, because you’ve got to start looking 

in the records pertaining to colored people instead of Indian people.” 
NERI and GARI Ethnographic Overview and Assessment 

94 

Robin Crawford, an African American cultural activist from Hinton whose ancestors 

escaped from slavery poling tobacco batteaus from the James River, pointed out that “lots of 

African Americans here are Native Americans.” 

In the 1880 census, no one claimed to be Indian. In Raleigh County, 39 people claimed to 

be mulatto, 23 of whom lived within our study area. In Fayette County, 223 people reported that 

they were mulatto, all of them within the study area. In Summers County, 323 people claimed to 

be mulatto, most of them in our study area. In Nicholas County, 37 people claimed to be mulatto, 

none of them in the Grant or Wilderness districts. We have to consider the strong possibility that 

those claiming to be mulatto were of Native American descent, in which case it is possible that 

modes of participation in the landscapes surrounding the parks are derived from Native American 

practices not too many generations back. During the 19th century, when it was illegal for Indians 

to vote or own land, many Indians declared themselves to be mulatto, or free coloreds, unless 

they could pass for white. The West Virginia census shows one declared Indian in 1870, with the 

count remaining in single and double digits until 1950, when 160 are counted. The census for 

1990 shows that 2,458 West Virginians claimed Native American ancestry. 

In 1996 and 1998 the Appalachian American Indians of West Virginia was acknowledged 

as a tribal group by the West Virginia Senate and House of Delegates. According to the West 

Virginia Cyclopedia entry: 

“Appalachian Indians of West Virginia, Inc. (AAIWV) is an intertribal 

organization of Native Americans and their mixed blood lineal descendants. 

AAIWV seeks to unite the Native peoples of the Appalachian region so that their 

rich Native American heritage is not lost. With over 4,000 members, AAIWV is 

the largest Native American group in the state of West Virginia.” 

(http://www.aaiwv-ani.org)

We learned of the AAIWV from members of the Gardner family in Thayer, and from the 

Springfield family in Danese. Members of both families reported joining the AAIWV and 

regularly attending the organization’s regional pow-pows. The goals of the organization, which 

are posted on its Web site are: 

“to provide a ‘tribal home’ for Native Americans in West Virginia, to save 

precious pieces of our heritage that are in danger of being lost, and to educate 

both Native Americans and the general public about the history and culture of 

Native Americans in this State. We do this through extensive teaching activities 
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95 

throughout the State, by holding free Pow Wows open to the public, and through 

meetings. In addition to our normal monthly Tribal Council meetings in 

Charleston, we hold Regional Gatherings each month in Mingo, Greenbrier, 

Monongahela and Ohio counties. We also publish a monthly newsletter, the 

Appalachian Indian voice, which is distributed free to our members. AAIWV 

also provides assistance to our members in need with a small Food Pantry and 

assistance with counseling and educational needs. AAIWV is supported solely by 

the contributions of it members. We charge no fees or membership dues to our 

members. Our public speaking and educational activities are also performed 

without charge to the community. No member representing AAIWV may accept 

speaking fees for public activities.” (http://www.aaiwv-ani.org) 

Questions regarding Native American ancestry elicit a characteristic, and curious, 

response. Most people I interviewed expressed the belief that there are no longer any Indians in 

the area. This disclaimer is consistently followed by a claim to Indian ancestry. Ernest Jones, of 

Brooklyn, who was born in Abraham, spoke of his grandfather’s memories of Indians who lived 

in the vicinity of Irish Mountain in the mid-19th century. “He said that the Indians were very poor 

and didn’t have much, and then they moved away.” I asked him about the claims to Indian 

ancestry that come up in conversations around here. “We’re supposed to have some Indian 

blood,” he replied, pulling out a photo of a relative with high cheekbones and straight black hair 

(September 17, 2004). 

Figure 36. Ernie Jones, Brooklyn, with a photo of his grandparents from Irish Mountain. 
NERI and GARI Ethnographic Overview and Assessment 

96 

“They were poor and didn’t have much and then they moved away,” leaving in their 

wake European and African American settlers pursuing a land-based way of life influenced by 

Native American practices, including hunting, gathering, gardening, camping, and fishing. The 

pertinent question here is not whether such ancestry can be proven, but how such claims are used 

to legitimize practices, which have been impugned and impinged upon, but not destroyed, by the 

rise and decline of industry in the Gorge. A second question has to do with the relationship people 

draw, often tacitly, but sometimes explicitly, between the way that Indians were treated and the 

anxiety over cultural disappearance as an effect of changes in the present. 

Robin Crawford observed that the New River was a conduit in the Underground Railroad. 

“Around the time of the Civil War, blacks owned land along the river.” A number of them arrived 

in batteaus, having been employed as batteau men by the tobacco planters along the James River 

in Virginia. Yet racial discrimination has continued in spite of the advances made by the civil 

rights movement. Crawford recounted the story of a lynching that occurred in Hinton. A rural 

region with such a high number of African American residents forms an indispensable 

opportunity for constructive engagement. 

The Community Forest and the Articulation of Modes of Production 

Deploying a widespread strategy, which social theorists call the “articulation of modes of 

production,” industrialists integrated the corn-woodland-pastureland system and the community 

forest into the extractive economy of coal. This economic system and recourse to the products of 

a shared forested commons were critical to the integration of communities in southern West 

Virginia into the industrial enterprise driven from the core and semi-periphery of the developing 

world system. Farmers who were supporting themselves were attracted to mining only as a source 

of cash for what they couldn’t produce, and were often not as reliable as the operators wished 

(Corbin 1990). One solution was to turn the landscape and the local system of working it into a 

lure for both investors and immigrant labor. Thus D.T. Ansted entices industrialists to the region 

by praising the pastoral qualities of the Cabin Creek Plateau in The Virginias: 

There is another mode in which this land, so valuable for its minerals, might be 

immediately rendered available and at the same time be prepared for future 

operations. There are on the plateau, intersected by the valleys, many thousand 

acres of good land, admirable adapted for cultivation. These lands are nowhere 

far from settled habitations, and would supply everything required for a colony of 
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97 

emigrants. The climate is delightful for the greater part of the year, and the 

winters moderate and short. There is excellent water and deep soil, well adapted 

to the growth of wheat, Indian corn, potatoes and other crops. The pastures where 

the trees have been removed are excellent, and the cattle are left to graze far into 

the winter. By offering allotments of moderate extent on easy terms, reserving 

the minerals, population could be secured and the whole district improved. The 

reserved allotments would soon increase in value. The cost of placing emigrants 

on these lands, from Liverpool, would not exceed $45 per head (Ansted, 1885). 

The advertisement uses the community forest system as a draw for investors, but note 

that the pasture land described is not that of the community forest where livestock fenced out of 

the crop fields foraged on mast from fodder trees, but enclosed, deforested space. Yet this 

radically different concept of pastureland is presented as though it were the most natural thing in 

the world. The intention was to integrate immigrants from Europe and blacks from the south into 

a landscape system that used local farming skills and landscape knowledge as a resource to 

subsidize the coal industry. The surplus wealth of the land on which farmers had banked for the 

previous century would be rapidly depleted in support of a mobilized labor force. In the New 

River Gorge, the space for gardening was not as abundant on the plateaus, but immigrants learned 

to garden in small spaces. As Murray Shuff, who grew up in Stone Cliff, pointed out, they grew 

their “heavy vegetables” (corn, beans, and squash) high on the mountain, and their other 

vegetables in plots near the coal camps. Farmers from the plateaus peddled not only their garden 

grown produce in the coal camps, but nuts and berries from the surrounding forests. 

Subsistence farming and gardening in the coal camps featured the same divisions of labor 

across the extended family by gender and age. Women and children tended the gardens. Trotter 

notes: 

Along with their regular domestic tasks, working-class black women nearly 

universally tended gardens. Although the men and boys cleared and broke the 

ground, women and children planted, cultivated, harvested, and canned the 

produce: corn, beans, cabbage, and collard and turnip greens. The family’s diet 

was supplemented by a few hogs, chickens, and sometimes a cow. Gardening not 

only nourished the family, but also symbolized links with their rural past and 

soon became deeply entrenched in the region’s economic and cultural traditions. 

Not yet eleven years old, while confined to a local hospital bed, a young black 

female penned her first verse, illuminating the role of black women in the life of 

the coalfields: 

When I get [to be] an old lady, 

I tell you what I’ll do, 
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I’ll patch my apron, make my dress 

And hoe the garden too. (1990:91) 

In histories of land-use in Appalachia, whites, blacks, and Native Americans participated 

in similar methods of farming and forest use. Sam Cook writes of the division of labor along 

gender lines among the Monacans of Amherst County, Virginia: 

Historical evidence ... suggests that Monacan agricultural pursuits were not a 

novel introduction at the time of European contact. According to accounts from 

Fort Christanna around 1716, women were responsible for growing and tending 

the cornfields. The implications of this account are twofold. First, it suggests that 

the Monacans, like their Iroquois neighbors, had a long-standing social tradition 

governing the means by which agricultural activities were to be carried out. But 

perhaps most significantly, it points to the possibility that women were held in 

high prestige in eastern Siouan societies, being charged (as in Iroquois and 

Cherokee society) with the care and control of a major element of subsistence 

(2000:33). 

The ethnic legacies are not neatly contained in discrete practices imported from the old 

world. To be sure, the practice of segregating white, black, and foreign residents within company 

towns is often alluded to in recollections of coal camp life, and this practice could have the effect 

of accentuating ethnic difference. And indeed, the skills that people brought with them from other 

countries helped diversify the local economy and landscape. Some people who came to the region 

to mine coal used those skills to stay out of the mines. Provi Marchio’s father worked as a 

shoemaker in the Mount Hope area and the stone masonry found throughout the area is attributed 

to Italian stoneworkers from the turn of the century. Carrie Lou Jarrell’s grandfather, a man from 

Greece, opened a restaurant in Whitesville, which is still called Greektown by older residents on 

Coal River. Italian stoneworkers built retaining walls, bridges, coke ovens from Thayer on down, 

the foundations for the buildings at Fayette station, brick pillars in the mines, tunnels, chimneys. 

One consultant recalled that these sturdy chimneys were the main support for Jenny Lind houses. 

Italian stoneworkers followed the stone and brick work throughout the coalfields. William Tury’s 

father built the big long stone building at Lester. Word was that in 1900 Italian stoneworkers 

begun building the Seng Creek tunnel, which eventually connected Cabin Creek with the 

coalfields of Marsh and Clear Forks. Tury assumes that his dad and the rest of the Italian workers 

built most of the stone houses and maybe the McKendree hospital. “Down there at Fayette Station. 

All those are stone buildings down there, and up that hillside down there, there’s cut stone, 
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99 

beautiful cut stone all over the hill there.” Some returned to Italy, but most settled in West 

Virginia. 

Until recent struggles in coalfield communities over the practice of mountaintop removal 

mining, the most common account of ethnogenesis in the coalfields has centered around the 

struggle for unionization, in which immigrants, native whites, and blacks found common cause. 

In the interviews, accounts of union activity are given for the towns of Fire Creek, Sewell, Beury, 

Caperton, Rush Run, Elverton, and Hinton. But this does not fully account for landscape 

participation in the context of the livelihood of kin. 

Geologist Charles E. Krebs’ observations in 1916 suggest that the community forest was 

well articulated into the industrial mode of production. After reporting in his geological survey of 

Raleigh County that its principal products were corn, wheat, oats, hay, beef, cattle, sheep, hogs, 

poultry, fruits of many kinds, vegetables and coal, Krebs adds “Considerable income is also 

derived from the digging and selling of medicinal roots, found in the forests, as follows: Ginseng, 

Black Snakeroot, Puccoon or Bloodroot, Mayapple, Yellowroot and Spikenard.” He mentions 

that Raleigh County “formerly contained one of the heaviest stands of timber in the state, and still 

possesses several large tracts of virgin timber” (1916: 3). Some people also recall that it was more 

profitable to sell corn by the gallon than by the bushel. Moonshining, a technology brought with 

the Scotch Irish, is said to have been practiced by black and white moonshiners who found a 

ready market in the coal towns of the New River Gorge. The important question for this 

ethnography is: what role did the mixed mesophytic watershed and its associated collective 

memory play in the industrial economy? The transcriptions of oral histories and interviews 

provide much more information on local people, places, and interactions with the landscape. 

Krebs cautioned in 1916 that the population figures given for coal camps were not to be trusted, 

because the populations fluctuated so much. The oral history transcriptions affirm his observation, 

providing many glimpses of a population constantly on the move, not just within the New River 

Gorge, but throughout the coalfields. “We moved at least two dozen times!” observed Grace 

Byset, a Baptist who married a Hungarian Catholic. “Just changing houses, changing houses. 

Nobody stayed in a town very long.... They’d get dissatisfied with where they were or the 

company they worked with.” 
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Figure 37. Detail of study area from 1917 map of West Virginia, showing location of mines. (Source: 

White 1917) 

The mobilization of a work force happened within the region as well as across 

international boundaries. A system of farming, in which life centered around the hollows in which 

extended families survived through participation in a borrow and barter, non-monetized 

subsistence economy, diversified and the geographic horizons expanded. The region took on 

some of the traits of a metropolis, and the local economy diversified. The coal camps provided 

outlets for farms in the uplands and bottoms. Farms on Beury Mountain supplied Thurmond with 

produce, while the Gwinn Farm supplied produce to miners from Thayer to Thurmond. Farms on 

Garden Ground Mountain provided fruits and vegetables to Terry. Beury Mountain farms were a 

resource for the mining communities around Keeney’s Creek. 

What emerges in the oral histories is a sense of the New River basin and surrounding 

counties as a region within which people circulate continually, but the scale of circulation varies. 
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101 

Some move around within a single tributary; others move around to mines throughout the gorge. 

Still others move to mines in different coalfields – from New River to Kanawha or the Winding 

Gulf. It is also important to note that some people never left the farms, and that some who did 

retained strong ties to the farmsteads. Lucille Springfield, who grew up in Ramp in the 1950s, 

commented that her family still lived the frontier life, and that she never had any desire to go 

beyond the farm. “The love of the land was deeply instilled in children,” she said. The family 

followed Lucille’s father to North Carolina, where Lucille met and married her husband. Their 

dream is to resettle the Richmond homeplace in Ramp. 

The implication is that definitions of NERI and GARI’s traditionally associated people 

cannot be based solely on genealogy or geography, but on a clearer understanding of how the 

New and Gauley Rivers appear in stories that integrate their tellers into the landscapes, history, 

and community life of southern West Virginia. 

Examples of Ethnogenesis in Southern West Virginia 

What was the character of the exchange of cultural ideas during the early decades of the 

20th century? Descended from a McGinnis, an old-line WV family, and an Italian immigrant, 

William Tury exemplifies the bridging of immigrant and native cultures through intermarriage 

and childrearing. His father recruited perhaps 500 men from Italy to work in the mines. He was 

French-Italian, from the Lombardy region. Milan and Turin were towns in the northern Italy 

province they came from. Tury believes that the West Virginia mountains reminded Northern 

Italians of their home. His father did stonework in Northern Italy and recruited people to come to 

West Virginia to do stonework. He recruited them from Italian neighborhoods in New York. Tury 

recalled that he brought back mostly Italians, but also some Portuguese, some French, and some 

Spaniards from Eastern France. “He never did go back to Italy – for some reason he couldn’t. He 

brought two brothers-in-law here, both killed riding monitors. He was like a godfather, a boss to 

them.” Tury’s father met and fell in love with a McGinnis girl while boarding in the hotel that her 

grandfather kept at Surveyor. The McGinnises were against the marriage and tried to stop it, but 

the determined couple prevailed. McGinnises helped develop the Coal River coalfields. They also 

had a farm near Arnett, and a boarding house in Surveyor. They farmed in Lincoln and Wyoming 

County, then left those places and went to Meadow Bridge, where they bought a farm. Tury’s 

parents moved to Chesapeake in Kanawha Valley. Tury Sr. worked for company at Winifrede 

doing stonework and brickwork, and then worked for Pure Oil at Cabin Creek. Tury Jr. went to 
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102 

Chelyan Junior High and East Bank High School. He grew up in Kanawha Valley and married 

Bertha Lee Morris, descended from William Morris, the pioneer whose daughters were killed in 

an Indian raid. Tury himself went to work for Dupont in 1933, at its Belle Plant, retired in 1973 

after working his way up to supervisor. His son is now a production supervisor there, having 

moved in a direction familiar to coalfield workers, from coal to petrochemicals, moving on down 

the Kanawha River. 

In this account, both Turys marry into old line families. During the interview, which 

takes place at Tury’s house in Glen Jean, Tury tells of his mother living at the farm with the 

children some of the time that his father was working. The movement throughout southern West 

Virginia, to Lincoln, Wyoming, and Kanawha counties, is not uncommon. His recreation at the 

time was salvaging cut stone on New River. “I’ve salvaged cut stone all over these old coal 

camps.... Every stone I pick up I wonder, did he have somebody do this or did he have his hand 

on this stone, see.” He is, in old age, fully integrated into the landscape of southern West Virginia. 

The story of Mae Bongalis, an elderly woman on Coal River, is told from the perspective 

of a Cherokee descendant. She was born as Mae Meadows on Indian Creek, in Boone County. 

She claims Indian descent. “Indian Creek was full of Indians,” she recalled during an interview 

with Mary Hufford in 1994. Many of them, she said, had taken the name of Meadows, in keeping 

with an Indian practice of taking white names that incorporated some aspect of nature (other 

examples offered during this fieldwork project include Clay, Dangerfield, and Springfield). She 

offered an account of her Irish grandmother, whose father-in-law, Mae’s great-grandfather, was a 

Cherokee medicine man, who had married a white woman. As a girl, Mae traveled with her Irish 

grandmother through the hills surrounding the Ashford Hollow on Indian Creek. Her 

grandmother showed Mae the hollowed out rocks where Indians ground their corn, the charred 

rocks where they baked their bread, and the limbs of towering trees that had been used for 

hanging meat to dry. When Mae was eight, her step-father moved the family from Indian Creek to 

Montcoal Mountain on the Marsh Fork of the Big Coal River, where Mae helped her father to 

load coal. At the age of 12, Mae married George Bongalis, a Greek immigrant. She recalled the 

Greek weddings, music, and food in the coal camp on Montcoal Mountain. She recalled teaching 

Polish women how to winnow and string beans for drying into leather britches and what they 

could gather for food in the winter. After Mae’s husband was killed in the mines, Mae took a job 
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as waitress in a tavern on Route 3. She taught her children how to hunt, fish, dig ginseng, capture 

rattle snakes, and plant by the signs of the zodiac. One son whom I interviewed before he died in 

the mid-1990s also worked for thirty years in Cleveland, before returning to Coal River. His 

daughter and granddaughter live in Michigan. They would often spend weekends camping and 

fishing on New River, sometimes bringing catfish back to release in Coal River. Catfish, as a 

friend of Shorty’s explained, are “survival fish,” not like the “trash fish,” rainbow trout 

introduced by the state. Rainbow trout don’t reproduce and eat the eggs of the fish that do. 

In this account, a family claiming Cherokee, Irish, and Greek ancestry weathered the 

times of industry and outmigration, and kept its fortunes interwoven with the southern West 

Virginia landscape. The account illustrates how the network of traditionally associated users of 

the New River extends into another watershed. It offers a glimpse of the subsistence practices on 

which the mining industry depended, including the livelihood of kin economic system whereby 

children assisted their fathers in the mines. The account also hints at the extent of the region 

occupied by traditionally associated peoples, for whom New River is a resource. This system, 

transferred from the context of farming to the context of mining, was one aspect of the frontier 

life which Salstom argues has persisted in Newer Appalachia far longer than in many other places 

in the United States. Salstrom points out that this subsistence economic sector may have a 

significant role to play in strategies for future economic recovery: “By still retaining a subsistence 

economic sector, however reduced or crippled, Appalachia may have also retained an economic 

resilience that the First and Second worlds will painfully need to recover” (Salstrom 1994). 

While the oral histories cover the topic of gardening fairly extensively, showing it to be 

an important practice for mining communities, there is a marked gap regarding interactions with 

non-timber forest products. This interaction was widespread, according to our interviews. 

Consultants reported gathering herbs, greens, berries, mushrooms, and nuts to supplement diets, 

as well as hunting and fishing. Digging roots such as ginseng for extra cash was also very 

common. While people had places they like to go for these products, the places were not fixed, 

and are therefore not mappable except as a general set of habitats representing the knowledge 

people have of the kinds of places where things grow. 
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While a sense of identity grounded in land and labor relations had been strengthened 

through the industrializing years of 1880–1930, regional identity in a national context would not 

fully crystallize until the massive outmigrations from the mountains to the Midwestern factory 

towns that mark the mid-twentieth century. 

Appalachian Ethnogenesis and the Mid-Twentieth Century Diaspora 

In the entry on “Appalachians” that appears in the Harvard Encyclopedia of American 

Ethnic Groups, Dwight Billings and David Walls argue that: 

Appalachians lack the church organizations, distinct language, and racial 

characteristics that often define an ethnic group. What group consciousness they 

have comes from their distinctive kinship system, religion, dialect, and music. 

Their group identity is only partial, but they are very often perceived as a group 

(1981:125). 

While our consultants on this project commonly cited ethnic origins of ancestors (including 

African American, Native American, Scots Irish, Italian, German, English, Polish, and others), 

the strongest expressions of identity centered around land, family, community, and work. When 

one examines the history that brought people of so many backgrounds together in this region, one 

sees an arena in which people had to make common cause. 

It was not until after coal collapsed as a major form of employment in the mid-20th

century that a distinctively Appalachian identity emerged. The diaspora out of Appalachia in 

search of work brought people from the region into contact with people from outside the region in 

urban settings. Within these larger-than-local contexts, ways of speaking and doing things 

associated with the hills condensed into an Appalachian identity, with variants from Kentucky, 

Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama, and West Virginia. 

Between 1940 and 1960, 750,000 West Virginians migrated elsewhere. In the 1950s 

West Virginia lost 75,000 jobs, and nearly a half million people. Many of them went to the 

factory towns in Ohio, Michigan, and Indiana, traveling routes that became known as “hillbilly 

highways” to destinations that are known to this day as West Virginia enclaves. In a bar in 

Minden a woman told us she lived in a place in Cleveland they call “Little West Virginia.” 

“Dayton, Ohio’s full of West Virginia,” said another man. As in the population of the coal camps, 

these concentrations occurred through a process of chain migration, as networks of extended 
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105 

family members and neighbors connected urban sites with sites back home. Studies of 

Appalachian populations in the cities suggest that the extended family forms a support system 

that has historically kept many urban Appalachians off the welfare rolls (Billings and Walls 

1981:127). The Appalachianness of this identity is something conferred by outside observers; 

within the communities the strongest affiliations still appear to be with family and community. 

A woman in her sixties, in the bar at Minden, retired here from a job in Cleveland, 

working for Alcoa. She came home every weekend while there, and when she returned to retire, 

before her boyfriend died and her lungs got bad, she fished every day at Cunard. She told a joke 

about a man waiting at the gates of heaven to get clearance from Saint Peter. As he’s waiting, he 

sees a stampede of people leaving Heaven. “Those are our West Virginia people,” Saint Peter 

explains. “They go home every weekend.” Laughing over this, she added, “If you took all the 

people from Pennsylvania and West Virginia out of Ohio, you wouldn’t have any workers in that 

state!” 

In the 1970s mining jobs opened up again, and people returned, and the next time the bust 

came, the jobs were in the furniture factories to the south. “They called Route 19 the North 

Carolina Highway,” commented Paul Fox to Tom Carroll. While many people moved away 

permanently, circular or return migration is common, as people travel back to West Virginia on 

weekends, or between jobs, or for retirement. Andrew Avancini, who grew up in Thayer, worked 

in Cleveland and raised his family there, and then came back to Thayer to retire. His children live 

in Cleveland. Ted Farley, descendant of Captain Matthew Farley, also worked in Cleveland for 

years, and came home to retire. 

Some of the miners living in New and Gauley River communities now drive some 

distance to work for mountaintop removal projects in Raleigh, Boone, and Wyoming Counties. 

Many of those mines are now non-union. 

As John Williams has pointed out, the struggle between speculators and settlers that 

defines West Virginia history has proceeded through three stages. Throughout most of the 19th

century, it was a competition for control of land. This was followed by a struggle over control of 

labor power into the 1980s. In the mid-twentieth century the spread of the practice of strip-mining 
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106 

signaled the beginning of a struggle over resources, a struggle that has many theaters as some 

people attempt to fathom the environmental and social costs of our continuing dependence on 

fossil fuels. 

While the UMWA’s struggle for an eight-hour work-day, a forty-hour week, and safe 

mining conditions during the first half of the twentieth century is covered to some extent, the 

struggle of communities living close to mountaintop removal projects during the last decades of 

the 20th century is not. The events leading up to mountaintop removal as the means of retrieving 

the last of the coal are part of the history of this region, and should be interpreted. It may seem 

that since strip-mining and mountaintop removal do not take place in the park, this part of the 

story need not be addressed. However, we might assume that some of the profits from mining the 

New River coals were invested in the development of the mining technology used in mountaintop 

removal, the source of record quantities of coal that speed through the Gorge daily. We might 

also predict that the disappearance of mountains and hollows not far from the park could affect 

the composition of the mixed mesophytic forest in this region, and could exert further pressure on 

the parks to meet the needs of local communities that have lost the forested coves, hollows, and 

ridges adjacent to their homes. 

Figure 38. Outline of mixed mesophytic forest region as defined by E. Lucy Braun, with counties 

surrounding the New and Gauley Rivers shown in black. Adapted by Mary Hufford from 

Loucks et al, 1994 and the Appalachian Regional Commission map of Appalachian 

Counties. (Courtesy Center for Folklore and Ethnography) 
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107 

Figure 39. Outline of mixed mesophytic forest region as defined by E. Lucy Braun, with counties 

surrounding the New and Gauley Rivers shown in black. Shown in gray is the 

Mountaintop Mining and Valley Fill Study Area as defined by the US EPA. Adapted by 

Mary Hufford from Loucks et al, 1994, US EPA 2003, and the Appalachian Regional 

Commission map of Appalachian counties. (Courtesy Center for Folklore and 

Ethnography) 

Although mixed mesophytic forest species are found outside of the outlined region, the 

outlined area in the figures defines the cove and hollow region that is the source of the eastern 

deciduous forests of the United States, and which has the capacity to incubate seed stock in times 

of severe climate change (Braun). If, as E. Lucy Braun surmised, the unglaciated cove and 

hollows of the Cumberland and Allegheny plateaus sequestered seedstock through the freezing 

temperatures of the ice age, the same climate-ameliorating capacity of the coves could shelter 

biodiversity in a time of global warming. Can the biocultural diversity of the region that includes 

the parks withstand the loss of hundreds of square miles of cove topography to mountaintop 

removal and valley fill? How can the seasonal round of the mixed mesophytic community forest 

and watershed serve as a tool for park planners in anticipation of climate change? 
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108 

THE MIXED MESOPHYTIC COMMUNITY FOREST AND WATERSHED IN THE 

TIME OF POST-COAL

Post-Coal is a misnomer. The industry continues to produce coal in record quantities, 

moving it toward distant markets through the Gorge daily. Post-coal really names the coal 

industry’s disarticulation of itself from local workers and economies. This disarticulation began 

with the closing of mines in the Gorge, which was not always synchronized with the closing of 

towns. Mines began opening with the completion of the railroad in the 1870s. The last mine to 

open was the mine at Ames in 1941. Mines closed as they were worked out, and were still closing 

well after the period of peak occupation on New River. When Sewell closed in 1888, the whole 

town was moved to Clifftop. Kaymoor Number Two closed in 1922, but Kaymoor Number One 

operated until 1962. Between 1942 and 1967, mines closed at Claremont, Fire Creek, Stone Cliff, 

Minden, Elverton, Sprague, Nuttallburg, Whipple, Summerlee, Brooklyn, Garden Ground, 

Fayette Station, Carlisle, and Terry. After Ames opened, there were no new mines nearby for 

miners to work in, but the introduction of the automobile had already made it possible for miners 

to live and work in different places. 

For many people living in the region then, “post-coal” names a strange scenario. The 

natural resources, the minerals and timber, are owned by the same corporations that owned them 

a century ago. Technological advancements have made these corporations independent of the 

local work force. With so few coal miners, the industry becomes somehow less visible, as do the 

communities. Yet the past is so dominant in the images of industrial history offered to park 

visitors and whitewater guests that it contributes to the impression that the communities 

associated with the landscapes of the gorge are gone. 
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Figure 40. The empty safe remaining at the site of the former Brooklyn Company Store. 

WHAT BECAME OF THE COMMUNITIES?

The census figures for these districts, from 1870 to 1960 show the rapid appearance and 

disappearance of place names, and register a pattern of growth and subsequent decline expressed 

in the official historical narrative. But the overall pattern of decline indicated in the figures is not 

as dramatic as it appears when viewing the New River Gorge in isolation from the plateaus as the 

space in which the history of industrialization is illustrated. The populations themselves have not 

in fact disappeared: many who live in developments and towns around the perimeters of the park 

either grew up in communities in the Gorge or are descended from people who worked there. 

In some instances it appears that communities were relocated as units. Some companies 

managed the relocation of families. Kaymoor Bottom emptied out into Kaymoor Top; Nuttallburg 

was moved to Clifftop; Duneden moved the Concho families to Terry. In other cases, real estate 

enterprises (some of them apparently reincarnated mining companies) built tracts of housing on 
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110 

the plateau. Homeseekers built Harlem Heights, which became a home for many of the black 

coalminers moving out of Minden. A man named Green bought the land at Greentown with the 

intention of parceling it out to black families. In other cases, the coal companies simply sold the 

houses to miners. This is why there are people living in Brooklyn, Rock Lick, Minden, Terry, 

Thayer, Price Hill, Scarbro, Whipple, Carlisle, and so forth. Some families were able to move 

back to their farms. Some of the original families are said to have sold their houses to people who 

had never lived in the Gorge before. 

 

1

 In the late 19th century, speculation about who the moundbuilders were led the Smithsonian to sponsor 

archeological investigations at Fort Ancient and the Bluestone Reservoir. Archeologist Ralph Solecki 

concludes that while the Fort Ancient and Bluestone Reservoir sites show evidence of occupation by 

related pre-historic aboriginal groups, it is not possible to relate the aboriginal groups to the historic groups 

known to traverse the area, including Cherokee, Siouan, Iroquois and Algonquian tribal groups, who used 

the upper New River Valley as a path across the Alleghenies (Solecki 1949: 420). Such trails, linking 

Virginia with Kentucky and Ohio, also formed early routes of access for European settlers, who in settling 

Crump’s Bottom emulated the prehistoric location of a gateway to the region just south of present-day 

Hinton (Solecki 1949: 322). Because this was a known Warpath, a number of forts were built there as well 

by ancestors of many who presently live in the region. 

2

 The massacre and captivity and escape of Mary Ingles is the topic of James Alexander Thom’s novel 

Follow the River. 
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CHAPTER THREE: THE TRANSITION FROM INDUSTRIAL 

CAPITALISM TO TRAVEL CAPITALISM 

BETWEEN THE TIME OF COAL AND THE TIME OF THE NATIONAL RIVER 

The demise of the coal industry in the New River Gorge formed a cataclysmic rupture for 

communities, but it was not the first such rupture. The saying, “They kicked us out of Scotland, 

they kicked us out of Ireland, they kicked us out of Pennsylvania, and when we got to West 

Virginia, we said, By God, we’re not leaving here,” encapsulates both a historical process and a 

will to survive culturally, and implies a set of strategies for such survival. This survival depends 

on the stability of an institution that transcends the present generation, locating people within a 

social body with a shared past and future. Supporting a distinctive land and kinship-based society 

and economy, the community forestland drained by the headwaters of the Kanawha River forms 

such an institution. In the region’s present transition from industrial capitalism to travel 

capitalism we see once again a redefinition of corporate identities in relation to the land. 

Of special interest in historical discourse is the use of first person collective pronouns 

“we” and “us,” as in the following discussion of how after the demise of coal in the 1960s, the 

New River and the company-owned lands continued to serve communities as they had during the 

time of coal: 

Interview with consultants from Edmond and Terry: 

MH: So there was a period between when the coal companies emptied out and 

the park service 

FP: Quite a long period, yeah. 

MH: It became sort of an area that people used a lot 

FP: Yeah, we used to go down and stay in the old abandoned houses. 

GL: Yeah. Locals used this area a lot before the park got here. They started 

putting restrictions on what they could do. We used to camp in the old 

houses, have fires outside, do anything you want to. We used to have a 

lot of that. 
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112 

FP: Coal companies didn’t police it – they didn’t put any restrictions on it. 

They were interested in the timber and coal. They didn’t care if you 

hunted or fished or camped. 

The use of the word “we” in these interviews points to an identity issue, raised also in an 

encounter witnessed by Tom Carroll when he accompanied a consultant into the park. As the 

consultant stopped to pick up a piece of dead wood, an NPS law enforcement officer drove by, 

stopped, and challenged the man picking up the wood. The officer told the man he could only 

pick up wood if it was on the road. “So,” said the man, seeking clarification, “If it’s in the road, 

it’s ours, and if not, it’s yours?” 

The incident illustrates the local classification of the Park Service as “not us.” The 

historical framework for relating to the Park Service is drawn from the history of relating to 

absentee landlords and landholding companies, which own close to 80% of the land in three of 

the counties surrounding the parks (see Table 10). 

Table 10. Land Holding Company Acreages by County 

 Fayette Nicholas Raleigh Totals 

Total acreage 426,560 362,092 390,496 1,179,248 

Holding co. acreage 251,031 247,980 271,979 770,990 

Chessie 44,064 60,905 79,215 184,184 

Westvaco 11,211 60,392 71,603 

Westmoreland Coal Co 9,555 48,091 57,646 

Rowland Land Company 54,180 54,180 

NW Railway Co 22,693 26,304 48,997 

John Nuttall Est. 35,951 35,951 

Eastern Associated Coal 34,544 34,544 

Berwind 27,115 1,398 28,513 

Georgia Pacific 11,833 13,972 25,705 

Pittston Company 780 22,000 22,780 

Piney Coking Coal & Land 24,143 21,143 

Bethlehem Steel 16,700 16,700 

Tioga Lumber 16,594 16,594 

Southern Land Co. 16,060 16,060 

Black-Mist Fuel 12,610 12,610 

Cherry River Coal & Coke 11,400 11,400 

Flynn Coal & Lumber 10,500 10,500 

Kanawha Gauley Coal & Coke 10,352 10,352 

Allied Chemical 7,422 2,808 10,230 

Clearfield Bituminous 10,200 10,200 

Wilcox Industries, Inc 10,162 10,162 

Imperial Colliery 10,063 10,063 

Federal Coal Corp 9,015 9,015 

J.L. Beury Estate 8,700 8,700 
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 Fayette Nicholas Raleigh Totals 

Union Carbide 8,500 8,500 

McCreery Coal Land 7,460 7,460 

American Electric Power 4,025 4,025 

Amherst Coal Company 3,692 3,692 

Charleston National Bank 3,623 3,623 

Consolidation Coal 2,138 1,138 

The Land-Based Livelihood of Kin in the Time of Travel Capitalism 

Like the coal industry, the tourist industry is tied to fluctuations in the world economy. 

The land and kinship-based livelihood of kin that supported people through the boom and bust 

cycles of the extractive industry continues to form a hedge against economic crisis during 

downturns that affect tourism. The question for this study is whether the land and kinship based 

economy continues as something truly land-based and if so, how is it anchored in the land and 

renewable resources of the New and Gauley River basins? In some ways, the problem for this 

ethnography, which is “who are the traditionally associated communities and where and how do 

they express themselves?” is the problem with which communities themselves grapple daily: 

How can we hold ourselves together when we are scattered in so many places? Resisting 

displacement has become a salient cultural imperative. A consultant for the 1991 American 

Folklife Center field survey talked about how moonshining enabled him to stay in the region in 

the 1960s when everyone else was leaving. Many families who hold onto places in the New and 

Gauley River basins express a striking commitment to place as one that requires living on lower 

incomes, and is far more rewarding than the larger paychecks that come with having to live away 

for many years. 

An institution in its own right, the homeplace emerges out of a pattern in which children 

move somewhere nearby the parents, whose home becomes “the homeplace” for grandchildren. 

“Homeplace” generally refers to the place where the grandparents and/or generations before them 

lived. It is possible for different generations of a family to have different homeplaces, which 

become a significant destination for families attending reunions. Reunions and homeplaces 

continue as expressions of a cultural formation that Ron Eller calls “familism.” 
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The Economy of Barter and Borrow and the Concept of the Commons 

In a practice of piecing together available resources, the livelihood of kin uses extended 

networks of family and property opportunistically to fill in gaps that arise when people are laid 

off or need to migrate elsewhere for work or become sick or elderly or fall behind in paying rent 

or utilities. A love of family and the land is related to an enthusiasm for growing things in order 

to sustain family and community. These feelings are reinforced in churches through the biblical 

metaphor of husbandry, the loving care for the land (Titon 1988). We met many people who help 

elderly neighbors to plow and plant a patch of earth, and who grow enough produce to supply 

some to those who cannot garden. In Glen Jean, Ellis Ross farms the bottomland on Dunloop 

Creek that his grandfather purchased around the turn of the 19th century, giving away most of 

what he raises. 

Figure 41. Chuck and Maxine Ross, harvesting produce from their garden on Dunloop Creek, in 

Glen Jean, which Chuck’s grandfather started.
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Figure 42. Newspaper article about Maxine Ross, Glen Jean resident, who was the first black 

woman coal miner in the state. 

Diversifying activities is one key. Tom Carroll points out that Leroy Harrell has done this, 

distributing his eggs into three different baskets: a store, a fifty-acre farm, and the army. The 

military continues to play a role in this patchwork. West Virginia, for instance, lost more soldiers 

per capita in the Vietnam War than any other state. How many from the New River and Gauley 

River Basins have died in the wars, from the Revolutionary War to the Iraq War, including the 

Mine Wars? The land-based skills that have developed over generations play an important role in 

this patchwork, which offers an indigenous model that combines cultural conservation, resource 

stewardship, and sustainable livelihoods. 

Division of labor is another another key. It is important to note that the distribution of 

knowledge and memory is not uniform, that it relates to the distribution of the population across a 

landscape that is itself highly differentiated. The knowledge distributed among river people 

around Hinton could be very different from the knowledge distributed among communities in the 
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116 

upland agricultural areas and on the plateaus around the lower New River. And for each tributary 

there will be some people who are very knowledgeable about different aspects of history, culture 

and ecology. Examples of this will be considered in the New River section. 

There is also a voluntary distribution of labor involved in maintaining this system, and 

therefore the knowledge required for participation is differentially distributed as well. Not 

everyone has the knowledge or capacity to build a john boat or batteau, find ginseng, or make a 

basket, recite genealogy, tend a garden, preserve produce, set a trotline, or get a job with a coal or 

chemical company or teach high school or college or drive a bus. But people seem to know where 

to go to find someone who does. This distribution of labor and knowledge can give an impression 

of fragmentation, but the system seems to be self-correcting up to a point, and what seem to be 

cultural discontinuities or ruptures can turn out to be on closer inspection innovative ways of 

keeping the system alive. 

Finally there is a particular concept of and practice of the commons. The practice of the 

commons in southern West Virginia relies on a concept of property that may be endemic to the 

Central Appalachian coal region, and which may be quite strange to non-West Virginians. 

Elizabeth Watson, a woman who worked for Jon Dragan in the 60s, then worked for the first Park 

Superintendant, Jim Carrico, and now is the postal carrier for Kaymoor, Cunard, and Brooklyn, 

commented on her initial surprise at what seemed to her a curious local concept of property. She 

moved from Northern Indiana, where she said property was strictly divided up and parceled out, 

and to go on the property of another without explicit permission is trespassing. But here, she 

noticed, people seem to move freely across the property of others, in apparent accord with what 

seems to be an unspoken agreement. “It’s logical when you think about it,” she told me. “But it 

took me ten years to grasp the concept of property held around here.” The concept treats 

landscape as a commons through which people can travel to get to resources needed for survival, 

but the commons has also been a fluctuating and negotiable social and cultural institution which 

articulated with the absentee landholding property system in southern West Virginia. 

In Raleigh, Fayette, and Nicholas Counties, close to 80% of the land is controlled by 

absentee landholding companies (see Table 10). This pattern does not exist in Summers County, 

which is more like Monroe County in the continuity of its land use. Barbara Rasmussen observes 
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117 

that, although Monroe County looked with envy on the development of neighboring coalfield 

counties, it is likely to fare better in the future because of the control it has maintained over its 

resource base (Rasmussen 1994). 

As the successor to and neighbor of a number of absentee landholding companies, the 

Park is implicated in the future of this commons. This does not mean that the park should open up 

its resources to local harvesters, but that it might exercise leadership in identifying and 

ameliorating the conditions that lead to the loss of the forest commons. The question of how 

much people would rely on resources found in the National Parks where there are no legal 

barriers is difficult to answer. Even outside the park, such practices as subsistence gardening and 

harvesting of NTFPs for domestic use are barely monitored. The statistics maintained by the West 

Virginia Bureau of Employment do not pick up the people who are caught in a pattern of circular 

migration that is this century’s version of the farmers who worked in the mines only until they 

had the cash they needed. Participation rates (the number of employable people who work) in 

2002 for the counties surrounding the park are as follows: 

Fayette: 46.7 

Nicholas: 51.4 

Raleigh: 57 

Summers: 42.7 

What these figures do not register are the ways in which, and the extent to which, people may 

incorporate part-time employment into a patchwork of diversified survival strategies. 

Within the land-based kinship system, while some members of an extended family may 

work full-time nearby or out-of-state, others are taking care of elderly and children, raising fruits, 

vegetables, and livestock for sale and home consumption, producing crafts for sale, working 

seasonally for the tourist industry, and swapping favors and work. Practices that rely on access to 

forests and rivers, such as hunting, gathering, and fishing, figure as part of this land-based kinship 

system. Neither gardens, which are particularly productive in this system, nor non-timber forest 

products are considered in the reports put out by the Department of Agriculture. 

 

The point here is that the reliance on renewable resources such as those contained in the 

park should be viewed in the context of the land and kinship-based, partly monetized economy of 
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118 

barter and borrow that distinguishes this region culturally, socially, and economically. Because 

land and family are so intertwined that is impossible to separate them in conversation with people, 

the land with which people are familiar becomes a resource not only for physical reproduction, 

but for cultural reproduction. The tending and harvesting of public resources is, traditionally, and 

ideally, tempered by a sense of social obligation to family and community. 

Indeed, the sense of connection created through participation in the community forest and 

river persisted beyond the time of coal and well into the time of the National Rivers. That part of 

the community’s identity remained stable, and is reflected in the following comments: 

“Some people call us Southerners, but I don’t think of myself as Southern. Or 

Northern. I just live here on the Allegheny Plateau. It’s different from either 

section.” 

“My people were here before industry and they got along just fine. And the 

people here behind us will get along just fine, and we won’t be tied to a coal 

economy.” 

“I worked for the railroad for a while, started on steam engines. But I think of 

myself in terms of the river. The railroad is secondary.” 

“I’ve worked in construction all my life, but really I consider myself a 

ginsenger.” 

“They’re taking our dignity by destroying our forest.” 

“Johnny was married to the river.” 

In the “post-coal” era, the New River has taken on a heightened identity as public space 

for coalfield communities, uniquely grounding a collectivity related through ancestors who 

worked in the Gorge and on the surrounding plateau region. From new homes on the plateaus and 

in the surrounding mountains, as well as from homes and from camps on the riverside, people still 

used the resources of the river and surrounding forestland as they had when living in the gorge, 

up until park legislation expressly prohibited such activities. 

The following graphic of a regional seasonal round represents the diversity of options 

supported by the mixed mesophytic community forest and watershed (see Figure 43). 
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Figure 43. The seasonal round of the mixed mesophytic community forest and watershed. (Source: 

Center for Folklore and Ethnography, University of Pennsylvania; adapted from original 

for American Folklife Center, Library of Congress, based on field sketches and 

interviews by Mary Hufford) 

In interviews with some of our consultants on the New and Gauley Rivers, we tested a 

model of the seasonal round developed in interviews with residents on Coal River. This graphic 

required only slight modifications to reflect the practices afforded by proximity to the New River. 

This proximity has allowed for greater participation in the amenities of a deeper and wider river, 

as well as participation in the travel capitalism that has developed on New River, but not on Coal 

River. 
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120 

In the following sections on the New and Gauley Rivers, we consider the practices that 

make up the seasonal round. We look at how these culturally renewing activities structure 

participation in a multi-generational time frame and related places on the landscape. The seasonal 

round is a vital means of producing and reproducing locality and populating it with local subjects, 

and New River, as Dave Milam told Tom Carroll, is the key. 
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CHAPTER FOUR: ETHNOGRAPHIC RESOURCES OF THE 

NEW RIVER GORGE NATIONAL RIVER 

By Mary Hufford and Thomas Carroll 

INTRODUCTION

“Everyone went to the River.” 

“The River is the key.” – Dave Milam

During this study we interviewed people in the following communities along the New 

River: Hinton, Meadow Creek, Ramp, Layland, Meadow Bridge, Beury Mountain, Highland 

Mountain, Danese, Thayer, Thurmond, Terry, Prince, Quinnimont, Grandview, Shady Springs, 

Beckley, Minden, Scarbro, Fayetteville, Oak Hill, Kaymoor, Cunard, Edmond, Winona, 

Nuttallburg, Ramsey, Lansing, Rock Lick, Glen Jean, Dewitt, Brooklyn, and Ansted. Our 

interviews and documentation took us into vicinities drained by every major tributary in the New 

River Basin. In our interviews we explored: 

• family and community history; 

• present and historical land-use patterns and relationships to forest, mountains, 

streams and rivers; 

• local ecological perceptions; 

• practices of gardening, hunting, camping, fishing, gathering, worshipping, traditional 

crafts and forms of recreation, home-building and home-making, and other aspects of 

life in the region; 

• the impact of the New River Gorge National River on access to resources 

fundamental to continuing local participation in the community forest and watershed. 

Whenever possible, we accepted offers for guided tours of portions of the park that our 

consultants wanted to show us, and we made photographs of traditional uses in the present. 

The northern and southern portions of the New River are strikingly different in character, 

a difference that relates to sharp contrasts in geological make up, and the resulting differences in 
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122 

the ways in which these areas were settled and developed. The New River Gorge developed 

differently from the areas around the Greenbrier and the Gauley Rivers because the gorge itself 

inhibited the standard pattern of settlement at the mouths of tributaries. People settled the 

headwaters of the New River tributaries many decades before industrialists created coal towns in 

the gorge. Some descendants of settlers moved into coal towns in the gorge and migrated out of 

the gorge back to mountain farms, or into towns and new developments on the plateau. 

The coal industry radically disrupted local patterns of land use. It turned a transnational 

rural farming population into an industrial work force, and then eliminated most of the jobs, 

triggering massive outmigration of workers in the mid-20th century. During the industrial period, 

coal towns became crucibles of cultural encounter among European immigrants and mountain 

populations. The communities surrounding New River have maintained ties to land and family in 

the face of persistent diaspora. In the following pages we explore the role played by the resources 

of the National Parks in contemporary community life, as well as some of ways in which National 

Park policies and regulations have made traditional access more difficult. 

HINTON AND FAYETTEVILLE: GATEWAY COMMUNITIES

Hinton 

With the exception of Jumping Branch, the region centered on Hinton has no significant 

deposits of coal. Therefore, as seems to be the case around some of the older Meadow River 

communities, the old land grant families and their descendants have retained some control over 

the way the region developed. A number of consultants with whom Tom Carroll spoke expressed 

a desire to make more of Hinton’s historic claim to the position of gateway to the region. Located 

just north of Warford (near Crump’s Bottom and Indian Creek) Hinton is a site that has, since 

prehistoric times, provided access to points north and west. Having grown up around the earliest 

settlement in the region (at the confluence of the Greenbrier and the New), and having developed 

into a city in relation to the railroad that connected Richmond with Cincinnati, Hinton has 

historically served as a gateway to the New River. Hinton pivots between the sites of the oldest 

European settlement on the Upper New, the Greenbrier and the Bluestone, and the sites that 

opened up on the plateaus along the Lower New following the battle of Point Pleasant. 
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Figure 44. Detail of New River North and surrounding study area. (Produced by Darryl Depencier 

for the Center for Folklore and Ethnography, University of Pennsylvania) 
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Figure 45. Detail of New River South and surrounding study area. (Produced by Darryl Depencier 

for the Center for Folklore and Ethnography, University of Pennsylvania) 
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125 

Hinton is still the town center for many of the old mountain farming communities of 

Summers County and western Greenbrier County, including Chestnut Mountain, Hump Mountain, 

and Keeney’s Mountain. These communities are more remote than the upland agricultural 

communities that grew up along the Giles, Fayette, and Kanawha Turnpike to the west of New 

River, and the Midland Trail to the east. A deep and rich sense of historic participation in these 

landscapes suffuses the conversations in places like Proctor Kirk’s restaurant on the Bluestone 

River. 

But while the mountains form an important backdrop to life in the region, the river is in 

many ways the most public space, functioning much as the plaza or town square does in more 

urban settings. The river is where people go to see others and to be seen themselves. Participation 

in the river and in fishing informs, as one man told Tom Carroll, a lingua franca around here that 

elsewhere is the function of talk about sports. This man’s mother always asked, “How’s the 

river?” If you grow up on the river, you love it, he told Carrroll. “It breaks your heart to move 

off.” Hence the proliferation of fishing camps along the river. Tracking the status of resources is 

the function of talk in settings up and down the New, Gauley, and Greenbrier Rivers. Bait hatches 

in creeks in a particular sequence. “Indian Creek’s in,” someone will announce in Kirk’s. Such 

talk is a social obligation. “Someone must have cut that walnut tree down,” commented one 

proprietor. “I haven’t heard anyone mention it lately. 

Participation in an annual round of fishing and bait gathering also informs a keen 

sensitivity to river ecologies in the southern district. People registered concern over the 

ecologically disastrous effects of the Bluestone Dam, and expressed hope that the upper end of 

the river could be developed as a tourist destination for low adrenalin (family) boating excursions, 

which the calmer water would support. 

Fayetteville 

The striking difference between the southern and northern districts of the New begins 

roughly around the place where bateau riders historically tied up their boats, at the foot of Batoff 

Mountain. Batoff Mountain, according to a number of consultants, got its name from this 

association with bateaus, and from which Batoff is supposedly derived. It is at this point, where 

the waters of Laurel Creek and Piney Creek empty into the New, that the intensive development 

of the Lower Gorge began. While there are other towns in this region (Beckley, Mount Hope, 
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126 

Oak Hill, Meadow Bridge) the undisputed gateway for tourists appears to be Fayetteville, at the 

northern point of the Gorge. While there are distinct historical and cultural sedimentations in the 

town of Fayetteville, it is dominated in the summer months by the whitewater rafting and highadrenalin adventurers, which are concentrated around the northern end of the Gorge, and their 

guests. While for communities around Hinton, access to the tourist market is an issue, for 

communities around Fayetteville, access to the river itself is the crisis, for people who feel 

displaced by the whitewater industry. Many of these people either live in the coal towns (Thayer, 

Brooklyn, Terry, etc) or used to live there, or are descended from people who lived there. There 

are also, in this region, descendants of coal operators, and of the Amherst County planters. A 

dismissive attitude toward subsistence lifeways still informs environmental decision-making. One 

descendant of a coal operator from Fayetteville commented that the people who feel so displaced 

were trespassing to begin with, and that the best thing to do is to document their traditions and 

display them at Canyon Rim. 

Thus, while Hinton reflects on the sort of identity it wants to project to visitors, at the 

other end of the park the challenge will be to undo the identity that misreads communities and 

their environment. This identity problem needs to be compassionately addressed. In the historical 

narratives that we gathered, it becomes clear that what appears to the uninitiated park visitor to be 

vacant space is part of a cultural landscape that extends beyond the boundaries of the park. We 

suggest that membership in the communities that participate in the historical landscapes of the 

New River Basin and its tributaries is developed through daily association and practice, and that 

access to the river is vital to those associations and practices. 

THE LOGIC OF CULTURAL RENEWAL ON NEW RIVER

The vernacular architecture found in the region around the lower gorge powerfully 

symbolizes a logic of cultural renewal at play in communities around the national rivers. In the 

1991–92 folklife survey of the New River Gorge, folklorist Karen Hudson identified the diversity 

of materials used to express traditional architectural attitudes as a distinguishing expression of the 

region’s unique history. Homes and outbuildings combining cinder block, brickrete, red dog, and 

wood and stone from dismantled log dwellings manifest the continuing dialogue between 
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traditional ideas and historical developments, and the innovative use of materials at hand as the 

medium of expression (Hudson, 1993). 

Figure 46. Home built of red dog blocks. Façade has been covered in permastone with a brick 

addition. Mount Hope, WV. (Photo by Karen Hudson. Source: American Folklife Center, 

Library of Congress) 

Figure 47. Cinderblock warmhouse with stone foundation. Salem-Gatewood Road, Oak Hill, WV. 

(Photo by Karen Hudson. Source: American Folklife Center, Library of Congress) 
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128 

Making space meaningful is a vigorous practice, and essential in a place that has had to 

strain so much history through so little time. Retrieving fragments from a way of life that is 

always changing and working them into new wholes is a source of satisfaction: the bricks from 

the Mount Hope bottling plant fashioned into a fireplace in a refurbished company home in Price 

Hill; the paw pole ladder used by miners ascending and descending between Nuttall bottom and 

Nuttal top reworked into a playground structure; the bells from the demolished mission churches 

at St. Anthony’s, St. Casimir’s, and St. Joseph’s enshrined in a monument to European 

immigrants. 

Figure 48. Jubilee Bells, a memorial honoring ethnic Catholic mission churches in Kilsyth, Scarbro, 

and Minden. 
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The mosaic tile flooring of the bank of Winona reframed by the free market economy of 

Anna’s Country Crafts (see Figure 50). 

Figure 49. The mosaic tile floor of the Winona National Bank, now an outdoor patio at Anna’s 

Country Crafts, Winona, WV. 

The concept of “bricolage,” from the french bricoleur, handyman, is useful in thinking 

about the logic that coaxes a second life out of things that have been worn out or used up in a first 

life, the logic we see in quilting or auto repair work. What bricolage does for space, the seasonal 

round does for time. Participating in an annual round of sprouting greens and mushrooms, 

ripening fruits and nuts, hatching bait and fish, plowing, planting, harvesting, canning, and 

seasons for game, family reunions, and life cycle events, people locate themselves within a larger 

social collective and its history. Each practice in the seasonal round composes an environment for 

this collective. 
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Table 11. Seasonal Round of Activities on New and Gauley Rivers 

Activity Type and 

Location 

Spring Summer Fall Winter 

Gardens [S] Plowing and 

planting (onions, 

greens, peas, 

potatoes, sweet 

potatoes, corn, 

beans, tomatoes) 

Canning Canning, drying 

beans, corn shucking, 

molasses and apple 

butter making, 

digging and storing 

potatoes, clearing 

gardens 

Winter 

cover and 

fallow 

Gathering (domestic) 

[M, MHS, T/C, S, T/R] 

Gather maple sap 

to make syrup, hunt 

“molly moochers” 

(morels), make 

sassafras tea 

Pick wild berries 

(strawberries, red 

mulberries, 

blackberries, wild 

grapes, raspberries, 

huckleberries, 

elderberries, currants, 

groundberries, 

wineberries) 

Gather wild fruits 

(paw-paw, 

persimmon) 

Split wood, 

cut 

Christmas 

trees 

Dig wild greens 

(ramps, poke, 

woolen britches, 

dock, Shawnee 

lettuce*, lamb’s 

tongue) 

 Gather nuts 

(hickory, 

beech, 

butternut*, 

chestnut*, 

walnut, 

hazelnut*, 

chinquapin) 

Gathering (commercial)

[M, MHS, T/C, F/B, T/R] 

 Moss, ninebark, 

yellowroot, bloodroot, 

mayapple, 

hellgrammites, Virginia 

snakeroot, Indian 

turnip, princess pine 

Ginseng Sumac, 

witch hazel, 

sassafras 

 Bait (minnows, 

nightcrawlers, lizards, 

chubs, softshells) 

 

Community events 

[S, M, R] 

Ramp festivals Camping Family, town, and 

church reunions 

Tend graves Ridgetop and 

riverside cookouts 

 Fish fries 

 Baptisms and 

weddings 

Fishing 

[T/C, R] 

Bass spawning in 

creeks 

Hellgrammites (two 

hatches) 

 

Hunting 

[M, MHS] 

Spring gobblers Grouse, groundhog, 

opossum, wild turkey, 

raccoon, boars 

Squirrels Deer, bear 

Seasonal commercial 

work 

[M, R, S, T/R] 

 Rafting, rock climbing Skiing 

 Tourist services (bus 

driving, food service, 

sales, etc.) 

 

Year-round work 

[M, MHS, S, T/R} 

Construction, mining, logging, teaching, healthcare, services, self-employment 
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Key to Locations: 

M – Mountaintop 

MHS – Mixed Hardwood Slopes 

T/C – Tributaries/Creeks 

F/B – Floodplains/beaches 

R – River 

S – Settlements, including old orchards and cemeteries 

T/R – Trails/roadsides 

We hear people saying that the community forest and watershed enables communion with 

ancestors who did the same things, neighbors who will want to know what you caught, and hope 

for descendants who might be able to as well. Caring for the community forest and watershed is a 

way of expressing respect for ancestors and neighbors, and a gift for descendants. 

Gardening 

David Allen Corbin’s observation that gardens helped keep southern West Virginia nonunion longer than other regions is resonant with Eugene Genovese’s insights about slave gardens, 

which kept open the possibility of independence. Subsistence vegetable gardening is widespread 

in southern West Virginia. Women continue to can and freeze large amounts of produce which 

feed their families throughout the winters. Canned goods are abundantly stored in basements and 

cold cellars, and are offered for sale at gift shops during tourist season. This kind of activity is not 

accounted for in federal statistics on crop production. 

Figure 50. Canned goods and potatoes stored in a root cellar on Dry Creek. (Photo by Lyntha Eiler. 

Source: American Folklife Center, Library of Congress) 
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How does gardening relate to the National Rivers? First, it was historically practiced in 

the gorge, and throughout park property. A man we interviewed in Thurmond said that it was not 

possible to garden in Thurmond, but that people who wanted to garden would walk over to Stone 

Cliff and grow what they needed. Sammy Plumley leases land from a utility company for his 

garden. Murray Shuff, who grew up in Stone Cliff, spoke of the “river garden” and the “mountain 

garden.” The river garden was where people grew their lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers, radishes, 

spinach and so forth. The mountain garden (known as a newground in other parts of the 

mountains) was where people would grow their “heavy vegetables” – their corn, beans, and 

squash. 

Second, gardening relates to a widespread love of growing things that we have 

encountered in our conversations with people. People grow flowers as well as vegetables, and 

there is a consistent practice of transplanting native species to gardens around the home, 

including ramps, ginseng, dogwoods trees, trilliums and other wildflowers, paw paws, 

persimmons, red mulberries, walnuts and other species of nuts. Some of these transplants are 

simply for the joy of having the plants in order to watch them grow. William Wolfe, a ginseng 

dealer in Oak Hill, grows ginseng in order to teach neophyte diggers what it looks like. Another 

man told Tom Carroll, “I have some ginseng growing back there. I grow it and I leave it alone. 

They’re the most beautiful stalks in the world. The squirrels eat the seeds.” 

Figure 51. A bed of “virtually wild” ginseng in Summers County. (Photo by Karen Hudson. Source: 

American Folklife Center, Library of Congress) 
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Pauline Sexton, of Kaymoor, recalled bringing things home from the woods just to plant 

them and watch them grow. This is not related to the taste for the wild, but to the love of making 

things grow. The privet hedge around her home was made out of starts from a neighbor’s hedge, 

when the neighbor trimmed it. The hedge then becomes an expression of her relationship to her 

neighbor, a resource for making meaning. 

Third, harvesting around the seasons is a practice that integrates cultivated produce with 

woods grown produce: before harvesting spring crops, one can harvest wild greens; between the 

time of harvesting spring onions and lettuce and the time of harvesting beans, one can pick wild 

berries; after harvesting winter squash, one can still harvest walnuts. 

Figure 52. Privet hedge cultivated by Pauline Sexton from clippings from the hedge of a neighbor, 

Kaymoor Top. 

Figure 53. Pauline Sexton, Kaymoor, W.V. 
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Figure 54. Catty Redden, Layland, with ramps, May 2005. 

Leo Vento’s parents came to Scarbro from Krakaw via Vermont. Their name was Wojtal, 

but local officials here changed it to one that sounded more Italian. In his interview with Ken 

Sullivan in the 1980s, he recalled that as a child he used to pick blackberries and chestnuts and 

chincapins. “You know what a chincapin is?” he asked Sullivan. “We used to know where all of 

those were.” 

Figure 55. Dorothy Grubb, gathering chincapins in the grove planted near her home on Highland 

Mountain. 
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Fourth, the old mountain gardens were often cultivated until the soil “wore out.” Then the 

farmer might plant fruit trees and “let it go” for a period of forest fallowing. The apple orchards 

that grew in the woods were often pruned and harvested by members of the community. People 

with whom we spoke speculated that apple trees might still be present at Concho, and talked 

about the apple orchards that grew near McKendree Hospital. Such orchards are ecological signs 

of the possibility of morel mushrooms (also known as “molly moochers,” “moodgins,” and 

“merkles”), which tend to proliferate around the roots of old apple trees that have not been 

sprayed with fungicide. Fifth, the harvesting of produce from gardens and woods sustains an 

informal economy and system of supporting the elderly and others who cannot get out to garden 

or gather, or making one’s resources available to neighbors and kin with less land. 

Figure 56. Mary Lou Walker, Jayne Payne, and Pee Wee Walker, apple picking on Beury Mountain. 

Gathering 

“They lived out of the woods. They lived on herbs, they lived on roots, they lived 

on wild game, fish from the river, that was their menu back in them days, really. 

They still do it.” – John Wimmer, formerly of Elverton, now from Gatewood. 

The list of seventy-six medicinal plants compiled by Maury and Fontaine in the 19th

century includes a number of items that people continue to gather for sale and domestic use, but 

made no mention of other forest products that people gather and consume in the present, 

including black walnuts, ramps, morel mushrooms, chincapins, huckleberries, and paw paws. 

Native American artifacts like nutting stones and the presence of permanent nut cracking places 

in some households on Coal River offer a glimpse of the time-depth of the community forest. The 
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southern counties of West Virginia still lead the state in the production of wild ginseng, in this 

order: McDowell, Wyoming, Logan, Mingo, Boone, Raleigh, Kanawha, Greenbrier, and Fayette 

(Whipkey 2006). 

People gather for both commercial and domestic use. We have spoken with four dealers 

in the region: Dave Cook, of New River Trading Company, William Wolfe, of Oak Hill, Tim 

Thomas, of Rainelle, and Randy Halstead, of Charleston. Ginseng is the most valuable of the 

gatherables, and is tracked by the state DNR, in accordance with CITES. There are very few 

people who would be considered full-time gatherers. Most go for particular products like ginseng, 

moss, and/or goldenseal. 

 

Figure 57. Moss drying on a line along Route 41. (Photo by Lyntha Scott Eiler. Source: American 

Folklife Center, Library of Congress) 

Tim Thomas, of Appalachian Herbs in Rainelle, distinguishes three kinds of people who 

harvest non-timber forest products (NTFPS) commercially: recreational harvesters, income 

augmenters, and subsistence harvesters. The recreational harvester is someone who is out in the 

woods for pleasure, on a Saturday or a Sunday, and happens to see some ginseng or moss or 

something else he knows he can sell, and gathers enough to pay for his trip. For the “income 

augmenter,” harvesting NTFPS provides a second paycheck or an income during lay-offs. They 

need the money, and they have traditionally relied on land owned by the government or industry 

in order to make ends meet during these times. Tim Thomas commented to Tom Carroll: 

“I like those guys. They have an extremely good work ethic. They bring you a 

good product. They’re real fair in their dealings, you know you don’t have to 

watch em, that kind of thing, but they do that to augment their own employment, 
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137 

maybe their unemployment has run out – but usually it’s to augment while 

they’re looking for another job.” 

Thomas described the third group, the necessity harvesters, as: 

“those folks who work when they want to, the number of hours they want to, in 

order to get whatever it is that they want, but it is a main source of income to 

those folks.... They like this because they can get up at ten o’clock, they can hit 

the woods at 11:30, they can get back in about 4 o’clock, and they can make fifty 

or seventy-five bucks, and they’re perfectly happy doing that. And that’s enough 

for them.” 

In many cases, the streams form routes of access to hunting and gathering areas. Ernest 

Jones, of Brooklyn, observed that when the coal mines were operating, women would get out and 

gather wild greens, and miners would go ginsenging and looking for may apple and yellow root 

in the long, deep hollows like Pennbrooke and Rush Run. Catty Redden, of Layland, has 

harvested a wide variety of materials, including moss (which grows, she said, in deep shady 

places; stone root, which grows everywhere along the road, as well as yellow root (goldenseal), 

and may apples). 

Gathering for domestic use is widespread, and has been touched on under gardening. 

Many people we spoke with gather at least one thing from the woods – ramps, molly moochers, 

blackberries, raspberries, huckleberries, paw paws, persimmons, beech nuts, walnuts (both white 

and black), hazelnuts, and chincapins. 

Figure 58. Nutting stones, used from pre-historic times down to the present. Artifacts collected on 

Clear Fork, including nutting stone, with walnut. (Photo by Lyntha Scott Eiler. Source: 

American Folklife Center, Library of Congress) 
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Figure 59. Herman Williams, on Clear Fork, cracking walnuts on a permanent cinderblock 

“nutting stone,” with his grandson, 1995. (Photo by Lyntha Scott Eiler. Source: 

American Folklife Center, Library of Congress) 

Fishing 

“I know every rock in that river.” Sammy Plumley, Prince 

Most of our consultants professed a passion for fishing, at least at some time during their 

lives. Some reported fishing in particular places, related to where they lived or their parents and 

grandparents lived. A consultant in Oak Hill reported taking his granddaughter fishing at Fayette 

Station where he grew up, until the whitewater business made it too difficult. Pauline Sexton, of 

Kaymoor, liked to fish at Cotton Hill. A woman in a bar in Minden said she still fishes every day 

at Cunard. People in Winona told us they like to go to the Water Tank, also known as Nuttallburg 

Hole. Sammy’s Rock was given as the name of another place to fish. Paul Bennett, of Summerlee, 

said he took his grandson fishing on Laurel Creek, Loop Creek, and Wolf Creek. “I know every 

rock on that river,” he said. Ernie Jones, of Brooklyn, said that the best fishing is at Red Ash, 

Rush Run, and Beury, where the longest eddy is. Red Ash Island, according to several consultants, 

is a good place to catch small mouth bass. 
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Frank Green said his best fishing happens at Ansted. Sammy Plumley cited Thurmond as 

a good place to fish. Sandstone Falls is said to be a good place for channel cats, Meadow Creek is 

stocked with trout, but native trout are known to swim in the right hand fork of Law Creek, and in 

Buffalo Creek at Thayer. Other creeks are distinguished as places that bass will swim upstream to 

spawn. “Not this creek,” said Harold Duncan, alluding to Dunloop. “It’s too steep. But they will 

swim up Piney Creek.” 

Figure 60. Camp Sunnyside, on New River below Fayette Station. (Photo by Lyntha Scott Eiler. 

Source: American Folklife Center, Library of Congress) 

Trot-lines 

There is a rich cultural tradition of fishing at Hinton all along the river north and south, 

(as well as on the Gauley) and the traditional method of fishing is with trot-lines. Charles Wood, 

proprietor of Wood’s Memorial Clock Museum on Temple Street in Hinton, said that he never 

fished by any other method. “We fished trot-lines,” he told me. “Never a rod and pole [sic]. To sit 

on the side of the river with a fishing pole, waiting for them to bite, that never appealed to me at 

all.” Instead, trot-line fishing demands active engagement with the line, and attention to 

conditions on the river. Among a younger generation, Jack Hellems is a prominent trot-line 

fisherman. “I do trot-line fishing,” he told me. “Not many people do it, but I prefer it. You have 

multiple chances all night long. You have to check them by law at least once every 24 hours. 

Some check at night.” 
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According to Jack Hellems, trot-line fishing requires patience and skill. “If you fish with 

a trot-line, it’s an art, and it improves as you learn more. And the river changes and you have to 

change ways. Because everything changes. So you have to adjust.” Mr. Hellems learned to fish 

mainly from two local men who were master fishermen. “Jim Williams taught me to trot-line 

fish,” Mr. Hellems said. “I also learned a lot from Harry Gore. But they’re two different methods. 

Harry was laid back, but with Jim, it was work. I do it halfway now. I fish by myself, because 

nobody’s interested, interested in that kind of fishing.” Mr. Hellems explained that conditions 

were radically different when his teacher fished. “Mr. Williams was born on the river, came to 

Hinton on a raft. He fished to survive. And there was no class system, not like now. Everybody 

was at a disadvantage, people trying to survive... people subsisted.” 

Most people we talked with about trot-line fishing indicated that relatively few people 

engage in it now. Meadow Creek was cited as a place where one might find a trotline. There is 

also a local tradition of scheduling fishing activity according to the signs of the zodiac, still in use 

among some people. Charles Wood, proprietor of the Wood Memorial Clock Museum on Temple 

Street in Hinton, first brought it to our attention. Mr. Wood is 86 years old, grew up on the river 

and operated the family ferry at Bull Falls, before leaving to work out of state for many years. 

The practice is based on the concept of the signs of the zodiac, and a relationship perceived 

between the signs, the moon, and the human body. The moon appears to move through the zodiac, 

as it rises or passes through each sign during the course of its monthly orbit. Meanwhile, each 

sign is associated with a part of the human body – one sign with the head, one with the neck, and 

so on. According to Mr. Wood, it is possible to catch fish only when the moon rises in the signs 

which are associated with the area between the shoulders and the waist, never when the moon is 

in the signs associated with the parts of the body below the waist. Jack Hellems also uses this 

method to schedule his fishing trips. “The old man who taught me how to fish, you fish by the 

moon sign. Zodiac sign of the moon. The Almanac tells when it changes. But after fishing for 

years, I can tell when to start. And it will be close. But I write them down... It’s the progression 

through the body of the sign, from head to feet. [From] the ending of the full moon....” 

Fishing guide services are one way in which local knowledge of the river is recycled in 

the context of tourism. 
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Figure 61. Mike Menarchik, of Gone Fishing Guide Service, landing a smallmouth bass. (Photo by 

Lyntha Scott Eiler. Source: American Folklife Center, Library of Congress) 

Figure 62. Frank Hartkenstein, operator of Frank’s Bait Shop in Dewitt, shows off a customer’s 

catch. 

Bait Catching 

GW: When I was a kid, in my early teens, I used to catch fish bait. You always 

knew when miners vacation was, so you go out and catch all the bait you 

could, then when they come down here to camp, you’d make some 

money selling them some bait, you know. 

MH: The kids would sell bait to the miners? 

GW: Oh yeah, that’s the way you made your spending money. 

Interview with Gene and Dreama Wilfong, Meadow Creek 
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“There’s a place called ‘The Island’, a place where the creek had filled in. We 

used to go there, turn rocks over, catch bait. Grampus and hellgrammites. And 

every fifth rock you got a water snake. Or we’d seine for minnows, or go to 

Sandstone. Little Falls, there was a swimming hole, up the hollow. Also, where 

the water tank was there was a natural soap dish in there. Had a baptizing in there 

a few years ago.” – Hobart Adkins 

Artificial lures are increasingly popular now, but our consultants almost universally 

agreed that live bait is a superior means of catching fish. Charles Wood always fished with live 

bait. “Minnows were good bait. We went to Lick Creek for them. Also grampus, hellgrammites. 

We went to Warford [for them]. Shallow water with a current. Turned the rocks over, got bait.” 

Proctor Kirk agreed, but noted that “It bothers me that people don’t go out and dig their own bait 

anymore...Want to go fishing? You go to the river bank, pick a set of shoals, pick hellgrammites, 

start fishing. So people like W.C. [Parker] set up...got a [bait] license...But the fish bait business 

is not what it used to be. We fished with live bait, now people use plastic stuff. They have it down 

to a science [the lure makers]. But live bait’s better if you can get it. There was a tannery at 

Marlinton, they tanned hides, and it left a residue in the water, that provided feed for crayfish. So 

there was a big supply. Softshells grew and shed constantly because they molted regularly 

because of the food source. So crawfish are hard shell, but softshells molt when feed is in good 

supply...But the EPA went in, and made them put cleanup systems in. So now the softshells are 

exceedingly difficult to come by. So now only two people catch them.” According to Mr. Kirk, 

the bait dealers keep their identities secret, and provide bait to established customers only. 

Related to this, bait catchers develop relationships with particular dealers, for whom they 

agree to work exclusively. Catty Redden, of Layland, is one of the steady suppliers for Frank 

Hartkenstein, in Dewitt. There is a distinctive seasonal round for gathering bait, in which 

knowledge of the system of streams plays a role. Ms. Redden gets bait at Army Camp, Terry, and 

Quinnimont Bottom (at the train station) and then when it’s “water time” or “Alderson time” she 

goes to Alderson. Through her seasonal round, places in the Gorge are linked to places outside. 

On the river she looks for hellgrammites on the bank, “anywhere there’s a rock bar.” She calls 

those “throw off spots,” where the river curves and the water throws the hellgrammites into the 

rock bar. For lizards she goes to the creeks. “I make enough at bait to get me through the whole 

year,” she commented. 
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Figure 63. Helgrammites, also known as “grampus” (the larva of the Dobson fly), in a bucket with 

moss at Frank’s Bail Shop in Dewitt, WV. 

Camping 

MH: So you’d like to see public campgrounds, on the beaches – 

GW: As close to the river as possible 

MH: As close to the river as possible – is that something that people have 

always liked to do, go down and camp on the river? 

GW: Yeah – that sort of originated from the coal mining days, the old coal 

mining days. The coal miners didn’t make much money. They didn’t go 

to Myrtle Beach (laughs). They went to their local riverbank and threw 

out the camp, and the family, and that’s where they stayed for a couple of 

weeks, you know. 

MH: And out of that grew a real custom that people cherish because it’s-- 

GW: Yeah, you grew up with it 

Interview with Gene and Dreama Wilfong, Meadow Creek 

Longhunters and trappers who made their way into the region ahead of the settlers set up 

camps. Johnson’s Branch, on the Loop Creek of the Kanawha, was first named Gunnoe’s Camp 

Branch after a longhunter named Daniel Gunnoe who set up camp there. Arbuckle Creek is 

named for the Arbuckle brothers who did the same there. What is referred to as the Army Camp 

was initially named Camp Prince, when the Corps of Engineers stayed there in the late 1950s. 

Other place names register the practice of setting up temporary quarters in order to accomplish a 

job: Sugar Camp, Board Camp, Farley’s Rooting Camp, or to escape into a different space: Camp 

Brookside and Camp Washington Carver. Many consultants recalled frequently camping on New 

River. During Miner’s Vacation, which was for one week each summer in June, miners would 
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144 

take their families to the river and camp. They would set trotlines, build campfires, and stay on 

the river. “A long time ago,” explained Chuck Ross, of Glen Jean, “That river was the beach for 

the people here. They couldn’t afford to get out. Like the miner’s vacation: you’d camp out on the 

beach down there.” 

Pauline Sexton, of Kaymoor recalled that fishing and camping went together. “We used 

to go fishing down New River a lot, because we used to go down Fayette Station and go down 

there, and we’d camp down there over the weekend. We’d go right down on the river bank. Down 

Fayette Station.” 

The practice was not limited to miners. Lucille Springfield, of Meadow Bridge, recalled 

coming with her family out of the hollow at Ramp to go down and camp along the river. “They 

would go down there a good bit. My brother would hitch hike or walk with some friends and 

spend the weekend there camping on the river and fish, and would come back Sunday afternoon. 

We didn’t own a car until just before we left West Virginia. We grew up without a car, and 

occasionally the whole family would go and camp there. We’d go to Sandstone and walk up the 

railroad tracks to the falls up there, and sometimes we’d take a tent. Mostly we’d camp under the 

shelter of the trees or the rocks or whatever. It was for pleasure.” 

Maury and Fontaine added an interesting note about camping in their 1876 inventory of 

West Virginia resources: 

“In the southern counties a great deal of ginseng is collected. With many of the 

people of the back counties, the collecting of this plant forms an important 

business. In Lincoln, Logan, &c., entire families in summer leave their homes 

and camp out during the whole season. They, with their dogs and guns, make 

long journeys in search of the plant, going even into the mountains of remote 

eastern counties, such as Pocahontas, &c. Many tons of this material are thus 

gathered, whose ultimate destination is China.” 

Indeed, on older maps of the region, places are marked with names such as “Farley’s 

Rooting Camp,” “Seng Camp Creek,” or “Board Camp Hollow.” And the practice of camping has 

antecedents in the region that pre-date European settlement, as archeological findings around rock 

“shelters” attest. 
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Camping continues along the river. Some people have houses that extended families use 

throughout the year, at Terry, Stone Cliff, and along the Greenbrier. Others have just owned 

camping spots that they go to and erect tents, and still others have simply gone to the river and 

pitched their tent where they could find a spot. One place where this was permitted was at the 

Army Camp across from Terry. People who still live in Terry and people who used to live in 

Terry recalled setting up at the Army Camp. They reported that the Park’s injunction against 

camping and cooking out on the beach has stopped the group from using the area. 

While people in Boone and Wyoming Counties, and in western Raleigh County continue 

to go camping during ginsenging season, camping out on New River appears to be more 

important as a means of taking a break from familiar surroundings while living, at least in part, 

off of the resources of woods or river. It provides people who no longer live near each other with 

an opportunity to set up a temporary neighborhood, for a week at a time, in order to fish, talk, 

swim, boat, and relax. “Nothing tasted any better than fried potatoes and stuff like that cooked on 

the riverbank,” said Dreama Wilfong, who lives not far from the river in Meadow Creek. She and 

her husband Gene and their children would leave Meadow Creek and go to camp at a place near 

Sandstone called “the Drift.” But people from elsewhere, they noted, would come and camp on 

the beach at Meadow Creek. 

MH: So when you wanted to camp, you’d go somewhere else? 

GW: (laughing) Oh yeah! Get away from here. The whole point of camping’s 

getting away from home. 

DW: But we’d take enough food to last us a few days, and you ate good on the 

riverbank. 

Figure 64. Cookout on the beach, New River. (Photo by Lyntha Eiler. Source: American Folklife 

Center, Library of Congress) 
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Fishing Camps and Family Cabins 

Whether in a temporary structure like a tent, or in a permanent cabin, getting as close to 

the river as possible is a stated value. The cabins set up along the river in various places are part 

of a tradition that, according to Jimmy Costa, predates the Second World War. 

The fishing camps now. Interesting enough, the tradition seems to have been, it’s 

prior to WWII -- there are pole log cabins that were built in the 30s up through 

here. There again, it was somebody who had some money, and needed a getaway 

place, people who lived in Beckley, Charleston, a lot of people on this bottom 

here are retirees from Union Carbide, and Monsanto and all, and they were 

buying places up here in the 50s, and so it was a little getaway from the city, 

build a camp, put a boat down on the river, and their families would come up on 

the weekends and holidays. Now it’s the grandchildren are coming up with their 

families. 

Between Fayette Station and Hawk’s Nest there are a number of named fishing camps, which 

should be documented. Fishing camps, camping spots, and family cabins along the river all 

deserve in-depth study. 

Figure 65. Fishing camp along New River. (Photo by Lyntha Eiler. Source: American Folklife 

Center, Library of Congress) 
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147 

Not all family cabins are near the river. During a homecoming at the New Life Baptist 

Church in Shady Spring, we pored over a map showing the Abraham-Pluto-Irish Mountain 

vicinity of the Park. Clyde and Lois Pack told us about the cabin they have on park property near 

Bass Lake, where they used to camp every weekend with their children. Lois explained: 

“Just use it for hunting and camping, and whatever. The access at the time we 

bought it was very poor, and we went down through below Sandstone Falls and 

we cut back up across the mountain and we hauled in dishes and cabinets and 

beds, and then when we went camping, we would park across from Bass Lake 

and we had a logging trail that went back up on the mountain and the front of it 

was nothing but cliffs, so we had to bypass the cliffs and get up the house!” 

There are community leaders in Hinton who view the family camping tradition as a 

business opportunity, an asset to develop. W.C. Parker observed that: 

“The Greenbrier River, there are camps one right after another. People hit their 

camps, and it’s big for business. But I sometimes think that people here don’t 

appreciate that. Business people. My mother, her family has a camp on the 

Greenbrier. My sister has that. I got the island Bargers is like a small 

city...Barger Springs. Used to be a hotel there, now there’s camps for a mile and 

three quarters, side by side.” 

Figure 66. Bass Lake, “where the Indians camped.” (Photo by Terry Eiler. Source: American 

Folklife Center, Library of Congress) 
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Hunting 

HD: You know, everyone used to hunt – it was a major event 

LG: Years ago you were lucky to see an animal in the woods around here – 

they hunted everything just about to extinction. 

PF: But it was for protein – everybody here knows what was for supper – you 

didn’t get up in the morning and say, “Mom what are we having for 

supper?” because you knew you were going to have pinto beans – 

everybody liked to hunt groundhogs and squirrels, and we ate them. 

So important is hunting in West Virginia that schools are closed during deer week, the 

first week of December. Hunting is a way of participating in the mountains and their social 

worlds, and a mode of raising children who learn how to read and interpret aural and visual signs, 

and how to escape detection by animals without being confused with animals by other hunters. 

Young boys will often begin learning to hunt by the time they are eight years old by hunting for 

squirrels. 

Figure 67. Wesley Scarbro, watching for squirrels in a hickory grove, Rock Creek, WV. (Photo by 

Lyntha Eiler. Source: American Folklife Center, Library of Congress) 

Signs of the culture of hunting appear on the landscape and in talk throughout the year. In 

August merchants of some stores offer grains to plant to attract deer; in early fall one hears men 
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149 

in local coffee shops and bars counting the numbers of prongs they’ve seen on some of the bucks 

traveling through the woods. 

Figure 68. Sign advertising deer cane in August, near I-64. 

In December signs advertising the services of deer dressers appear in shop windows. 

Figure 69. Sign advertising deer processing in Shady Spring. 

Referring to territory along the Greenbrier River, where Marlin and Sewell first 

encamped, which the Shawnee defended so vigorously during the 18th century, Leonard Cales, of 

Ramp, commented, “That’s all good hunting country, all through there, plumb into Marlinton, 

and on up that way.” 
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Skills associated with hunting include rifle-making, bow and arrow making, dog training 

(plots, walkers, black and tans, beagles, feists), tracking, animal calling (squirrels, turkeys), 

taxidermy, deer dressing, food preparation, and land management. Waterways form routes of 

access and points of reference. Game reported includes coon, rabbit, bear, deer, squirrel (fox and 

gray, not the red squirrels, locally called ferry diddles), wild hogs, quail, turkey, and doves. 

Figure 70. Rev. Carter, retired from a career as a chef for the railroad, serving cherry pie for the 

Big Spring Hunt Club in 1992. (Photo by Lyntha Eiler. Source: American Folklife Center, 

Library of Congress) 

Figure 71. Rifle made by Mark Whitt of Shady Spring. (Photo by Lyntha Eiler. Source: American 

Folklife Center, Library of Congress) 

Popular places to hunt deer, squirrel, rabbit, grouse, and bear were mentioned during an 

interview with Greg Malcolm: 

“Beury Mountain here in our district, is a real popular hunting spot. During deer 

season that’s a favorite place for a lot of people to go.... Garden Ground’s good 
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too. Beury’s a pretty good sized area, and it’s just always been a good area for 

people to hunt.... River right around Cunard there’s what they call the Campbell 

Tract area, and a lot of people like to go in there to hunt. 

There is also a tendency for people to return to places where they hunted as children, 

taking their children and grandchildren to those places. People who lived in the coal towns spoke 

of hunting in those vicinities. Pauline Sexton used to go hunting with her husband for turkey on 

Long Point. 

“He hunted everywhere and he liked to turkey hunt, deer hunt, squirrel hunt. All 

that. Ginseng. He’d dig ginseng too. I went with him, I went with him hunting 

too. He would just go in these woods out Long Point. You know about Long 

Point, I guess. That’s a place where people can park and walk. And you can go 

all the way out. You can’t get down, cause it’s a cliff. It’s called Long Point.” 

Elders in the community drew our attention to cycles in the abundance and scarcity of 

game. Hope Lewis recalled that the deer were scarce when she was a child: 

In the early days, there weren’t any deer in this area. When I was a child, we 

never saw a wild deer, but now my husband, the last few years we were there, he 

had to put an electric fence up to keep them away from his apple trees and out of 

his strawberry patch. The fellow that bought my house said he came out once 

morning here while bak and said there was a big deer out there chomping his 

tulips, and he grabbed it by the horns, but he had to let it go. Said he slipped up 

on it. The deer, they’re really thick here now. Back then, we never saw a deer. 

People from earlier had hunted them out, killed them all for food. And then, of 

course they’ve come back now. They had the season closed on them for years, 

you weren’t allowed to hunt them...” 

Figure 72. Historic photo of Big Spring Hunt Club. Members travel from Fayette County to 

Virginia for the annual hunt during deer week. (Photographer unknown; copy photo by 

Lyntha Eiler. Source: American Folklife Center, Library of Congress) 
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Ellis Ross reflected on the difference in motivation for hunting now: 

“I think now people do it because they love to, but back when the mines were big 

and strong around here, people did it because that was a second source of a little 

income, and for food and stuff. And the same with hunting and trapping and stuff. 

Now people don’t do that.” 

Along Route 41, Signs for the Sewell and Beury Mountain Gun Clubs point to an issue 

that a number of consultants raised: that of the dwindling availability of places to hunt. 

Historically, coal company land has been treated as public land for hunting, but recently leased 

for use by private clubs. One man we spoke with has leased a hundred and fifteen acres which he 

makes available to people who pay $300 a year to hunt there. 

Figure 73. Sign for Sewell Mountain Hunting Club, Route 41. 

Because these posted lands are adjacent to the park, some who would like to hunt stay 

away fearing that they will inadvertently trespass. The situation contributes to a sense of 

enclosure: 

“Twenty years ago,” a man from Gatewood told Tom Carroll, “Anything across 

that bridge, I could run over there and hunt it, because the land company owned 

it. But you go from that (New River) bridge now, plumb on through to Layland 

and all up through there, posted. Posted, everything is posted ... Come up to 

Rainelle, all up in there it’s posted all the way. Yeah, there’s a little bit out there 

around Clifftop I think you can hunt, but you don’t know. You know they’ve got 

the park in there and they’ve got hunting clubs in there. It’s another one of them 

situations, you’re almost afraid to go because you don’t know who’s owns what 

and what owns who. And if you get caught on posted property where these 

hunting clubs have got it, they can actually fine you. I mean, they can get a game 
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warden come over there and fine you.... For trespassing. So you’re really scared 

you know, you just don’t get to hunt with a ease of mind of “hey, I’m within my 

rights, here, I’ve bought my license and all.” Yet you sit there and wonder, “now 

am I on their property or, state property, or whose property am I on?” But twenty 

years ago it didn’t matter whose property it was on, because it was open, 

everybody got to hunt.” 

“So,” replied Tom Carroll. “It’s a combination of things, it’s not just that the park 

is there, it’s also that you’ve got all this posted land, you’ve got the hunting clubs. 

You don’t know anymore where to go or what’s open.” 

“You’re not at ease unless you go up into some of these northern counties.” 

There are strong feelings about the changing property regime, in a region where people 

have depended on access to corporate holdings for generations. Tim Thomas explained to Tom 

Carroll the historically recent inconsistencies and pressures that are so upsetting to people: 

“Most of my material comes off of timber company lands or mine company lands, 

because timber companies, mine companies own most of the land. I suspect that 

if you went and researched all the deeds that they’d hold more than 50 percent. 

Huge tracts, cause Plum Creek, which used to be Georgia Pacific, has 71 

thousand acres right around here that they control. Westvaco, belongs to Mead, 

several hundred thousand acres that they control. Now Westvaco’s real good 

about permitting you in, and Georgia-Pacific used to be. But they’ve gotten to the 

point that it’s very difficult to get on their property now because they lease it to 

hunt clubs, and they allow hunt clubs to control trespass on their property. 

Westvaco leases the same way, but they don’t allow the hunt club to control 

trespass. They say, “Trespass is our business. Not the hunt club’s business.” We 

lease the land to the hunt club and they have exclusive hunting rights or exclusive 

hunting and fishing rights. But they do not control the land for any other purpose. 

Georgia-Pacific allows clubs to control trespass and it has caused a lot of friction. 

I had a guy in my office the other day who got run out of a piece of property by a 

hunt club. And I guess maybe because we have always had access to all this land 

– and we know it isn’t ours. We know it belongs to Georgia Pacific, we know it 

belongs to Westvaco, we know it belongs to Turley Mines, Wide Mining, but 

we’ve always had access to it, until the last five to ten years, this hunt club 

business has really taken off and really boomed and huge tracts of it are now 

closed off and you can’t get to it, it’s gated, it’s closed off, and that has caused a 

lot of friction. The gates really bother a lot of people – I guess I know why the 

timber companies do it, but they’ll build a new road, they’ll go in and they’ll 

harvest out timber and then they’ll gate that road off so nobody can get in there. 

The hunters get really ticked about that, and every year in the fall they lose a lot 

of gates, because guys’ll go and hook a big chain around the damn gatepost, get a 

big four-wheel drive truck and jerk the damn gate out. It just pisses them off 

because the guy’s forty years old and he has hunted back up in there – wherever 

“there” is – for most of his life. Now all of a sudden he can’t go there any more.” 
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As the accompanying map shows, more than fifty percent of the non-public land in the 

counties adjacent to the park is controlled by large landholding companies. 

Figure 74. Map showing concentration of landownership in West Virginia counties. (Source: Miller 

n.d.) 

Swimming and Boating 

“We just would always put our bathing suit on, a pair of old shoes and grab a 

towel and go to the river! -- Jane Graham Lawson (Oral History) 

‘When I grew up, we didn’t have swimming pools, we swam in the river. We 

lived in the river. And we explored, got in a boat and went out to the islands. The 

really good swimming hole was where the Pizza Hut is now’. – Proctor Kirk 

“They did some swimming in the river. Most of them were born and raised on 

that river and they were just like fish, they could swim! Those boys, I’ve seen 

them get out in boats and row upstream. Now that is a trick, against that current. 

And they’d do it just for the fun of it.” – Mildred Henry. 

“Boatbuilding, that’s a tie-in to the past. The wooden boat’s really important and 

a tie to the heritage and doing it in a certain way. Do it the hard way...I have 

three wooden boats. Built two john-boats, and Melvin Plumly built the other 

one.” – Jack Hellems 
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The transcriptions are shot through with references to swimming and boating on New 

River, with boating done both commercially and for recreation. Swimming holes were identified 

in relation to particular tributaries and sand bars – the Blue Hole (in Mill Creek); a swimming 

hole up the hollow from Sandstone; there are sandbars at Stone Cliff and Thurmond (“where 

Wildwater puts in”) that people reported swimming at; Bellepoint is another place to swim, and 

also Avis, and Terry, where they still do Baptisms in the river. When asked whether he’d rafted 

the river, Ernie Jones of Brooklyn answered, “No, I’ve swum all over it... Just anywhere, from 

Thurmond down to here. Had swimming holes and a diving board. Swings, where you swing out 

and drop off into the river, on a rope and a tire. Up at Beury.” 

Commercial boat operation goes back, of course, to the first recorded settler on the Lower 

New, Peter Bowyer, who operated Bower’s Ferry. Other ferries in operation included Woods 

Ferry, Montgomery Ferry, Packs Ferry. As the population along the river grew, so did the number 

of known boat crossings. Hubert Carper, of Piney View, operated a ferry at McCreery. Ferries 

operated at Rush Run, Fire Creek, Beury, East Sewell, Brooklyn Bottom, and Keeney’s Creek as 

well. Cavalier mentions that Miles Manser came from Cincinnati and built boats with Elisha 

Williams at Kanawa Falls (1985:180). Andrew Avancini, of Thayer, recalled that as a boy he 

would ferry people across the river from Thayer to Bragg for 50 cents. 

Two kinds of boat have been built in the region, john boats and bateaus. During the 

industrial period, bateaus were used to deliver barrel staves and other goods from sawmills to 

points along the river. The Corps of Engineers dredged a series of sluices around the shoals to 

ease the passage of steamboats and bateaus. People refer to these locally as chutes, or notches: 

New River Chute, Greeney Chute, Steamboat Chute, and Barger’s Notch. In Hinton, Robin 

Crawford mentioned that his people were bateau people, and that he knows how to build bateaus. 

He discovered bateaumen in his ancestry when reviewing 19th century census records. The 

connection between black bateau drivers and New River goes back to the 18th century, when a 

flood destroyed the fleet of Rose canoes that were used by Amherst County tobacco planters to 

get their tobacco to market. Reconstituting the canoe fleet was made difficult because most of the 

riverside timber had been cut. Amherst County planters Anthony and Benjamin Rucker 

developed a boat out of sawn timber. Light-weight, double-ended, and flat-bottomed, this boat, 
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which became known as the James River Bateau, would glide over rocky shallows and could be 

pulled easily across sandy beaches. The boats were manned by freed blacks and by slaves, some 

of whom evidently took advantage of the opportunity to escape. 

Figure 75. Bateaux by W.C. Parker, soaking near the beach at Avis. 

There is still a strong tradition of boatbuilding in the Hinton area, as conversations with 

Richey Smith and W.C. Parker indicate. Mr. Smith talked about the local bateau tradition and 

said he was having one built by people in town. People who have built boats, with whom Tom 

Carroll talked, included Melvin Plumley, Proctor Kirk, W.C. Parker, and Jack Hellems. The johnboat, an important, widely distributed vernacular form, is the most important vernacular boat 

form in the New River region. Among its many virtues, it is very stable in the water (poles rather 

than oars are the traditional method of propulsion, which requires that the boater stand in the 

boat), is relatively easy to build out of locally available woods, and is well adapted to conditions 

in local rivers. 

Proctor Kirk’s father built john-boats, according to Mr. Kirk: 

“My father built the best john-boat I ever been in. When we came down the New 

River all the way from North Carolina we examined homemade john-boats. We 

saw john-boats everywhere, and nobody knew how to build a john-boat as well 

as we build them in Hinton. There’s some secrets to them. They’re flat on both 

ends, made for poling, not oars. I have one I made myself. But I adapted it, used 

plywood. The bottoms were of poplar, 18-inch gunnels, 17-feet long. You can’t 

get that kind of wood anymore. Melvin [Plumly] built the boat the old way. Johnboats were built out of green wood, they put oakum in the gaps between the 

boards, put it in the water, and it would swell, be water-tight...Flat deck on either 
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side. You sit in the middle and pole or oar, there’s no hydraulic [resistance], 

because of the flat ends. So the boats really move. We didn’t have motors. 

Everybody oared or poled. Very few people if any can pole a boat [now]. I do. I 

have the only wooden boat in this part of the county. I don’t like aluminum boats. 

You drop a split-shot, a sinker, it pops on the bottom, scares the fish.” 

Wood boats are a deeply traditional form, subject, perhaps, to relatively little variation. 

Melvin Plumly observed of his father, Amos, that “Dad never varied his boats, but there’s a lot of 

interest in them now. There’s very few wooden boats on the river. You can walk the banks from 

[North Carolina] to here and see very few of ‘em. And the fish... wooden boats make a natural 

sound, like a log. Metal boats ping, scare the fish.” 

This description of the john-boat evokes the strong cultural identification local people 

have regarding it. Nearly everyone at the Hinton end of the river seemed to mention it, although 

instances of the wooden john-boat are relatively rare these days, given the preponderance of 

aluminum boats in use on the river now. It is also interesting to note that Mr. Kirk made an 

informal survey of john-boats along the New River, and found those at Hinton to be superior. 

Whether correct or not, it is indicative not only of a sort of local pride, but also of faith in the 

form itself. It probably is the best boat form, the most reliable and useful, given the local 

conditions and the local culture, whether people actually prefer oaring these boats or did so out of 

necessity. It’s possible that oaring is an imperative, given widespread conditions of shallow water 

and the preponderance of shoals on the New River, especially upriver from Hinton. And of course, 

shallows and shoals are where the fish are, because as Jack Hellems observed, “fish relate to 

structure,” and so do people. The genius of humans, for better or worse, is that we can integrate 

structures and create synergies. The john-boat and the method of using it is, given the locale, a 

fine example of synergy. 

When asked about boat builders in Hinton, Mr. Kirk answered, “Melvin Plumly. His 

father was Amos Plumly. Melvin Plumly is the boat builder. There was a Steamboat Chute in the 

river, a channel up to the Virginia line. You can see it. They ran bateaus upriver, would pole them 

up, walked alongside of the boat. The farmers sent produce down on them. Melvin built a bateau, 

a replica. His father also built boats.” It is interesting to note how talk of boats is integrated with 

talk of the river and of goods and commerce. All authentic cultural artifacts, at least those 
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associated with a tradition, operate within an apparently seamless system of form and 

representation, are richly configured within a system of cross-references. 

There was boatbuilding elsewhere on New River as well. Paul Bennett, of Summerlee, 

made john boats – which he says are square ended– and dories, out of lumber scavenged from 

houses being torn down. He used a john boat to get to school at Brooklyn. Growing up, he lived 

in Cunard, Brooklyn, Claremont, Keeney’s Creek, and Caperton. He began fishing at the age of 

four, and fished wherever he wanted to on New River. 

“I started fishin’ with a fellow up at Claremont, Henry McCormick. And I fished 

with him some. Of course there weren’t any spinner and reels back then. You 

fished with a string on a stick with a wooden boat, cut you a pole, then you used 

trot lines and throw lines.” 

Despite its continued use, the john-boat isn’t the predominant boat form on the New River these 

days, at least not in its wooden incarnation, but it may be scheduled for a comeback within the 

context of economic development planning. Prior to that, however, the john-boat had already 

made a jump from everyday use to representation in Hinton. According to Melvin Plumly, “I used 

john-boats when I was growing up. There were very few motors...Some had poles, people 

paddled or poled...Dad built Proctor Kirk’s john-boat. Proctor’s dad won it in a raffle. He had it 

at the restaurant. Dad built boats out of his head, no plans. Both ends are out of the water. The 

boat just skids on the water. This one was made out of pine. Dad was 86 when he died, built the 

boat two years before he died.” I asked why and how his father had gotten started building boats, 

and Mr. Plumly answered, “Dad was just there at Glade, had to go back and forth across the river. 

And they fished. But lots built their own boats. Lots at Brooklin [section of Hinton] built boats.” 

During an interview with him, Richey Smith voiced an intention to begin using the bateau to 

launch his programs of historical tours and family rafting trips. 

Note that the story of the john-boat can be pieced together from fragmentary statements 

by a variety of individuals. This, too, is a part of the truth-value of vernacular culture: it tends to 

reside and to emerge in and through interconnected, collective individuals, rather than through a 

single individual. Seeking local “truth” in this way is not a matter of testing and cross-referencing 

data, but in recognizing and establishing the forms and boundaries of knowledge and their 

locations and distribution within a particular group. This, too, is something which the Park 
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Service might keep in mind in working with local communities, especially those communities 

which the park service defines as “historically associated” with what is now the national park. 

Given this, it is clear that understanding and communication between and among disparate 

entities (between bureaucratic institutions and cultural communities for example) is a 

developmental process, commitment to which can form the basis of a rewarding and productive 

relationship. 

Amos Plumly has become the local archetype of the boat builder, especially within the 

context of the current economic development process, and while it is true that other people may 

be able to build john-boats, their work is probably undertaken with a different sort of purpose 

than that which motivated Amos Plumly. Amos was “just there at Glade.” Builders today instead 

are trying to recover or even to reinvent the form. 

The other obvious form of boating, whitewater rafting, also is playing an important role 

as a source of employment of the sort that articulates with the patchwork economic structure 

described above. People who drive busses during the school year drive busses for the whitewater 

companies in the summer. Students who are home for the summer from college, or local youth 

who work at winter resorts, find employment with the rafting companies as well, as guides or as 

support for related services. 

Figure 76. Coming into Fayette Station. (Photo by Terry Eiler. Source: American Folklife Center, 

Library of Congress) 
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Whitewater rafting is an important industry, certainly here to stay, but exploring the 

question of how to articulate it with the older traditions of boatbuilding, fishing, boating, and 

swimming on the river presents an opportunity for civic engagement. The traditions of boating 

and boatbuilding are sites where local perspectives on culture, economy, and ecology converge. 

Many other traditions offer similar sites. These visible outcroppings of local identity and culture 

are sites in which the park can begin the work of articulating the production of the national park 

with the local reproduction of community life. The park has begun this kind of engagement by 

supporting such local forms of cultural renewal as the bateau festival and the Plateau District 

Quilters. We will return to further possibilities in the concluding discussion and recommendations. 
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CHAPTER FIVE: ETHNOGRAPHIC RESOURCES OF THE 

GAULEY RIVER NATIONAL RECREATION AREA 

By Rita Moonsammy 

LR: We’re forgotten here. 

KR: Forgotten. 

RM: You’re forgotten? 

LR: We’re the northern most surviving little community in Fayette County, is 

what we are. Everybody else is done gone by the wayside. 

INTRODUCTION

By comparison with the New River region (Raleigh and central/southern portions of 

Fayette), the Gauley River region is less densely populated and the landscape less industrial. 

There are fewer hard roads and main highways. Because of the nature of the coal seams in the 

area, the river’s edge was not developed with coal towns as was that of the New River. Most 

settlement appears to be small towns that line main roads, such as Route 39. There are scant 

industrial remnants along these roads. Though timbering continues to be an important industry, it 

has been controlled such that the area is not visibly deforested. The main roads divert from the 

river’s edge past Swiss, reinforcing the impression that the river is isolated. During controlled 

water releases from the Summersville Dam, sections of the Gauley are turbulent and dangerous. 

Thus, the region may appear to the visitor’s eye to be “wild.” 

The narrative of the Gauley area provided by the 1994 NPS General Management Plan 

largely supports that view. It notes that “cultural resources” in the area are few because of the 

minimal remnants of Indian activity, and the paucity of important historic industrial and 

monumental remains on the landscape. Although the report affirms that timbering was 

historically important and continues to be important, it pins the notion of vitality on the coal 

industry, concluding that “The coal is gone, or nearly so. Most of the homes and mills have gone 
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162 

up in flames or rotted away. The trains run less frequently all the time. Trees shade the old 

foundations along the river. The stage is set for hikers, hunters, campers, boaters, anglers, and 

trappers to enjoy the Gauley” (p. 95). 

By reducing the “story” of the Gauley region to the story of the coal industry there, this 

narrative effectively erases the history and culture of the people in order to create a stage for 

tourist encounters with wilderness. It discounts the personal landscapes that are replete with 

cultural resources: historical and environmental sites, family and community networks, and 

occupational and recreational places. In the minds and narratives of residents, these phenomena 

populate and domesticate the “wild” landscape, rendering a revolving stage that carries past into 

present into future. As one resident put it, “I was born in one coal camp, and have lived three 

other times in coal camps, so I know about the coal camp situation. [But] I’m afraid that we might 

lean heavily on the coal [in interpreting the region], since there’s a lot in this area, but before 

1879 no one knew there was any coal here and there were still lots of people here.” 

Traditionally associated communities of the Gauley consist of people who live yearround in settlements in the Gauley region and who participate in a way of life that has historically 

produced a local landscape along the Gauley. Geographically, this area would approximately 

extend the Kanawha Falls to Summersville west-to-east, but the north-south boundaries are much 

more difficult to define. In practice, the communities that live among the hollows and mountains 

on both sides of the Gauley within that longitudinal area are traditionally implicated in the 

region’s culture. They participate in a way of life that has historically produced a local landscape 

along the Gauley and beyond. 

Figure 77. Path leading to Gauley River at Swiss. (Photo by Rita Moonsammy) 
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Figure 78. Detail of Gauley River and surrounding study area. (Produced by Darryl Depencier for 

the Center for Folklore and Ethnography, University of Pennsylvania) 
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In contrast to the New River area, the Gauley area has not received much attention in 

terms of cultural documentation. NPS documents include minimal information about the culture 

of the region. State archives hold documents on other topics that include some information about 

the Gauley area, but are not generally focused on documenting the culture. Individuals, historical 

societies, newspapers, and local libraries in the area also hold a variety of documents that could 

further illuminate the history and culture of the region. Some of the information assembled during 

the 1992 New River Folklife Survey also pertains to the Gauley. 

During this study, we interviewed people in the following communities along the Gauley: 

Gauley Bridge, Belva, Jodie, Swiss, Peter’s Creek, and Kessler’s Cross Lanes; and in 

communities that are oriented toward the Gauley, including Kanawha Falls, Glenn Ferris, Ansted, 

Russellville, and Summersville. We questioned them about family and community history, 

community values and cultural practices, occupational background, environmental knowledge, 

use, and perception. The traditional practices that we documented are numerous, and include 

family life and care, home making, home building, farming and gardening, hunting, gathering, 

fishing, camping, worshipping, recreating, and working, and many others. We also explored with 

our consultants the impact of the Gauley River National Recreation Area on access to the 

resources fundamental to continuing local participation in the historical landscape. 

In the historical narratives that we gathered, it becomes clear that what is visible to the 

uninitiated park visitor as vacant space is a part of a cultural landscape that extends beyond the 

boundaries of the park. During our research, we compiled a partial list of named landscape 

features that comprises a preliminary and partial typology of the cultural landscape forms that are 

integral to traditionally associated community life in the Gauley region. The terms we have used 

for these features are for the most part terms that our consultants use. Clarification of some of 

these terms is necessary here. By “historical” we mean the practices whereby communities 

identify themselves in relation to particular spaces in the recreational area and in relation not only 

to a past, but to a future. How, in other words, is continued access to a set of places and resources 

in the Gauley River National Recreation Area fundamental to the continuity of traditional 

community life? We suggest that membership in the communities that participate in the historical 

landscapes of the Gauley National Recreation Area is something that people develop through 

daily association and practice. 
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FAMILY, LAND, HOME, AND COMMUNITY

Although the Gauley River region, as understood for this survey, bears some 

demographic differences from the New River area (more rural, more agricultural), in the main it 

is part of the broader Southern Appalachian cultural region. Scholars and writers have identified 

core aspects of that region as family and land. Our research confirmed that these aspects of 

identity and culture are so thoroughly enmeshed that it is nearly impossible to separate out for 

discussion the topics of family, home, land, and community. The very character of the regional 

culture is land-based: traditions and lifestyle are rooted in the relationship of people to the natural 

resources. Families are identified by, and identify themselves by, their places -- cognitive and 

geographic -- on the land. They find their way socially and physically by that understanding, and 

maintain their lifeways through it. 

Family and Land 

This is in part because of the history of settlement of the region. Many families trace their 

ancestors to the early Scots-Irish and German settlers, some of whom came by way of Virginia 

after its earliest settlement. Other families came from adjacent areas such as Kentucky or 

southern Ohio two generations ago, or from other parts of West Virginia, or have lived in those 

areas for part of their lives and returned to the Gauley region. The families of most of the people 

that were interviewed have been in Fayette and Nicholas counties for at least several generations. 

The importance of family history is shown not only in the popularity of geneology 

collections, societies, and individual research, but also in day-to-day conversation, which helps to 

situate contemporary people and events in the larger history. Where one’s extended family 

members moved to, where they live now, and where they are buried, are all relevant to an 

individual’s sense of family membership. Some people also have documents detailing part of the 

history of their family in the area. (The Koontz family has a photocopied history, typewritten in 

the 50s by a family member.) Reunions are prevalent, and an important way of maintaining that 

knowledge across time and space. The following lengthy excerpt from an interview with a 

resident of Jodie exemplifies the importance of family and local history, as well as of the 

“homeplace,” which will be discussed further in a following section: 
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KR: And his father moved here from Virginia. My grandfather moved here 

way up in the fall of the year. And he walked from Virginia to here. 

RM: To this area? Jodie? 

KR: To this area. Yeah. And, in fact, he lived up the road, what we always 

called “Dogpatch.” 

RM: Dogpatch? 

KR: Yeah. The town had different names. Dogpatch was the little town up. 

This was Jodie, and around the other way was Ridge Creek. And the last 

little town, before you run off the blacktop, was called New Town, 

because it was the newest part of the community that was built. All these 

old houses are Jenny Lind, but New Town was framed. You know, 

studded up and all that. 

RM: And were they all built by coal companies? 

KR: Yep. All of them. 

RM: So, like – yours isn’t, is it? 

KR: Yeah – 

RM: This house is a coal company house? 

KR: This is a coal company house. Originally it’s four rooms. And it’s been 

added to over he years by my father and then I put new siding on it and 

all that. 

RM: So did you grow up in this house? 

KR: I grew up in this house. 

RM: That is great! 

KR: I lived around on the other end of town for about ten years. And when 

my mother passed away, we moved here to keep the homeplace going. 

So I sold my house there and moved around here. 

RM: Mmhm. This is the homeplace. 

KR: Yeah. 

RM: Why did your grandpa move up here? Coal mining? 

KR: Well, uh – mostly coal mining. He was a wheel wright. He set up grist 

mills. And he was also a blacksmith at the coal mines. And they moved 

up from Virginia. Most of my relatives, I ran my family history back to 

Europe and most of my family, once they came to the United States, 

lived, uh, from Maryland and Virginia, and one of my ancestors, moved 

to California, a little place called ‘Susansville’. And he was the only 

person that’s ever been the governor of two states at one time. Of 

California and of Nevada. And he built a little place in Susaville called 
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‘Roops Ford.’ It was twenty feet square and they used it to defend 

themselves against the Indians. 

RM: So, that same name – Roop. 

KR: Yeah. Roop. 

RM: And that’s an English name? 

KR: Well, uh, it was German, spelled ‘Rupe.’ 

RM: That’s what I was wondering. 

KR: And over time, they have changed the spelling too r-double-o-p. Which I 

tell people is just ‘poor’ spelled backwards. 

The family networks reach farther, however. Extended family members often live in 

other homes on the farm or in nearby towns, in some sense rendering the distinctions between 

towns moot, especially since most of those towns are unincorporated. Aunts, uncles, and 

grandparents help to care for children, such that many children have virtually two homes. Sherrie 

Koontz, for instance, makes sure her nephews, who live in her brother’s house on the same farm, 

get off to school every morning. On one farm, there were eight elderly relatives in the several 

homes on the property, all being watched over by the younger generation. Many households are 

multigenerational. Several grandmothers were taking care of their grandchildren while the parents 

commuted to work. Grown children, even after marriage, may live with parents until they can 

find or build a home nearby. (This was the case with a couple who eventually bought and moved 

a house so they could live in Swiss.) 

A narrative that looms large in the Gauley region and further illustrates the importance of 

the equation of family and land for current residents, as well as their apprehensions about the 

Park Services acquisition of land, is that of the town of Gad. Many of the people who were 

interviewed related the history of the building of the dam and its impact on the local culture and 

environment. An excerpt of one interview shows how closely residents equate historic homeplace 

and personal happiness. 

BS: But anyhow, they took the property from my dad, 76 acres, and they took 

some farms, ALL the farm, everything they owned, people owned. Had 

lived there all their lives and their grandparents had lived there all their 

lives. 

BeS: Tore up the communities without any thought about it. 
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BS: Nothing. The communities were gone. Two -- Gad and Sparks. But , 

anyhow, when they put the dam in, that money should have come to the 

people who lost their farms. I mean, they put a power plant in and 

Summersville immediately got a million dollars. Summersville didn’t 

own nothing down there. They didn’t own a thing. They called it the 

Summersville Dam because they didn’t want to call it the Gad Dam. 

(Laughter}) 

BeS: The could have called it Sparks. 

RM: That must have been like a tragedy for people, to lose their houses. 

BoS: Oh, sure it was! Oh, yeah. What really happened, what was really sad -- 

the old people, some of her relatives, had lived there all their lives. Their 

parents had lived there. They inherited the property. They never did find 

happiness. They came, they moved here and they’d buy property and 

they couldn’t -- they’d move somewhere else. They spent their lifetime, 

until they died, trying to find happiness. 

BeS: I imagine that Uncle Ed probably lost his mind as a result. And listen, 

Joe Copenhefer, too, Uncle Joe -- 

BoS: Ed Copenhefer. There’s several families that just never did find 

happiness. They’d go and try to --- well, the one bought where Alfred 

lives. One of them bought that. Ed Copenhefer. And then he sold that and 

moved somewhere else. They just couldn’t -- you know. They’d lived 

there all their life, you know. 

Ironically, some of the structures in Gad that were flooded when the dam was built are 

now thought to be serving as fish habitat. Several people mentioned a place in the Summersville 

Lake that they’ve named “Sunken Island” as an especially good fishing spot for certain species. 

In general, this is an example of how the dam and the changes it wrought are seen as a mixed 

blessing by residents of the Gauley area. 

Interaction with extended family is constant and important. Interviews nearly always 

included the arrival, departure, or phone call of a cousin, grandchild, child, friend, aunt, etc. This 

kind of daily involvement with the extended family is the cornerstone of community and a 

primary motive for residents to do whatever they can to remain in the area, including working 

different kinds of jobs, commuting to Charleston, or working even farther away and returning on 

weekends. The ability to rely on community members in times of need, as well as celebration, is 

seen as a key feature of life in these towns. 
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Daily involvement with family and community is also the “learning center” for the 

generations. Larry Roop insists that he will not leave his home on the river as long as he has 

grandchildren to come there. He maintains a trot line in his back yard so that he can teach the 

grandchildren that fishing method so it will not die out. Dennis McCutcheon said that he would 

maintain his homeplace, Pleasant Hill, so that his grandchildren and their children, even if they 

have to live somewhere other than West Virginia, will have their place to come back to. This is 

why many of the traditional practices that people in other regions regard as “lost” are in the 

Gauley very much alive. Domestic practices, in particular, are well maintained, even across 

gender lines. One mother proudly mentioned that her 11-year-old daughter already knows how to 

make biscuits, while several of the people interviewed served food that had been prepared by the 

husband. The Haines family built a little “quilting house” where Florence makes dozens of quilts, 

a practice that is also maintained in church groups and quilting guilds. Rugs are braided, furniture 

built, figures carved, flowers pressed. Even further, homes are built, with cousins helping to fell 

trees and raise walls. 

All aspects of food preparation, in line with the continuing practice of subsistence 

farming/gardening, are still widespread and support the family-centered lifestyle. Most 

agricultural families have for generations needed to supplement their income with cash from 

other jobs, so that subsistence farming has long been a part time endeavor. Today, the outside 

jobs may demand more time and labor, but the farming continues in smaller ways, in particular by 

having large gardens and fruit trees and by raising some animals for slaughter. Families that raise 

their own cattle may slaughter themselves in the fall, as in the past, or take the animal to a nearby 

processor. Some still cure their own hams and bacon; others process meat by canning. Nearly 

everyone, including retired couples who don’t have a need for the amount of produce they raise, 

has a garden. The numbers of jars of canned tomatoes, beans, corn, and berries, and accounts of 

family and friends to whom they were given, and how many were used at home during the course 

of a year, were recited repeatedly in interviews. The genealogies of seeds, some from relatives, 

others making their way from someone of Indian heritage to a neighbor, etc., are well known. 

Other traditional foodways practices widely noted are bee keeping/honey gathering, pickling, 

curing, preserving, and gathering greens, nuts, and berries. 
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Figure 79. Sam and Florence Haines, butchering a hog in Russellville. (Photo by Lyntha Eiler. 

Source: American Folklife Center, Library of Congress) 

Homes and Homeplaces 

The ties between family and land are most visibly demonstrated in homes. As mentioned 

above, many families still live on the original family homestead, sometimes in a building that 

may have been erected two generations earlier. Often, this structure has been altered considerably, 

usually in ways that historic preservationists would look askance at, but which local families 

regard as resourceful. As mentioned in an earlier excerpt, the Roop home in Jodie began as a 

Jenny Lind-style coal camp home on the edge of the river. Today, it appears to be a contemporary 

rancher with white siding, a garage, and a broad front porch. The kitchen and bathroom have been 

extensively remodeled. The owner grew up in the house and moved back into it from another 

house in Jodie after his mother died. What looks like an inexpensive, development-style rancher, 

is in fact the contemporary permutation of a working-class home that narrates the family history 

and it maintains a tie to a place that is key to the identity and culture of the occupants. 

Other families bemoan the loss of these buildings when they are unable to (or another 

family member neglects to) take care of them. When they build a new home, they may often 

incorporate elements of the homeplace into it to maintain the connection with the original 

homeplace. For instance, the dooryard of the Summers’ new home is partially surrounded by the 

stone foundation of the house that Bob grew up in. The hand-carved stone basin that was used for 

scalding slaughtered pigs sits amidst the heirloom daffodils that Beulah has cultivated in the 

garden. Another resident of the area used boards from her grandfather’s old barn to panel a room 
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171 

of her new home. Thus a building whose provenance does not appear to the historian to be of 

importance may in fact contain markers that tie it deeply into the family and community history. 

On the other hand, when the Haines family built their new home on the family homestead, they 

wanted it to be like the home that Sam had grown up in. Like the younger Koontz son, they felled 

the trees themselves and built the home with the help of family members to resemble the Jenny 

Lind style. 

By comparison, Page and Edith Koontz live with their daughter Sherrie in a farm house 

that began as a single-room dwelling nearly 60 years ago. The Koontz’s recall that when they 

married, they had only enough to build a single room as their home, but over the years, they were 

able to add room after room to raise their family. They are proud of what they’ve built. The house, 

located on the homestead that the early settlers of Swiss acquired, is literally a collection of their 

personal and family history. About an eighth of a mile from it, on the same side of the hill, is the 

home that Page grew up in. On the opposite side is a new home that the Koontz’s son built 

himself. 

The Koontz family has been approached by coal companies, rafting companies, and the 

National Park Service to sell their property. They are resolute in their determination to keep it. In 

Page’s view, the land is their freedom as well as their livelihood. “You know what? Anybody 

within hearing distance, if they start bothering us, we can tell them to get out of the way, but if 

you start selling something like that, you’d have everybody in here in a little bit. Some freedom’s 

worth a lot more than all the money they give you....Mom and Dad set me down here one time, 

and asked me if I wanted this farm. I said, ‘Sure. I want it, but I don’t know --- I’m going to have 

to do something different from what I’m doing.’ That’s before I got my tractor and that. Right 

about when I come out of the Army, I believe it was, wasn’t it? And he said, ‘Well,’ he said, ‘We 

been talking it over. We’re just going to give you a deed for it. It’s yours.’ He said, ‘If you take 

care of it, it’ll take care of you.’ And it has.” The land and its fruits are part of the independent 

lifestyle that has characterized the culture from its earliest days. 

Places that have remained in extended families for generations often acquire names, both 

formally and informally. Florence Haines chuckles at the fact that the mountain they live on is 

often referred to as “Haines Hill.” The McCutcheons named the 56 acre plot of the original 
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172 

homestead on which they live “Pleasant Hill.” Names are powerful historical markers. One 

couple told of their indignation with an attempt to change the name of Peter’s Creek Road. The 

story of Peter, the slave who first came to the area with the Morris family, and who was entrusted 

with watching over the property during his owner’s absence of a year, is an important legend in 

the local history. Changing the name would be diminishing the story of settlement that belongs 

not only to historians but to every individual who lives there. 

CEMETERIES AND CHURCHES

Though many families have sold part of their land, many have also bought other pieces of 

property and farmed it. The genealogies of these places are recalled and recited with the same 

importance as are the life cycles of family members. Family cemeteries help to maintain those 

geological genealogies. The Summerses narrated the history of their grandfather by referring to 

places on their land where he, his wives, and other family members are buried. Many times these 

plots are fenced and maintained; others are marked only in the memories of the narrators. Even 

when families move away, they often return to take care of the graves. Adam Brown spoke of a 

cemetery in Wyndal (a.k.a. Wendell) across the river from Belva where, despite the fact that the 

town was long ago deserted, a burial recently took place. 

Cemeteries sacralize the land, making it more powerful and personal. Churches do, as 

well. Many of the churches in the Gauley area are very old, and the Nicholas County Historic 

Landmark Commission has developed a brochure of the Lockwood Historic District to identify 

the churches and other historic structures. It indicates the age of the church, the names over time 

of the area in which it is located, and the style of architecture. Thus the churches have 

archeological value as well as community value. The predominant denominations of the older 

churches are Baptist and Methodist, but for most residents, the important thing is not which 

church one attends, but that one belongs to a church. Some churches are virtually extended family 

networks. Many people have attended the same church for their entire lives, despite where they 

have moved, so it becomes the site of life cycle memories. Norma Keith recalled that, for the few 

years she lived in Charleston rather than Swiss, she did not attend a church, so important was her 

connection to the Methodist Church in Swiss she attended most of her life. The environment is 
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173 

further incorporated in the sacred realm when baptisms are held in the river, a still-current 

practice at several of the churches in the area. 

Churches are often the site of reunions, bringing former residents from miles away. They 

are also important sources of social assistance, for church members pitch in to help the sick, 

elderly, and jobless. The church at Swiss is a signal example of how communities work to 

maintain the congregation as well as the building. The current structure was built by the 

congregation in the 20s. (The church itself is older). Although the church now has only about 

thirty regular congregants, they have worked over the years to refurbish and build onto the 

structure. The annual hot dog sale during Gauley season has provided the funds for them to make 

the improvements, suggesting that there are ways that communities can maintain their historical 

connections to land and community through negotiation with tourism. 

Figure 80. Sales of hotdogs to whitewater rafters benefit the community at Swiss, the take-out point 

on the Gauley River. (Photo by Rita Moonsammy) 

Figure 81. Sherrie Koontz serving hot dogs at Swiss. (Photo by Rita Moonsammy) 
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KNOWLEDGE OF THE LANDSCAPE

Ties to environment do not, of course, end at the boundaries of family property. In the 

woods, wayfinding skills are based upon a multidimensional understanding of the terrain and are 

facilitated by knowledge of local history and natural features. Hills, creeks, hollows, rocks, stands 

of particular varieties of trees, remnants of structures, and old industrial trails enable residents to 

make their way in what would appear to strangers to be undifferentiated wilderness. One resident 

described a map that he had drawn for his younger relatives to indicate some of the best sites for 

hunting, but most such maps exist only in the minds of the experienced. Knowledge of the 

relationships of these features provides alternative routes, important when circumstances such as 

flooding or restrictions reduce access routes. Such was the case for Adam Brown and his son 

when the boy was cut off from several routes down the mountain by spring flooding. Knowing 

the complex terrain and the relationship of the mountain to the river allowed him to make his way 

down the mountain safely and back home to Belva. Often, local history is entwined with personal 

experience. One consultant talked about camping out in the old coke ovens when he was a kid, 

and recalled that some of the men who came to work on the Hawk’s Nest Tunnel project slept in 

those structures, too. 

The Gauley 

Landscape features have often been given names that circulate within the community but 

never appear on official maps. Some have been noted in the databases accompanying the report. 

The Gauley River is replete with such places, many of whose names are simply practical, such as 

“Flat Rock.” Others are mimetic, such as “Bible Rock,” and still others connote an experience, 

such as “Egg Rock.” The story of Flat Rock was related by a woman whose family home is at the 

edge of the Gauley outside of Gauley Bridge. As a child, she swam regularly in favorite 

swimming holes in the river. (“Big Rock” was mentioned by several people.) She recalled 

numerous tragedies that had taken place on the river, at least one of which involved Flat Rock. 

She explained that the appearance and name of Flat Rock are deceptive. It appears to be a place 

where one can swim up and easily climb onto the rock. However, the current has eroded the rock 

beneath the surface, and the water rushes under it, creating an undertow that is dangerous for 
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swimmers who approach the rock. Her story about a visiting couple that had drowned because 

they did not know that feature of the rock encapsulates that knowledge. 

Other residents named places that have appeared on the whitewater rafting maps, such as 

“Iron Rings,” but most of the names on those maps are unfamiliar to local people. Paul Ramsey 

described the log chute and mused that he would like to go down the river and see what the 

rafters call the various places he knows. Both his knowledge of the area and the importance of the 

river in his personal, family, and local history unfold in the following excerpt from an interview 

with him and his wife: 

RM: And so your family’s property was on the Saturday Road, too. 

PR: It was on Saturday Road, yes. Actually, it’s an offshoot. There’s a road 

that turns off of the Saturday Road, and it’s two miles down to where I 

was raised. So -- 

RM: And how far is that from the Gauley? 

PR: Where I lived? Oh, it’s -- well, from the Gauley River it’s as far as from 

here up to the top of the hill -- maybe -- 

VR: You go down, over the hill. 

PR: Over the hill, maybe, you know, over the hill. Well, when my brother 

and I hoed corn, or whatever we were doing in the summer time, as soon 

as we finished, we’d run down over the hill and go swimming in the river, 

for our bath, and then come back, you know. So it was, it was real close. 

RM: So it was a big part of your life. 

PRL Oh, absolutely. 

VR: His brother was six years older than he. 

PR: It was a big part of our life. We -- the boys all swam down there, in the 

summer time all the time. And there’s one, there’s one place down there, 

and I have no idea what they call it now, but it was actually a log chute. 

Because before the railroad was built, the timber companies cut timber 

all the way up Gauley River, and they floated them down the river to 

where the electro-metallurgical plant was. There was a sawmill down 

there. Glen Ferris. 

RM: Glen Ferris. 

PR: And so they -- the logs, in this one place, where the cliffs came out like 

this, so what they did, they blasted a place down like this so the logs 

would get through. You have no idea what that’s like to swim through 

that when the river’s high! 

RM: No, I don’t. 
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PR: It’s amazing! We would jump up in the water up here and it would take 

you all the way through, put you underneath the water -- you couldn’t 

stay on top -- and then it would shoot you up on the outside. 

RM: That’s amazing! 

PR: And then we’d run and do that again over -- Sundays, we’d do that over 

and over again. Lots of fun! 

RM: And where is that? 

PR: That’s just below where I was raised. 

Many names have stories that reveal both long association and a kind of ethnoscientific 

understanding of the environment. “Alum Rock,” which is an overhanging cliff along the water’s 

edge, was the site of many camping trips by the Summerses. Part of the challenge of the trip was 

making their way down the mountain to the river’s edge, another use of wayfinding that allowed 

local residents to regularly use the river at places that appear to be inaccessible. The Summerses 

described the area: 

BS: Oh, yes, every weekend we went fishing. In the summer time, there was 

a bunch of us boys, every Saturday night we’d go down to the river and 

fish. We camped out. My mother went! Oh, yeah, we always camped out. 

My mother’d go. 

BeS: What’s the rock name that you all would camp by? There’s some big 

rock down there. 

BS: Alum Rock! Evidently they got alum out of it. They used alum, I think, 

something in making powders, pickles. And there was supposed to be 

alum under the rock and they called it an alum rock. Great big rock! I 

mean, it’s way up there, and it could never rain or snow or anything on 

you. I mean, it’s like you’re out in the open, but if you’re under this big 

rock hanging way over you. It’s way up there. And we’d build a fire 

under it. 

The use of this area changed after the whitewater industry grew along the Gauley: 

BS: We camped there all -- every weekend back then, we -- some of them 

even came from Beckley. People camped all along. The fishermen would 

come and camp and fish, and they don’t do it now, I think.... After the 

rafters started, I think people quit.... People always went down there. 

Always on Saturday night, the miners would come, and go down and 

camp and fish. 

BeS: We see a lot of traffic on the weekend. A lot of trucks go down there. 
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Springs 

Another aspect of local knowledge concerns the system of waterways. The following 

excerpt includes information about local understanding of the nature of the river as well as of the 

system of streams and springs and their use by local residents: 

RM: Would you have called it a “wild river”? You know, that’s what it’s 

advertised as. 

PR: Uhhh -- well, we didn’t call it a wild river. I mean, that wasn’t even in 

our terminology. 

RM: Did that description fit? 

PR: Nnnnnno -- the only time we called it a wild river was in the springtime 

when we had lots and lots of rain, it was wild. But we never called it that. 

We said “the Gauley’s high,” you know. But we never -- no, that 

terminology didn’t even enter into our vocabularies. 

RM: But was the concept of it as being a really rough and dangerous river? 

PR: No. No. And when we swam in it, we never thought of it. ‘Course we 

didn’t swim when it was high. I’ve seen it so high you wouldn’t dare go 

in it, in the springtime, usually, when you had a lot of rain. But ordinarily 

in the summer, we swam in the eddies, and then we did go through the 

log chute. We’d swim sometime -- we’d just swim down the river, you 

know. 

RM: From where to where? 

PR: Well, we swum from where we went in, down below the homeplace, to 

Woods’s Ferry, sometimes. We’d just swim the whole length there. 

About a mile, well -- mile and a half. We’d swim, and sometimes we’d 

go out and wade for a while, and swim a little further, you know. 

RM: Mmhmm. Did you know, like, since there are so many streams and 

springs and creeks and things like that, and you grow up in a place, did 

you have like a mental map of where they were, and things? 

PR: Oh, yes! Oh, yeah. You knew where each creek came down into the river 

from -- well, actually from both the Nicholas and our side, too, pretty 

much, for, we’ll say, three - four miles, the length of it. And usually -- 

well, as I say, Piney Creek was “the creek,” as far as we were concerned, 

until they named it. Now there was another one named “Horseshoe 

Creek” which came down, and it had that name for a long long time. And 

there’s a Horseshoe Road, too, out there, but -- . And when I was a boy, 

we knew every cold, iron water spring that there was anywhere along the 

river. 

RM: Tell me about them. Cold, iron -- 

PR: Well, it’s iron water, or we call it “sulphur water,” you know, is what we 

call it. And there was some -- 
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178 

VR: It doesn’t taste very good. 

PR: And on the other side of the river, there were about -- two or three, and I 

don’t know whether this is the reason for it or not, but usually the paths 

from the river up to the plateau, usually go by one of those cold springs. 

In the middle of the summer, it would be -- it felt like 40 degrees. I don’t 

know. If was very very cold. It came out and it was red water, and we 

had one on the other side of the river, on Nicholas, I know of, and we 

had about three -- particularly after they built the railroad -- that came 

out of the hillside there, and we’d always, that’s where we got our drinks 

of water, of course. 

RM: Because it was so nice and cold. 

PR: It’s so nice and cold and I developed a taste for it. I just love it. 

RM: For the sulphur water. 

PR: For the sulphur water. 

RM: Even though, like Vera was just saying, it doesn’t taste good. 

VR: Tastes like rotten eggs to me! 

PR: Oh, I loved it! I still do. I love the taste of that red water! 

VR: Tastes like rotten eggs to me! [laughs] 

RM: And you still go find them? 

PR: Oh, yeah. I could locate, I know I could locate the one on the other side 

of the river. Well, I could locate it, I’m sure, on this side of the river 

because you’d see the red outcropping, where it comes out of the side of 

the bank, you know. 

RM: And you said that there were more of them after the railroad went 

through. 

PR: Well, we knew of more of them, because you see, before the railroad, 

there were a lot of places where there were red water, and we didn’t 

really access that at all. You had a path from here down to the sand bar, 

and you had a road or a path down to Woods’s Ferry, and another one up 

there. You had about three paths that went down over the hill. Then, 

when they built the railroad, we found that there were some red water 

springs along between those paths that, unless you were Daniel Boone, 

you would never have seen those, you see. 

VR: Mmmhmm. 

PR: So that explained the reason for that. 

RM: What was the understanding of the reason for the water being red? 

PR: Oh, it’s an iron water. The water goes through a layer of iron ore, shale, 

and it just turns it red. But it’s always deep. It’s deep and that’s the 

reason it stays cold all the time. 
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RM: Did people ever think of it as having medicinal qualities? 

PR: No, not around here. In fact, people like to avoid it in a well, of course, 

because you can’t wash clothes in it. 

VR: No, hmm mm. 

PR: On our homeplace, we had a fresh water spring, and it was perfectly soft, 

and then, less than three hundred feet from it was another spring of the 

red water. And the red water spring was always at almost the same 

amount, and it was very,very cold, whereas the fresh water spring, 

sometimes, in a very, very dry time, it wouldn’t produce very much 

water. 

VR: But, oh, it was good! 

PR: It was good water. 

VR: Mmmhmmm. It was really good. 

PR: It was amazing. 

RM: Did your father -- did you have to dig wells? 

PR: No, we never did dig a well, because we had these two springs that were 

very reliable. And so -- 

VR: And they had what they called a “spring house.” 

PR: We had a spring house, yes. Where the spring, where this fresh water 

spring was, the soft water, uh, Dad’s father built this stone building down, 

most of it underground, you know. And so -- and right up in the corner of 

it was the spring. He’d concrete it in, so you had -- and later on we put a 

pump in it. But in there, that’s where mother kept her milk and butter and 

everything. And it was cold, you know. 

RM: Is that still on the farm? 

PR: Uh huh, it’s still there. Yep. 

Plants 

Knowledge of local species of plants and their habitats is widespread and contributes not 

only to subsistence but also to tradition. As in the New River area, gathering of ginseng is a very 

common way for people to make some extra cash. Nearly everyone interviewed had at times 

gathered and sold ginseng. No one said that they use the ginseng itself, however, and several 

people and commercial sites in the area between Glen Ferris and Summersville were mentioned 

as buyers of ginseng. More important in terms of personal use are mushrooms, blackberries, 

yellowroot, butternuts (also called “white walnuts,”) and a variety of greens. The best places to 
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180 

find these plants are part of the knowledge of the landscape, and the locations of those that have 

become rare (like butternuts), or are valuable (like ginseng), are guarded secrets. 

Figure 82. Photograph on bulletin board in New River Trading Company, Summersville, showing 

proprietor with a pair of trophy four-prong ginseng plants. 

The locations of some of the wild greens on the Haines property, and the best time to 

gather them, were recited in an interview with Florence Haines, along with some of the local 

wisdom about their uses and cooking methods. Regarding ramps: 

“You talk about them flies, now when you cook ramps, now there’s flies. I don’t 

know where they come from, but you’ll find them when you cook ramps. When I 

cook greens, the flies will be on the windows...outside. I don’t know what it is 

about them greens and them flies.’ Everybody says ramps are a spring tonic, but 

she doesn’t know if they’re good for you. They’re ‘just greens.’ She cooks poke, 

dandelion, and violets. Violet greens are good mixed into other greens. She also 

cooks a little weed that she calls ‘stickweed,’ but a lot of people call it ‘white 

top’ or ‘fuzzy britches.’ The leaves are fuzzy, but when it grows up, it’s 

stickweed. You pick it when it first comes up, around the beginning of May, 

when they’re about four or five inches high, before it gets tough. She boils them 

and then puts on a little vinegar or bacon grease. You can eat both the flower and 

leaf of the violet. She cooks the different types of greens together. She also cooks 

“creesy (but you have to get them early)” and “wild beet.” 
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Figure 83. Fuzzy britches, also known as woolen britches, cow parsnips and Herculeum lanatum. 

(Photo by Lyntha Eiler. Source: American Folklife Center, Library of Congress) 

RECREATION/SUBSISTENCE

While the 1994 NPS General Management Plan sees the de-industrialized Gauley area as 

a stage newly set for the enjoyment of “hikers, hunters, campers, boaters, anglers, and trappers” 

(p. 95), the fact is that residents have been using the environment for those purposes, unabated, 

since the earliest settlement. Perhaps the most salient difference in their use and the use of 

recreationists is that a number of the activities listed were, and still are, part of the subsistence of 

residents. This does not diminish their value as recreation and enjoyment; it merely amplifies 

their importance to the lifestyle of the residents and their vestedness in the landscape. 

Hunting 

Hunting is important recreationally and ritually. Family and friends hunt together, often 

sharing a cabin constructed specifically for the activity, and sharing the expenses of leasing land 

for hunting. Initiation into hunting is a meaningful step into manhood for boys of around twelve, 

and most recall the first time they succeeded in shooting a deer. (Sherrie Koontz related the story 

of how her nephew got his first deer at the age of eleven from the porch of the family home.) The 

challenge of tracking and shooting prey is exhilarating and requires knowledge of the landscape 

as well as of the prey. For many, both visitor and resident, it is a time of intense appreciation for 

and a feeling of oneness with nature as well as community. And while most hunters, visitors and 

residents alike, keep the deer and process the meat or give it to those who like it, for many 
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residents, venison continues to be an important part of the harvest that sustains their annual food 

cycle. Other wild game that is used includes turkey and squirrel. Bear hunting is also done in the 

area, but apparently more by visitors than by local residents. 

Though hunting is thought of as an activity for men, several people talked about women 

who have hunted. Vera Ramsey’s mother, in fact, had a tract of land that her husband bought for 

her specifically as hunting grounds. He built a little cabin on the land, and Ramsey’s mother 

loved to go there to hunt squirrels. 

Fishing 

Fishing has perhaps become more of a sport for Gauley residents than a subsistence 

activity. This is partly because of the changes in the river since the building of the Summersville 

Dam. Fishing over time has remained widespread and constant; every interview included details 

of fishing, fishing holes, species caught, etc. 

RM: Did you have names for spots on the river? 

PR: Yeah. When you went fishing, you always -- well, we went down to the 

Sand Bar, you know, that’s where you went fishing. And frequently, 

we’d go all night fishing. That was typical -- that was our recreation. 

We’d pack some eggs and bacon and a few other things in a bag -- 

cushion the eggs, of course -- and then we’d go down and -- well, 

sometimes you’d have a blanket, sometimes you didn’t have. It was 

always in the summer time. And so we’d fish all night. It was mostly for 

cat fish, in the summertime. And if we were lucky, we could have fish 

for breakfast the next morning. If we weren’t, then we had bacon and 

eggs, you know. But that was our recreation. 

 

Fishing is still popular along the Gauley, and a favorite activity of fathers and sons. 

(Adam Brown and his sons fish the river right across from his service station at Belva. Bub 

Shelton and his sons regularly fish in “buddy tournaments.”) However, residents now often fish in 

bodies of water that maintain more constant flow and temperature. Indeed, the major 

environmental change for residents of the Gauley area, with consequent cultural change, occurred 

when the Summersville Dam was built. While everyone acknowledges the importance of the dam 

in flood control, and the benefits of Summersville Lake, they nevertheless bemoan the way that 
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the dam changed the river. Larry Roop helped to build the dam, and though he feels pride in the 

achievement, he regrets its effect on the river: 

LaR: I worked five years at Summersville Dam, building it, and I made --- 

what I done, basically I made Jodie a spillway and ruint my river. 

RM: You made it a spillway? 

LaR: I made Jodie a spillway for it and I ruint my river. 

MH: How did it ruin it, though? 

LaR: Makes it too cold, for the fish to spawn, for us to swim in, like we did as 

kids, you know. 

LiR: It used to be in the summertime, it dried almost clear up. And it doesn’t 

do that now. 

RM: And what did you do when it dried almost clear up? I mean, was that 

something that was like -- 

MH: Was that a good thing, when it dried clear up...? 

LaR: We still swam but we swam where it was swift, you know, like in the 

shoals and things, you know, in the rapids. 

RM: You swam in the rapids? 

LiR: Well, it’s not that rapid. 

LaR: That’s what the rafters calls it --- rapids. But we used to just take the 

family and just go for six or seven miles up the river with a little row 

boat, for the Fourth of July and things like that. It was our way of 

pleasure, and doing things... 

Figure 84. Rita Moonsammy, center, interviews Ken Roop (left) and his cousin Larry Roop (right) 

in Jodie. 
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Nevertheless, local people continue to fish in the Gauley, as well as in streams, creeks, 

lakes and other rivers. Species that were discussed include muskie, walleye, bass, sunfish, trout, 

crappie, and catfish. Some people “gig” for frogs at night on ponds. Fishing tournaments are an 

important part of the scene for avid fishermen, and they also provide some cash to those who 

organize them as well as win them. Anyone can organize a fishing tournament, Bub Shelton 

explained. There are established rules and regulations, and the winning pot is the total paid by 

participants, minus a percentage for the organizer. Shelton regularly fishes in “buddy 

tournaments” and enjoys the “dock talk” among fishermen who congregate and exchange stories 

and tall tales, some of which are strategies for keeping other fishermen away from good fishing 

spots. 

The town of Gad continues to have a place on mental maps of the Summersville Lake and 

is expressed in a description of good fishing spots: 

BS: Got places up there we call the Sunken Island. Well, what it is, it was an 

old bridge that, you know, was a farm, before they flooded the lake. And 

just fish places like that because fish will migrate to that. It’s a shallow 

area and there’s deep access, deep access and the fish will come to places 

like that to feed. So you go up there and fish. You look for places like 

that. Look for long points that will run out into the lake, and some of 

them will be rocky, and some of them stumpy. Sometimes that makes a 

difference, whether it’s rocky or stumpy. 

RM: How would that be -- what difference would that make? 

BS: Well, the fish, if they’re feeding on crawfish, the rocky places are the 

better places. Crawfish laying under the rocks. And sometimes maybe 

the minnows are -- they’re feeding on the minnows and the minnows are 

schooled up on a stumpy place that might have some grass or something 

in there. And they’d be in there feeding on them, and maybe you’d just 

have to hunt and search for them. 

Camping 

As mentioned in the section “Knowledge of the Landscape,” camping was and continues 

to be an important activity. There are numerous “fishing camps” -- small buildings and cottages -- 

along the Gauley’s edge, especially around Gauley Bridge. Although a few attempts have been 

made to re-fit some of these homes into year-round residences, most are still used only for 

summer activities by people around the area. Perhaps a contemporary version of such structures is 
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185 

the campers that are now on some campgrounds in the area. On a private lot, previously owned 

by Union Carbide for the use of their employees, members of a number of extended families have 

permanently parked their campers for as many as the last thirty years. They go to the lake as often 

as possible in the summer, viewing it as a wholesome family activity in a safe place. Others 

continue to camp on the riversides in and beyond the New and Gauley. 

Memories of camping in the past are vivid and fond, again belying the notion that the 

Gauley was “wild” and fearsome for local residents. The Taylor family in Gauley Bridge often 

camped out on the riverside in the summer, even though it was just a stone’s throw from the back 

door of their home. Everyone went along, as did all the provisions necessary for meals and 

sleeping. These might be difficult to get down the hillside to the river, but they managed 

nevertheless. There is a general sense that regulations brought by the establishment of the parks 

have diminished the possibilities for camping beside the river. 

Boating 

There are distinct differences in opinions about boating on the river, which may depend 

on exactly where a resident lived. Three excerpts from interviews indicate the differences in the 

river at its east and west sections: 

In the Peter’s Creek area: 

RM: Did you boat on the river? 

BS: No, no. There was no way to get a boat to the river. Wasn’t any way to 

get a boat to the river. You went down over the mountain. If you’d see 

where we went down to the --- where we camped to the Alum rock, you 

had to hold on to the tree. It was like this [indicates a steep slope]. You 

had to hold on to a trees in order to go down through there, it was so 

steep, going over the hill. 

In the Piney Creek area: 

RM: Did you boat on the river? 

PR: No. There was no, none of this rafting or anything. 

VR: No. 

RM: But did you use boats at all? 
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PR: We used boats just to go across the river, but we never did go up and 

down it ‘cause an ordinary flat, wooden boat would be torn up down 

there. No, I never knew anybody ever to just go down the river. We had 

about four different places where there were eddies in the river and we 

could go across there. There was a sand bar, and there was Wood’s Ferry, 

and let’s see.... 

Yet in the western section of the river, interviewees talked about the various ways that 

they made boats and makeshift rafts. 

KR: He [his father] built row boats. He was quite a craftsman. He could build 

a little row boat. And he could [construct] a nose that would never plow 

into the water, but just skim across the water. And .. 

RM: How did he learn that? 

KR: I don’t know. Just trial and error more than anything else. And he passed 

that on to me. He told me how to build them, and I’ve threatened for the 

last couple years to build one, see if I can duplicate his craftsmanship. 

But – 

RM: You haven’t yet. 

KR: Haven’t yet. 

RM: Well, did you when you were younger? 

KR: I helped him build several boats, and I know, once, he built my boat for 

myself, and my mother -- my birthday was coming up. I was 12 years old, 

she asked me what I wanted for my birthday. And I told her three yards 

of muslin. And she said “What?” And I said “You’re to build my sail and 

Dad’s gonna build the mast for my boat.” And convert it to a sailboat. I’d 

get out here, sail, all year long. 

KR: I don’t have that boat any longer. In fact, the only thing I have right now 

is a canoe. But I want to try to build me a new boat. Just a row boat. 

RM: Was your dad building them for people, or was it mostly his own use? 

KR: He built several for other people, but mostly just for his own use. 

RM: And what did he use them for? 

KR: Just fishing. But they were very stable boats. You could sit up on the side 

of it if there was -- to bail the water out. You could set right there. It 

wouldn’t try to flip with you or nothing. 

RM: What did he use to build them? 

KR: Twelve inch pine boards....He could build a boat with six pine boards. 

Six 12-foot or 14-foot, whatever he wanted to build. He was an 

electrician in the mines. He taught me electricity. Had a little partial 
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187 

basement under the house. Dad and I would go down there and rewind 

motors, different things, you know. 

RM: So did you use the river more then? Were the kids their own little 

society? 

KR: Well, we lived on the river literally. Rowboats. They had a big raft. We’d 

take a big piece of old roofing tin and make us a canoe. The only thing, if 

it sank, it sank, you know? 

While many people now have aluminum and fiberglass boats, there are still some, among them 

Bruiser Cole of Gauley Bridge, who continue to build the “john boats” that are indigenous to the 

area. 

Hiking 

No one who was interviewed talked about their sojourns into the woods and along the 

river as “hiking.” Many did talk about going to places that have ruins, or simply local meaning 

and value, as a favorite past time. Congruent with the subsistence approach to the environment, 

they spoke more about their time in the woods in terms of other activities -- gathering, hunting, 

and traveling from place to place. However, one that can be most closely associated with the 

recreationist’s reason for hiking is riding trails. Four-wheeling with trucks and ATVs is a popular 

way of enjoying the landscape, as well as an important way of getting around. Many areas that 

were, before the days of four-wheel drive vehicles, inaccessible to residents have become valued 

sites for “getting away,” visiting old family and community spots, and enjoying the 

companionship of others. Rough, old trails, many of them industrial routes for timbering, are now 

used for four-wheeling. On the other hand, areas that have been leveled out by strip mining are 

sometimes now regarded as excellent places for four-wheeling. Spots along the river that were 

difficult to reach are now gathering spots. That the coal and lumber companies generally allowed 

such uses has made the proposed Park Service restrictions a hotly contested issue. 

WORK

While work for coal companies has been a widespread occupation over the years, the 

most striking feature of the occupational profile of the area is the versatility of workers. As 

mentioned earlier, this has enabled families to stay in the area through the flux in job 
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188 

opportunities. It is also an important aspect of the long-practiced subsistence lifestyle. When one 

resource plays out or disappears, whether it be a coal mine or an employer, the people of the area 

have used the environment and adapted their skills to do other kinds of work. This is why part 

time agriculture, gathering, and timbering are as important as the development of tourism 

businesses. 

In the current economic/business climate, families continue to need to supplement basic 

income. Of the ten largest employers in Nicholas County (Nicholas County Board of Education, 

Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., Summersville Memorial Hospital, Alex Energy, Inc., Columbia West 

Virginia, Inc., Global Contact Services, LLC, Seneca Mental Health, Inc., BEAerospace, Inc., 

Lowe’s Home Centers, Inc., Richwood Area Community Hospital), six fall in occupational 

categories that pay average annual wages of less than $22,000. In 2000, nearly 20% of 

households in both Fayette and Nicholas counties had income of less than $25,000 annually. Our 

research verified that residents use the environment to supplement these limited incomes. 

Agriculture 

In 2002, there were 332 farms in Nicholas County and 240 in Fayette County, with an 

average size of 100 acres in the former and 132 in the latter. Much of the acreage is in forage 

crops (hay, grass silage, etc.) and woodland, but production is significant in vegetables, fruits, 

tree nuts, and berries. Cattle and calves are also an important product. (State stats) Yet, more than 

half of the owner operators of those farms had their principal employment in another sector, and 

the cash income from these farms is generally quite low. This reflects not only the versatility of 

the workers, but also the importance of the environment as a resource for subsistence, and the 

importance of the family for sustenance. 

Numerous families have “cow-calf” operations, in which they may breed a few cows and 

sell the calves to large farms in other parts of the country. They also slaughter for their own use. 

Rather than cultivate more labor intensive crops, they raise hay and grass to feed the animals. 

They may also have large gardens and raise vegetables that they can and freeze and share among 

members of the extended family. Such farms can be run only when family members and 

neighbors help with chores. While Sam Haines worked in the mines, he and Florence raised cows, 

pigs, and sheep for sale and for their own use. Florence tended a large garden that fed her family. 
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189 

When Sam was laid off from the mines for an extended period, she sold vegetables at a stand in 

Summersville. She had regular customers for eggs. Their three daughters and Florence’s brothers 

helped with the chores. The Koontz Family farm is similar. Page sometimes worked in other jobs, 

and now his son is employed elsewhere, but the family together with friends raises cows and 

crops, using the field that rafters park in during the fall to harvest two crops of hay during the 

spring and summer. 

Figure 85. Cattle dogs on the Koontz farm. (Photo by Rita Moonsammy) 

Figure 86. Cattle dogs on the Koontz farm. (Photo by Rita Moonsammy) 
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Mining 

According to West Virginia state Bureau of Employment figures from 2003, 631 people 

in Nicholas County and 431 in Fayette County were employed directly in mining. Others work in 

mining on and off, and still others are employed driving coal trucks and repairing equipment. 

Such official documentation differs from the Park Service’s narrative that sees the coal industry 

in the Gauley area as nearly dead. It is true that not as great a percentage of the population today 

makes a living from mining. However, new mining sites are planned, and the overall employment 

level is sufficient to see the story of coal in the Gauley region as ongoing rather than finished. 

Brown’s Service Station is an example of a business that has been sustained through coal. Adam 

Brown’s grandfather started selling gasoline in the 20s on the same site where the station is still 

located, and Brown’s business is profitable now because of the services he provides to the coal 

trucks. (Brown’s father lives in the house his grandfather built just up the hill from the Route 39 

location, and Brown’s new home is located just to the west of it.) 

In fact, with a few exceptions, the people spoken to during this survey had worked in 

mining themselves, had forebears who worked in it, and had relatives who are working in it. For 

people between 50 and 80, the mines provided employment off and on during their work years. In 

Nicholas County, many families spoke about the punch mines on family property. Bob 

Summers’s father mined enough from his property to supply the school district and other 

customers. Some had work enough for several employees; for others, it was strictly a family 

endeavor. Those mines were part of the varied resources that kept families afloat. 

Many of the older people are the children of miners and lived in a number of different 

places as their fathers moved among the active mines. Some men began their work lives in the 

mines and stayed on until retirement. During the inevitable lay-offs and strikes they would patch 

together jobs to sustain their families, often using the resources of their land. Others began their 

work lives in the mines then moved on to other less dangerous or more stable occupations. Such 

is the story of the father of Dennis McCutcheon. Following is an excerpt from the summary of an 

interview with McCutcheon. 
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“His father loaded coal in the mines, which involved everything from the dynamiting to 

the loading and separating the slate. He got paid for the coal and not for the slate. He did this until 

1938, 9 years after he married. ‘I remember the evening he quit. I saw him coming across the 

field carrying his tools.’ Then he worked as a salesman from 1938 to 1947. By that time he knew 

everyone in the north half of Fayette County and in the western half of Greenbrier County, and 

after the war was over, he sold vacuum cleaners and made a good living.” 

As a group, the interviewees know how to do nearly every function necessary in a mine. 

They have blasted, bolted, sorted, hauled, put up posts, operated longwall machines, marked 

channels, run saws, set posts, pulled pillars, and more. Many have experienced danger and even 

disaster first hand. Their stories are as sobering as those that are now printed in the history books. 

RM: So your grandfather did some things that were associated with mining. 

And then did your dad work – 

KR: My dad was a coal miner all his life. Except the last job he worked was 

helping build Summerville Dam. 

RM: Oh really? 

KR: And that’s the last job he worked for and retired. But he worked coal 

mines here in town, all over the southern part of the state. 

RM: Did the family move with him when he was mining in other parts of the 

state? Or would he just go for --- 

KR: He would come home on weekends. We always lived right here. There 

was six of us children. My youngest brother and sister are both dead now. 

My brother was killed in a mining accident. 1986. 

RM: Oh, really? 

KR: He was a powder man --- he and my first cousin. And, they put a shot off 

and killed those two. 

RM: Where was that? 

KR: It was up at Nicholas Energy, it’s called now. It was High Power, up at 

Drennen. And I was supposed to go to work with them the day they was 

killed. He was going to let me go, and show me how to shot and stuff. 

But I was out of state and didn’t get back till late, so I didn’t go with him. 

The narrative of the Gauley can only benefit from the inclusion of these stories and their 

tellers. A ride down the Gauley in October will be no less exciting when the rafter knows that the 

people who live in the surrounding hills have defied danger and made their way deep into the 
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192 

earth. In fact, it may intensify the sense of the Gauley region as challenging and valuable. 

Certainly, it will diminish the sense among people in that area that they are “forgotten.” 

Timbering 

Cutting trees and sawing and selling wood is yet another example of how the 

environment has provided multiple resources to maintain a family’s livelihood. Many families 

have used the timber on their property to supplement iincome. When he was laid off or out on 

strike from the mines, Sam Haines would cut trees to sell to the mines to be used for posts. Others 

have used the wood to build their homes or other farm buildings. One man used the wood from a 

large chestnut blown down during a storm to make wooden kitchen implements. He sold many of 

them through the Gauley Bridge Arts and Crafts Center until it closed. Other families have 

focused on timbering. Timothy Foster’s father and grandfather were timbermen, the latter 

legendary throughout the region for his seven-foot height. Adam Brown’s maternal grandfather 

logged with horses even during the 1970s. Brown recalls going with his grandfather to take care 

of the horses on weekends. (There is apparently still one man timbering with horses, but he was 

not interviewed during the study.) There are still sawmills in the area, the largest of which is a 

fourth-generation family business. NPS restrictions on cutting trees have thus removed a 

subsistence resource for some families. 
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CHAPTER SIX: CONCLUDING DISCUSSION AND 

RECOMMENDATIONS 

The preceding sections of this report have focused on describing the mixed mesophytic 

community forest and watershed. This cultural and ecological formation precedes the time of 

European contact. It has adjusted to the historical ruptures brought on by European conquest and 

industrial capitalist exploitation. It remains vital to the social and economic life of the region in 

the present, and its continuing vitality is of global significance. We have identified a number of 

key ethnographic resources and practices that the park could engage in planning for the future of 

the mixed mesophytic community forest and watershed. In this section we want to address two 

interrelated questions: 

• How can the park participate in the mixed mesophytic community forest and 

watershed? 

• How can the mixed mesophytic community forest and watershed incorporate the 

park? 

Answering these questions will require setting up an ongoing process of shared inquiry, 

engaging residents of the region in the task of identifying where the goals of the park overlap 

with the cultural and economic goals of communities, and harmonizing processes for meeting 

these shared goals. In the zone of overlap, the collective memory becomes vital to the park’s 

ability to recognize and preserve thresholds to history and to understand the deep connections 

between culture and ecology along the national rivers. 

REINTEGRATING A FRAGMENTED ECOSYSTEM:

A FOUNDATIONAL ROLE FOR COLLECTIVE MEMORY

In every vicinity along the New and Gauley Rivers we heard similar kinds of concerns: 

about the fragmentation of the commons, the alienation of young people from the ways of their 

elders, increased levels of pollution and littering, loss of access to favorite fishing and camping 

spots, uncertainty about what the new regulations are and where they apply, and an often-stated 
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194 

belief that tourists matter more to government officials than the communities adjacent to the park. 

In the aggregate, the expression of such concerns reflect an anxiety over the pace of change and a 

sense of having been excluded from the decision-making process that manages change. 

Figure 87. Allen Brown, proprietor of Quinnimont Lunch, kept the establishment going as a 

community center where teens could socialize until his death in the 1990s. (Photo by 

Lyntha Eiler. Source: American Folklife Center, Library of Congress)

To understand this anxiety, it is instructive to consider Gregory Bateson’s model for what 

he calls “the thinking system.” In Steps to an Ecology of Mind, Bateson argued that the thinking 

system, which is the minimal unit required for survival, consists of the organism plus its 

environment. If we think of the community as a thinking system, the incessant labor of piecing 

together an environment that is always being fragmented makes sense: an organism survives by 

continually refitting itself to its surroundings, which harbor all the cues for social communication 

and its meanings; and which gives continual feedback on the status of community life. All along 

both rivers we heard people trying to make sense of new and unfamiliar signals. 

As the Summersville Dam is troubling to people on the Gauley River, the Bluestone Dam 

is still cited in the Hinton area for its damaging effect on the local economy and on local culture, 

having displaced many family farms and ripped an important agricultural resource out of the local 

economy. According to W.C. Parker: 
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195 

“This is farming country. We got all this good bottom land on both sides of the 

river. Like where Camp Bertha is...lot of good bottom land on the river and it’s 

productive. The dam cut off the best farmland in the county. People truck-farmed 

there, sold produce in Hinton and to the coal camps and to Bluestone Produce. 

Dad was opposed to that [the dam]. But it’s there for flood control for the Ohio 

system...There’s a lot of flat water from the mouth of Indian Creek to the dam. 

What they have covered with that thing is not my stomping ground, but I had 

friends and relatives there, so I hate to see that displacement. The dam hurt the 

local economy. We lost farms, stores...And when the railroad went down, it’s 

been a problem for the economy.” 

In other words, having lost the land as a buffer against economic downturns, communities 

become vulnerable when the industrial base collapses. 

Echoing Parker on another occasion, Jack Hellems, a long-time trot-line fisherman, 

commented: “The dam has hampered the fishing and ruined the farms. They keep the water level, 

change the outflow, it erodes the river bottom...There’s mud in the dam, so they put in trees and 

rocks [to create structure for habitat]. Mud and silt. The [fish] eggs sink into the silt, and they 

can’t survive.” There have been more deliberate interventions as well, in the introduction of 

muskellunge and striped bass, predatory species. “They also introduced stripers,” Mr. Hellems 

said. “They’re a predatory fish...But they didn’t get below the dam. Smith Mountain Lake in 

Virginia. They’re there for the tourists. I hope they don’t get down here.” 

The dam disrupted the favored practice of fishing for wall-eye around Hinton. “The state 

record for walleye was here,” Jack Hellems said. “Charlton Cox, held the record till the 1990s, 

from the 1960s. So it’s great for walleye. Had the state record.” But the dam has disrupted that 

fishing, at least downriver of Hinton. “So reintroduce them below the dam,” Mr. Hellems 

suggested. “They can put them in several places, and they bite in spring and fall, not summer. 

Like any fish, they relate to structure. So any place where there’s deep water and shallow water 

nearby.” These conditions no longer exist in the vicinity of the lake, but they are common in the 

gorge. In addition, a fish that bites in spring and fall will be of interest locally, because those 

seasons fall outside the very busy summer tourist season, when the river is flush with rafters, 

kayakers, and campers. 
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Figure 88. Bluestone Dam. (Photo by Karen Hudson. Source: American Folklife Center, Library of 

Congress) 

The dam has created a new set of complexities for local fishermen who find themselves 

competing with tourists for ‘space’ on the river. The raising and lowering of water levels, for 

tourists, is often cited as disruptive to fishing. Jack Hellems told Tom Carroll: 

“Fish won’t bite when the water drops or rises. So you need to leave it constant. 

But last summer, they kept it at three gates. This summer it’s been below two 

gates. Three gates, it’s too deep to wade. You can gauge the river, tell how many 

gates. And to catch fish you have to watch that.” 

 

Glen Vallandingham raised a potentially alarming issue when he noted that: 

“The last several years I don’t catch half the fish I used to catch. Because of 

pressure on the river, increased people fishing, and there’s also something in the 

food chain. We used to catch hellgrammites, these long fighting-mad 

hellgrammites, got a lot in the net. Now, there’s only one or two...and they’re 

soft and puffy and quiet. So there’s something wrong in the food chain. Once, 

when the river was down, the rocks were covered with a white powder when the 

river dropped. I called the dam, they said ‘it’s always on there, in the spring.’ So 

maybe the plants along the river in Virginia dump into the river in spring. And 

there’s no industry here. But the officials said, ‘Oh, it’s always there.’ They were 

dismissive. But I never saw it before, and I was always on the river.” 

The officials who said, “Oh it’s always there,” squandered an opportunity for civic 

engagement around their resource. Based on years of first hand experience, Vallandingham’s 

observations and expressions concerns are invitations to such engagement. 
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197 

What distinguishes a number of NERI’s neighbors from other visitors are their vivid 

historical and personal memories of this landscape, strong feelings of affection for that, and 

related feelings of distress at signs of continuing degradation. Such memories and observations 

are renewed through practices like hunting, fishing (traditionally with trotlines), gathering, bait 

catching, walking, gardening, boat building (john boats and bateaus), making fish traps, bait 

boxes, seines for hellgrammites and minnows, and so forth. People are commenting on the 

fragmentation of this system, and their comments, drawing on years of participation in NERI 

landscapes, reflect a keen sensitivity to differences among places in the watershed, and ecological 

changes over time. 

Buzzy Hellems reflected on what makes Meadow Creek a unique place to fish, and how 

to know where to catch bait, and when: 

“That’s quite a country down below Meadow Creek. The fish out there, they 

bleed, it’s just like butchering a hog. Maybe because the river’s dropping down, 

and the shoals, there’s more oxygen in the water. Because it does drop pretty 

keen, water’s pretty swift. The river narrows, and there’s a sharp drop, right 

below Glade. We used to have dates, to fish different places. The earliest are, for 

softshells, crawfish...We knew where to go, when.” 

At his home in Grandview, Ritchie Carper, (descendant of Joseph Carper, the famed 19th 

century rifle maker), related the differences in the kinds of crops that could be grown in 

communities around New River to differences in soils and microclimates on either side of the 

Fire Creek seam of coal: 

“On the River they could grow sweet potatoes, which you can’t grow up here. 

And down on the river people were raising tomatoes and sweet potatoes, because 

they get an early season and it’s the sandy loam soil. Where up here, this is 

mostly a clay type soil and our seasons are late. So we have to compensate for 

that by planting different crops. But just about the Fire Creek coal seam is the 

break in climate here.” 

A conversation that Linda Lee and Mary Hufford had with Paul Fox and Harold Duncan 

gives us a glimpse of what people can remember about the community forest, and the way in 

which talk about species opens onto a different historical and cultural perspective on the forest: 

MH: I want to ask you some questions regarding the forest – are there a lot of 

nut trees? 
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198 

PF: Hickories – we used to gather the hickories – there used to be a hazelnut 

– I haven’t seen a hazel nut in years 

HD: Mostly died out 

PF: We used to gather them – it was a source of food 

HD: Like the butternut 

MH: Are there any butternuts left? 

HD: Last one I recall grew up this path by the railroad track up here – it died 

out about 12 years ago 

LL: Do you know what caused them to die out? 

HD: No 

PF: I think the weather’s changing. I think the forest is changing. 

MH: What makes you think that? 

PF: Well it just seems that the trees are not the same as they used to be – a lot 

of the hickory trees are dying; a lot of beech trees are dying 

MH: Yellow locust? Mountain locust? (this is not a meaningful distinction to 

Paul Fox) 

PF: Locust has a blight now – the leaves turn brown and stuff – you’d be 

amazed at how brown it can turn and still live. 

HD: We used to have chincapin – I don’t know of any of them left 

PF: We used to pick blackberries and cherries – used to pick everything we 

could gather 

LG: can it! 

MH: How about red mulberry? 

PF: I love mulberries – we had a mulberry tree – black mulberries – kids’d be 

hanging all over that tree when they were ripe (laughs) 

HD: Used to be made into pies and jelly 

MH: Wild? 

PF: No these were planted 

MH: Are there many trees planted by people still growing? 

PF: Oh yeah – a lot of them are – that’s something else – I don’t think fruit 

trees are doing as well as they used to – it’s kind of rare to have a good 

cherry crop 

HD: Used to be people would take good care of their trees – even if it wasn’t 

on their land – go saw it out – try to keep the tree alive; same with apple 

trees – but now they just grow up all gnarly – bumps all over them and 

everything -- years ago you didn’t have the money to go to Foodland. 
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199 

MH: Do you know where there are still orchards or bits of orchards in the 

National Park? 

LG: I’m sure there’s still some up in the area around where Terry is – there 

use to be an old McKendree hospital up there along the river, and a 

couple of the doctors had built real nice homes across the river which are 

gone now, but several of those places had apple orchards, plum trees, 

peach trees – I’m sure they’re still standing, but in such bad condition 

they’re not producing anything 

HD: Persimmon trees – they have them along the river – now everybody 

relates to them as a place to find deer during deer season – deer eat the 

persimmons as they drop off – anybody interested in persimmons is 

interested in getting the deer as he’s there eating the fruits 

MH: Paw-paws? 

LG: They’re not as plentiful as they used to be, but they’re still around 

HD: Same area where that butternut tree was, there’s plenty of them up there, 

but very seldom do they produce anything – they grow up there, but they 

don’t produce – I don’t know why 

PF: when I was a kid, we used to have a place where we hunted – it was just 

beech tree after beech tree after beech tree – last time I was there all of 

them’d died. I don’t know what happened to them. 

MH: You see a lot of small beech trees, but you’re saying there aren’t too 

many big ones 

PF: All the big ones are dying – I don’t know why – just look like they 

caught some kind of blight or disease 

HD: Like chestnut trees, this whole area was full of chestnut trees. My dad 

used to talk about going up and getting bushels of chestnuts and by the 

time I was big enough to see what a chestnut tree looked like, they were 

dying. 

PF: I’d sure like to see one – I’ve seen the stumps, humongous stumps 

HD: My dad used to talk about how Chestnut trees were just a magnet for 

animals of any kind – turkey, squirrels, deer, eat the chestnut – when 

they knew where the chestnut tree was, they were right there, getting the 

chestnuts and hunting the animals too. 

These kinds of observations were made by older people up and down New River who 

have spent their lives interacting with the community forest and watershed. In a short stretch of 

talk, historical and cultural information was interwoven with observations on forest species, 

offering a glimpse of the thinking system, and the role of forest species in archiving collective 

ecological memory. 
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200 

Figure 89. Butternuts curing on the stoop of Howard and Sadie Miller, Drews Creek. (Photo by 

Lyntha Eiler. Source: American Folklife Center, Library of Congress) 

In the mid-1990s, a three-year scientific study designed to investigate local observations 

of species decline in the mixed mesophytic forests concluded that mortality rates in the mixed 

mesophytic forest (from northern Alabama to southeastern Ohio and southwestern Pennsylvania) 

are three to five times higher than historic rates (Loucks et al. 1997). The study found that a 

number of the species cited by Paul Fox are particularly susceptible to the airborne sulfates and 

nitrogen oxides from fossil fuel combustion upwind of the region that have weakened this forest 

system over the past three decades. Perhaps science in collaboration with local collective memory 

could find ways to encourage the hardwood species and habitats that distinguish this community 

forest among mid-latitude systems worldwide. 

ENGAGING THE ARCHIVE: PRACTICES OF CULTURAL RETRIEVAL AND 

DISCOURSES OF RECONNECTION

“I like to just sit on the river bank and think about the history of these coal 

towns.” – Ernie Jones, Brooklyn 

In addition to making ends meet, and getting out of the ordinary routine, the practices of 

fishing, camping, boating, gathering, and gardening provide ways of structuring remembrance 

that afford a great deal of pleasure. Resources that have never been plentiful, which most tourist 
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201 

would not recognize, are cherished. “When I was a kid,” recalled Albert Pennington. “I only 

knew of about five or six butternut trees, they were about two miles from home, and sometimes 

they wouldn’t have over five or six butternuts on them. I would walk those two or three miles to 

see if I could find a few butternuts.” 

As we saw above, William Tury spent his spare time in the 1980s salvaging cut stone 

from coal camps on New River in an attempt to reconnect with his father, a stoneworker from 

Italy. “I’ve salvaged cut stone all over these old coal camps,” he told Ken Sullivan. “Every stone I 

pick up, I wonder “Did (my father) have somebody do this, or did he have his hand on this 

stone?” For people who lived the history, and their descendents, ruins within the park – 

foundation plantings, cemeteries, stone work, railroad ties, old roads, orchards, and the like – 

precipitate memory. So powerful are the settings, even when mostly gone, that it remains 

important to hold church homecomings, and family, town, company, and high school reunions in 

near proximity to these places. Almost any ruin is apt to precipitate memory, and plans that would 

disturb these should engage appropriate members of communities, particularly where cemeteries 

and churches are involved. There are a number of cemeteries that do not appear on the U.S.G.S. 

quadrangles, and mapping these should be a priority for the park. 

Figure 90. Dinner on the Grounds at the New Life Baptist Church Homecoming in Shady Spring, 

2004.
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202 

Figure 91. Scale model of family homestead on Irish Mountain, made by Ernie Jones and displayed 

in front of his home in Brooklyn.

Figure 92. Gene Hall and Billy Harris trading memories of friends buried in the Terry Cemetery, 

on Garden Ground Mountain. 

There are a number of processes already in place, which the Park could identify and 

engage, whereby communities are recovering and maintaining connections. At some of the 

reunions and homecomings we attended, there were temporary photo galleries displayed. Around 

these photos intergenerational groups rehearsed their history. At Mount Hope Jubilee Days, many 

store fronts became sites for the display of memorabilia. Ritchie Carper, of Grandview, said that 
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203 

the Grandview Reunion had such a kiosk, and that visiting the cemeteries and homeplaces is 

something people do at the reunion. The Beury Mountain reunion is held at the cemetery on 

Beury Mountain, where the grave markers prompt remembrance and recognition of a larger social 

body to which people belong. 

Outside of the time of reunion, there are many informal archives and museums in the 

region. The walls of bait shops, convenience stores, bars, and restaurants are hung with 

memorabilia. We were in the Minden Bar for less than ten minutes before the proprietor pulled 

out photographs of the catastrophic flood several years ago. Similarly, at Anna’s Country Store in 

Winona, five minutes of conversation with Wilbur resulted in a retrieval of historic town 

photographs around which a small group assembled and began relating stories. 

Figure 93. Wilbur Berry, relating some of the history of Winona on the porch of Anna’s Country 

Crafts, August 2004. 

Connoisseurs of the region’s past, like Jimmy Costa, Billy Aliff, and others have 

assembled collections that are already recognized as resources by schools. Robin Crawford hopes 

to open an African American museum in Hinton. Such events and sites, and their underlying 

philosophies of piecing together fragments in a way that generates new communities of talk and 

inquiry, are potent with possibility for building new relationships between the park and its 

neighbors, and the visitors who pass through the region, who might come away with a much 

better understanding of its life than they presently do. The Park Service, which has already done 
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204 

exemplary work through its oral histories, “New River Neighbors” video series, and participation 

in the recent documentation of the bateau, could extend its support to indigenous efforts to 

conserve and capitalize on cultural assets. 

Figure 94. Fieldworkers Linda Lee and Cindy Murtagh, with members of the Plateau District 

Quilters who meet each Wednesday at the Glen Jean National Bank. 

RECOMMENDATION FOR INTERPRETATION AND MANAGEMENT

These recommendations attempt to address the basic problem of the disconnect between 

existing NPS interpretations of the region and the complexity and vivacity of the living culture. It 

is useful to note here that, over the course of our fieldwork in the region, a number of people 

referred to the area as “forgotten.” While this was especially true in upper Fayette County, 

Nicholas County, and Summers County, where services and public resources are minimal 

compared to those of lower Fayette and Raleigh counties, there is a general sense that local 

culture has been overlooked by the Park Service and others whose programs and policies focus 

public attention in the state. From our perspective and experience, the region is still rich with 

cultural practices and communities that our society in general bemoans the loss of elsewhere. 

They warrant our attention and respect. 
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Constitute the Mixed Mesophytic Community Forest and Watershed as a Ground 

for Civic Engagement 

Finding ways to engage with traditionally associated people around the task of restoring, 

monitoring, and tending the mixed mesophytic community forest and watershed as a landscape 

that is the expression and medium for community life is critical to the management of this 

resource, and therefore fundamental to the purpose for which the park was created. In this plan, 

the collective memory of traditionally associated peoples about the mixed mesophytic watershed 

would not simply be documented and stored in the park archive. Rather the landscape itself would 

continue to function as a living archive. While the park would continue to regulate the use of land 

and resources within its boundaries, it could exercise leadership in restoring the mixed 

mesophytic watershed by engaging (and employing) people inside and outside the park 

boundaries in the propagation of mixed mesophytic species and in the cleaning up of invasives. 

1. Recognize the community forest and watershed in the park themes and content 

and address perspectives of traditionally associated communities. 

2. Form a set of working groups of local residents who know the woods from 

traditional experience with them: hunting, gathering, walking, hiking, fishing, 

camping and so forth. 

3. Use a professional facilitator to bring park resource managers together with 

interested traditionally associated people to explore issues of environmental 

quality and health and set priorities for assessment and management of the mmf 

watershed. 

4. Develop a plan for ongoing assessment of watershed health and replenishment 

and sustaining of biocultural resources in and around the park. (For instance, 

conduct an ongoing forest census to locate species that are becoming more 

scarce: butternuts, chincapins, red mulberries, yellow locust, and so forth; launch 

a program of propagating nut trees and other native hardwoods). 

5. Provide training and jobs for members of traditionally associated communities 

interested in participating in monitoring and propagation of mixed mesophytic 

species and the restoration of their habitats. 

6. Develop community-based criteria for managing areas that presently function (in 

a de facto way) as local use areas; places that are remote or difficult for visitors 
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206 

from elsewhere to access, but that could be cultivated as spaces that serve the 

mutual interests of the park service and local communities. 

7. Coordinate with adjacent corporate landowners and with other Federal agencies 

(USDA, EPA, USFWS) to devise and implement policies that recognize and 

support the institution of the community forest in the Central Appalachian region. 

RECOMMENDATION FOR FURTHER RESEARCH, PROGRAMS, AND 

EDUCATIONAL PRODUCTS

In consultation with traditionally associated communities, develop programs for 

educating park visitors about the region’s dynamic living culture, its biocultural underpinnings 

and the global significance of the mixed mesophytic watersheds of New River and Central 

Appalachia. 

Local residents comprise a knowledgeable constituency for the mixed mesophytic 

watershed in ways that most visitors to the park do not, and can not. Participation in this 

landscape, conditioned by local knowledge that is generations deep, is the basis for continued 

ethnogenesis in this region. The collective memory that circulates in talk and practice and the 

reservoir of deep affection for the environment that many of our consultants expressed are 

resources on which the park could build a program of ongoing research and public education. 

1. Create partnerships with local residents (through churches, civic organizations, 

workplaces, retirees organizations, etc.) to both revise the NPS narrative of the 

Gauley and to sustain cultural structures and values. Create a multifaceted 

residents’ advisory group to work with the Park in an ongoing manner regarding 

planning, public information, and enforcement and incorporate local residents 

and experts into all phases of planning, rather than providing a limited set of 

plans for them to respond to at the outset. 

2. Revise the NERI and GARI themes to reflect more accurately the current 

socioeconomic and cultural configurations and to incorporate the residents’ view 

of what is important. 
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207 

3. Use NPS public education formats and materials to show the connections 

between the past and the present as a dynamic process, and to present living 

tradition as an important cultural resource 

4. Identify respect for and sustenance of the living culture as a core aspect of the 

Park’s mission 

5. Seek ways of supporting initiatives through which local groups can benefit, 

financially and culturally, from the tourism that the Park encourages 

6. Network with other agencies of government to address policies that conflict and 

to support policies that sustain the communities 

7. Support a fuller program of research and documentation of the traditional culture 

of the Gauley region, recognizing that the economic and cultural networks extend 

beyond the river. 

8. Work with interested communities within the park boundaries and along the 

routes of access to whitewater put-ins and take outs to obtain funding to develop 

interpretive materials, visitors centers in the communities, and support exhibits, 

events, gift shops, fundraisers, guide services and so forth based at community 

centers. 

9. Form a community of inquiry with interested members of the public to document 

and archive community-based knowledge of history and ecology. Inaugurate 

multi-disciplinary summer field schools to work with the park and its neighbors 

on particular topics. Topics to explore include cemetery customs, agricultural 

history and practice, landscapes and histories of African American communities, 

ecologies of subsistence, traditional practices that connect the river to the forest, 

such as the tradition of building of john boats and batteaus, which we 

encountered both around Hinton and Gauley Bridge. 

10. Produce public educational products (exhibits, sound tracks for automobile tours, 

recipe books, calendars, and so forth) that disseminate local knowledge and 

ecological concerns. Make these available to community visitor centers to sell as 

a way to raise money and also to engage with park visitors. 

11. Document the diffusion of communities from mountain settlements into 

settlements and coal camps in the Gorge, and subsequent relocation to 

communities surrounding the Gorge. 
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208 

12. Develop strategies for exchanging and building on cultural and ecological 

knowledge about resources in and around the park (for example, an interactive 

website and/or talk radio programs). 

CONCLUSION:

THE MIXED MESOPHYTIC COMMUNITY FOREST AND WATERSHED IS 

FOUNDATIONAL TO THE PURPOSE FOR WHICH THE PARKS WERE CREATED

In her report on the natural resources of NERI and GARI, Carol Mahan observes that the 

mixed mesophytic forest, within which NERI and GARI are located, comprises “the largest 

remaining area of midlatitude forest in the world, making it a globally significant resource.” 

Mahan’s observation adds to the significance of the parks and provides an additional means of 

integrating the region into the world system. The mixed mesophytic forest is a resource that 

contributes to a unique identity for National Parks located within it, and a trademark for the 

region that no other region in the world can claim. As a resource that figures uniquely in the 

identities of communities on the Cumberland and Allegheny plateaus, the mixed mesophytic 

forest also provides a means of integrating NERI and GARI into the lives of traditionally 

associated peoples. Having participated in human activities for thousands of years, the mixed 

mesophytic forest has gained an identity as a community forest. The geological events that 

produced the conditions under which this forest evolved also produced the rivers that define the 

parks. By dint of a unique geology and history, the community forest itself is part and parcel of 

the watersheds at the headwaters of the Kanawha River. The community forest climaxes in full 

reciprocity with the collective memory of traditionally associated peoples. Engaging with this 

collective memory and conserving the practices and resources through which it circulates, the 

resources of the mixed mesophytic forest and watershed, is foundational to the purpose for which 

the New River Gorge National River was created. 

 
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APPENDIX I: 

HISTORIC POPULATION TRENDS FOR MAGISTERIAL 

DISTRICTS ALONG THE NEW RIVER 

In general, the five most historically consistent magisterial districts in the Fayette County 

portion of the northern New River region are centered around the following present day 

communities (see 1933 maps of magisterial districts by John R. Ice, Figures 94 through 97): 

Fayetteville: Fayetteville, Oak Hill, Mount Hope (and communities in the Gorge from 

Stone Cliff to Fayette Station) 

Mountain Cove: Ansted, Hico, Lansing, Hawk’s Nest 

Quinnimont: Meadow Bridge, Layland, Maple Wood, Danese, Springdale (and 

communities in the Gorge from Glade to Claremont) 

Sewell Mountain: Centered on Landisburg and Clifftop (and communities in the Gorge 

from Thurmond to Sewell) 

Nuttall: Lookout, Edmond, Russellville (and communities in the Gorge from Caperton? 

to Nuttalburg) 

While the census figures for the entire Mountain Cove district in Table 12, the fieldwork 

on the northernmost portion of Mountain Cove and the entire Falls district of Falls Church is 

covered in the Section on the Gauley River by Rita Moonsammy. For each decade until 1930, a 

magisterial district is added. In 1910 and 1950 the figures are given separately for a number of 

towns within the six minor civil divisions, and in 1960 the figures are again reported for the six 

minor civil divisions. At some point after 1960, Fayette County reconstituted itself as three minor 

civil divisions: New Haven, Valley, and Plateau. 

Table 12. Population Trends for the Northern Region of New River, 1870–1960 

1870 1880 1890 1900 1910 1920 1930 1940 1950 1960 

Fayetteville 1/Town 472 671 1952 

Fayetteville 2 1977 2313 4100 9889 23,288 30,078 32,794 27,807 

Mountain Cove 1923 2042 5123 4235 4489 4284 4554 5352 6133 4850 

Sewell 1333 1333 3100 3648 3331 3314 3208 3752 3419 2865 
NERI and GARI Ethnographic Overview and Assessment 

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1870 1880 1890 1900 1910 1920 1930 1940 1950 1960 

Quinnimont 2659 3360 5525 5926 5944 6950 6459 3812 

Nuttall 3180 3388 3589 4442 3976 3689 2306 

Glen Jean 722 537 

Hilltop 761 576 

Kilsythe 730 

McDonald 1153 

Mount Hope 494 494 

Oak Hill 764 4518 

Ogden City 210 

Scarbro 1533 1348 

Thurmond 315 219 

Stuart 697 

Ansted 1543 

Minden-Rock Lick 2307 

Meadow Bridge 597 

Figure 95. Fayette County magisterial districts, 1933. (Source: Ice 1933) 
NERI and GARI Ethnographic Overview and Assessment

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Raleigh County 

Magisterial districts for Raleigh County have remained more stable than they have for 

Fayette County. The divisions contiguous to the northern region of the National River are Shady 

Spring and Town. The Richmond District includes Irish Mountain and Redden Ridge, and 

communities on New River from Long Bottom to Hamlet. Shady Spring encompasses Grandview, 

Beaver, Table Rock, Daniel, Scott Ridge and on New River, the historic towns of Royal and 

McCreery. Town centers on Beckley, and extends across Batoff Mountain to the communities 

along Piney Creek: from Stanaford to Terry on the New River, and the old McKell towns on 

Dunloup Creek: Tamroy, Oswald, and Price Hill, as well as Cranberry, Skelton, Sprague, 

Mabscott, Sophia and other communities that began as company towns. 

Table 13. Population Trends for Magisterial Districts in Raleigh County, 1870–1960 

1870 1880 1890 1900 1910 1920 1930 1940 1950 1960 

Shady Spring 686 1223 1586 2334 3887 5976 8376 9713 11,040 9271 

Town 811 2305 3357 10,407 16,555 28,439 39,018 44,771 45,877 

Richmond 389 725 986 1226 1220 1920 1892 1601 829 908 

Figure 96. Raleigh County magisterial districts, 1933. (Source: Ice 1933) 
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Summers County 

The minor civil divisions adjacent to Hinton in the Southern District are in Summers 

Counties. These include the Jumping Branch, Greenbrier, and Green Sulphur magisterial districts. 

Although Summers County was formed in 1871, the magisterial districts do not appear in the 

census records until 1890. In Summers County, Jumping Branch is where White Oak Mountain 

drains via Madam’s Creek below the confluence of the Greenbrier and the New Rivers, and 

tributaries of the Bluestone River drain the headwaters on Bluestone Mountain. Stretching across 

Wolf Creek Mountain and Keeney Mountain, the Greenbrier District includes the Greenbrier as it 

flows from Ballengee past the Big Bend Tunnel and empties into the New at Bellepoint. The 

historic railroad town of Hinton is in the Greenbrier District. The Green Sulphur District includes 

Hump, Chestnut, Sewell, Gwinn, and Fisher Mountains, the communities of Ramp, Green 

Sulphur Springs, and Claypool and communities along the New River from Brooks to Meadow 

Creek. The populations recorded for these districts in the censuses from 1870 to 1960 are as 

follows: 

Table 14. Population Trends for Magisterial Districts in Summers County, 1870–1960 

Green Sulphur Greenbrier Jumping Branch 

1870 

1880 

1890 2135 3608 2188 

1900 2747 4940 2779 

1910 3139 6419

(including Hinton, with 3656) 

2792 

1920 3579 6998 2774 

1930 3577 7984 3003 

1940 3932 7368 3408 

1950 3560 7285 2953 

1960 ? 6429 2112 
NERI and GARI Ethnographic Overview and Assessment

231 

Figure 97. Summers County magisterial districts, 1933. (Source: Ice 1933) 

Nicholas and Fayette Counties 

Table 15. Profile of Population Growth for the Gauley River Area 

 Falls Grant Jefferson Wilderness 

1870 1414 729 649 824 

1880 837 906 820 1272 

1890 1099 1247 991 1565 

1900 1597 1116 1235 1773 

1910 6775 1155 2155 1803 

1920 8874 956 2011 2418 

1930 9939 977 2013 2124 

1940 11,813 1161 1955 2326 

1950 12,918 1469 2488 2365 

1960 9865 1465 2350 1987 
NERI and GARI Ethnographic Overview and Assessment 

232 

Figure 98. Nicholas County magisterial districts adjoining the Gauley River National Recreation 

Area: Jefferson, Grant, and Wilderness. (Source: Ice 1933) 
NERI and GARI Ethnographic Overview and Assessment

233 

APPENDIX II: 

SUPPLEMENTARY TABLES 

Table 16. Birth Places of Residents in Raleigh County, 1880 Census 

District Clear 

Fork 

Marsh 

Fork 

Richmond Slab

Fork 

Shady

Springs 

Town Trap 

Hill 

Totals 

Enumeration 

Number 

126 127 128 129 130 131 132 

Population 1026 1121 725 813 1223 1498 961 7367 

Birth Place 

West Virginia 885 620 574 683 948 959 691 5360 

Virginia 109 481 135 105 215 454 264 1763 

Pennsylvania 2 9 35 46 

Maryland 1 1 

Ohio 24 8 1 7 7 16 63 

Kentucky 1 7 1 4 2 15 

North Carolina 1 8 1 8 6 11 4 39 

Indiana 1 1 3 1 6 

New Jersey 1 1 

Tennessee 1 1 1 2 5 

South Carolina 1 1 2 

Louisiana 1 1 

Missouri 1 1 

Texas 3 5 1 9 

Illinois 3 3 

New York 4 1 5 

Dist. o Columbia 1 1 

Massachusetts 1 1 

Ireland 14 1 6 21 

England 2 2 4 

Scotland 1 1 

Canada 14 14 

Germany 1 2 3 

 

Totals 1026 1121 725 813 1223 1498 961 7367 

District No. 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 

Source: William A. Marsh, 1880 Census of West Virginia 

Table 17. Birthplaces of Residents in Fayette County, 1880 Census 

District Falls F-ville #1 F-ville#2 Kanawha Sewell Mntn Mntn Cove Totals 

District # 26 27 27 28 29 30 

Population 837 472 2313 2076 2820 2042 11,560 

Birth Place 

West Virginia 679 378 1799 1252 1799 2382 8289 

Virginia 89 75 404 437 734 393 2132 
NERI and GARI Ethnographic Overview and Assessment 

234 

District Falls F-ville #1 F-ville#2 Kanawha Sewell Mntn Mntn Cove Totals 

Pennsylvania 9 1 12 56 40 66 184 

Maryland 2 1 3 4 8 1 19 

Ohio 17 6 20 79 45 53 220 

Kentucky 9 1 6 26 11 10 63 

North 

Carolina 

 7 3 11 3 20 9 53 

Tennessee 1 3 3 4 11 

New York 1 2 7 9 26 8 53 

New Jersey 1 1 2 6 3 13 

Indiana 5 1 5 6 1 9 27 

Illinois 4 4 8 

Missouri 2 2 5 3 1 2 15 

New 

Hampshire 

 1 2 3 

Iowa 1 3 1 5 

Michigan 2 1 3 

Vermont 1 1 2 

Massachusetts 2 8 4 4 18 

South 

Carolina 

 1 3 4 

Maine 2 1 3 

Georgia 1 1 3 1 6 

Delaware 1 1 

Kansas 1 2 3 

Mississippi 1 1 

Dist. of 

Columbia 

 1 3 4 

Alabama 1 1 

Arkansas 1 1 

Florida 1 1 

Nebraska 2 2 

England 1 5 79 16 67 168 

Scotland 24 31 10 65 

Ireland 6 5 32 20 5 68 

Wales 36 13 5 54 

Germany 5 7 6 18 

Austria 2 2 

Nova Scotia 1 1 

Switzerland 3 12 1 1 17 

Canada 1 7 1 9 

Belgium 1 1 

Prussia 1 1 

France 1 1 

 

Totals 837 472 2313 2076 2820 2042 11,560 

District # 26 27 27 28 29 30 

Source: William A. Marsh, 1880 Census of West Virginia 
NERI and GARI Ethnographic Overview and Assessment

235 

Table 18. Birth Places of residents in Summers County, 1880 Census 

District Forest Hills Greenbrier Green

Sulphur 

Jumping

Branch 

Pipestem Talcott Totals 

District # 133 134 135 136 137 138 

Population 1295 1858 1640 1499 1306 1418 9016 

Birth Place 

West Virginia 1064 1153 1233 1018 1014 1165 6647 

Virginia 202 557 348 467 264 235 2073 

Ohio 1 16 1 2 20 

Pennsylvania 3 25 15 43 

Maryland 6 1 7 

North Carolina 9 3 8 2 23 2 47 

Tennessee 4 6 10 20 

New York 1 20 2 1 1 25 

Texas 2 2 5 9 

California 2 2 

Mississippi 1 1 4 1 7 

Missouri 2 1 1 1 5 

Indiana 2 6 2 10 

Kentucky 12 3 2 17 

DC 2 1 3 

Massachusetts 2 2 

New Jersey 3 3 

Georgia 2 2 

Louisiana 1 1 

Kansas 3 3 

Illinois 2 2 

Alabama 1 1 

South Carolina 5 5 

Vermont 5 5 

Ireland 4 18 23 1 3 49 

England 3 1 4 

Scotland 1 2 3 

Canada 1 1 1 3 

Italy 1 1 

Germany 1 1 

Baden 1 1 

New 

Brunswick 

 1 1 

Bavaria 1 1 

Hanover 2 2 

Switzerland 1 1 

Totals 1295 1858 1640 1499 1306 1418 9,016 

Source: William A. Marsh, 1880 Census of West Virginia 
NERI and GARI Ethnographic Overview and Assessment 

236 

Table 19. Birth Places of Residents in Nicholas County, 1880 Census 

District Grant Hamilton Jefferson Kentucky Summerville Wilderness Totals 

District # 103 104 105 106 107 108 

Population 906 1955 820 1199 1071 1272 7223 

Birth Place 

West 

Virginia 

850 1755 776 1100 911 1145 6537 

Virginia 43 142 15 63 118 95 476 

Maryland 1 1 2 

Ohio 7 2 7 6 3 25 

Kentucky 20 1 12 5 18 

North 

Carolina 

1 1 3 7 1 13 

Illinois 1 1 2 

New York 1 1 1 1 4 

New Jersey 1 1 

Wisconsin 1 1 

Tennessee 1 1 3 5 

Iowa 2 1 3 

Dakota 

Territory 

 1 1 

Pennsylvania 2 10 4 8 18 42 

Michigan 1 1 

Indiana 2 1 2 

Missouri 1 1 

South 

Carolina 

 1 1 

Italy 1 1 

Nova Scotia 4 4 

Scotland 4 4 

England 1 1 1 3 

Switzerland 9 11 1 21 

Ireland 1 3 3 19 2 28 

Prussia 1 1 2 

Sweden 1 4 

Denmark 4 1 

Totals 906 1955 820 1199 1071 1272 7223 

Source: William A. Marsh, 1880 Census of West Virginia 

Table 20. Birth Places Reported in the 1920 Census by Foreign Born Residents of Counties 

Surrounding the New and Gauley Rivers 

County Fayette Nicholas Raleigh Summers 

Total Foreign-born white 3,203 436 2,270 68 

Countries of Birth: 

Austria 293 40 336 60 

Belgium 5 3 

Canada 36 9 31 11 

Czechoslovakia 35 9 26 
NERI and GARI Ethnographic Overview and Assessment

237 

County Fayette Nicholas Raleigh Summers 

England 372 21 177 14 

France 23 2 13 

Germany 144 16 35 4 

Greece 19 47 191 11 

Hungary 121 11 176 1 

Ireland 31 5 12 3 

Italy 873 193 425 16 

Yugoslavia 66 20 

Lithuania 112 12 

Poland 489 26 186 

Rumania 21 1 

Russia 230 17 219 2 

Scotland 112 3 99 3 

Spain 68 2 215 

Switzerland 10 8 7 2 

Syria 39 27 

Wales 32 21 

County Fayette Nicholas Raleigh Summers 

Totals 60,377 20,017 42,482 19,092 

Source: 1920 Census, Volume III, Population 

Table 21. NTFPs of Commercial and/or Domestic Value

Common 

Name 

Latin Name Habitat Winter Spring Summer Fall Properties/ 

Uses 

Status 

in 

NERI 

& 

GARI 

TSN 

Sugar 

maple 

Acer 

saccharum 

 tap for 

syrup 

 Sweetener 28731 

Ramp Allium 

tricoccum 

moist, 

shady, high 

elevations 

 dig 

roots 

 spring tonic 42672 

Sarsparilla Aralia 

nudicaulis 

 “fool’s Seng” 29376 

Butterfly 

weed 

Asclepias 

tuberosa 

dry, sandy, 

rocky, 

sunny, 

edges of 

forests, 

roadsides 

 roots respiratory 

ailments; relief 

of colds, fever, 

flu 

 

Paw paw Asimina 

triloba 

 fruit edible; aka 

“West Virginia 

banana” 

 18117 

Chestnut Castanea 

dentata 

 blighted 19454 

Chinquapin 

chestnut 

Castanea 

pumila 

 nuts formerly 

common 

not 

listed 

Blue 

Cohosh 

Caulophyllum 

thalictroides 

cold coves; 

deep, moist, 

rich 

woodlands 

 roots promote 

menstrual 

flow; treat 

kidney, 

bladder, and 

uterine 

infections 

 
NERI and GARI Ethnographic Overview and Assessment 

238 

Common 

Name 

Latin Name Habitat Winter Spring Summer Fall Properties/ 

Uses 

Status 

in 

NERI 

& 

GARI 

TSN 

Black 

Cohosh 

Cimicifuga 

racemosa 

rich, moist, 

humus; 

open 

woods; cold 

coves 

 roots ease menstrual 

and 

menopausal 

discomfort; 

good for 

nervous 

conditions, 

high blood 

pressure, and 

arthritis 

 

Stone root Collinsonia 

canadensis 

 32474 

Wild yam Dioscorea 

villosa 

moist, wet 

thickets, 

hardwood 

forests 

 roots, 

after 

seed 

has set 

colic, 

indigestion, 

liver problems, 

asthma. Not a 

source of 

naturally 

occurring 

progest-erone. 

 

Witch 

Hazel 

Hamamelis 

virginiana 

light woods, 

forest 

edges, 

rocky 

stream 

banks 

 bark leaves bark, 

leaves 

sooth 

abrasions, 

burns, insect 

bites; treat 

aching joints, 

sore muscles 

 

Wild 

hydrangea 

Hydrangea 

arborescens 

rich woods, 

stream 

banks 

 roots, 

after 

seed 

has set 

bladder and 

kidney 

problems; 

diuretic 

 

Butternut Juglans 

cinerea 

 nuts prized edibles 19250 

Black 

Walnut 

Juglans nigra sunny, rich, 

well 

drained, 

bottomlands 

and hills 

 bark leaves nuts dietary 

supplement 

rich in protein; 

leaves and 

bark used in 

treating skin 

conditions, 

constipation, 

and parasites; 

hulls used for 

dyes 

 

Wild 

lettuce 

Lactuca 

Canadensis 

low damp 

places: 

fields, 

fencerows, 

thickets 

 leaves, 

for 

potherb, 

rich in 

vitamins 

 leaves, 

flowers, 

stems 

sedative; milky 

juice for skin 

irritation 

 

Partridge 

berry 

Mitchella 

repens 

moist 

shaded 

woods, 

rocky 

hillsides 

 stem, 

leaves, 

berries 

 for insomnia, 

as a diuretic, as 

uterine tonic 

 

molly 

moochers 

Morchella sp. old apple 

orchards, 

dying elms, 

poplar 

stands, nut 

trees, ash 

 harvest 

after 

warm 

spring 

rain 

 edible; aka 

“dryland fish,” 

“merkles,” 

“moodgers” 

 
NERI and GARI Ethnographic Overview and Assessment

239 

Common 

Name 

Latin Name Habitat Winter Spring Summer Fall Properties/ 

Uses 

Status 

in 

NERI 

& 

GARI 

TSN 

Red 

mulberry 

Morus rubra fruits Edible 19070 

Catnip Nepeta 

cataria 

waste areas; 

roadsides 

 Leaves, 

flowers, 

while 

blooming 

 respiratory 

ailments; relief 

of colds, 

cramping, 

nervous 

conditions, 

sleeplessness 

 

American 

ginseng 

Panax 

quinquefolia 

 roots 

Passion 

flower 

Passiflora 

incarnata 

fence rows, 

pastures, 

edges of 

woods 

 leaves, 

flowers, 

fruits, 

stems 

 skin injuries, 

insomnia, 

nerves 

 

Pokeweed Phytolacca 

Americana 

Disturbed 

areas 

 tender 

leaves 

 roots spring greens, 

roots for joint 

pain, tumors. 

Poisonous in 

large doses 

 

Mayapple Podophyllum 

peltatum 

rich damp 

open 

woodlands 

 roots, 

late 

summer, 

when 

leaves 

are 

yellow 

 regulate liver 

and bowel 

functions and 

jaundice; wart 

removal 

 

Solomon’s 

Seal 

Polygonatum 

biflorum 

moist, rich, 

shady 

woods, in 

association 

with 

bloodroot 

and 

mayapple 

 roots, 

after 

seed 

has set 

cuts, bruises, 

sores, rashes; 

arthrities, 

indigestion, 

respiratory 

ailments 

 

Wild 

cherry 

Prunus 

serotina 

wide 

ranging 

prefers 

moist, rich 

deep soil. 

 bark, 

before 

sap rises 

 respiratory 

ailments, 

fever, sore 

throat, nerves 

 

Smooth 

sumac 

Rhus glabra disturbed 

areas, 

power lines, 

roadsides 

 roots 

and 

bark 

green 

leaves 

roots 

and 

bark 

respiratory 

ailments 

 

Black 

locust 

Robinia 

pseudoacacia 

 aka “field 

locust;” nurse 

trees for 

reclamation 

 504804 

Yellow 

locust 

Robinia 

pseudoacacia 

x rectissima 

 aka “mountain 

locust”; fence 

posts, rot 

resistant 

 not 

listed 

Blackberry Rubus 

occidentalis 

old fields, 

roadsides 

roots 

(bef. 

Leaves 

appear) 

 roots diarrhea, 

dysentery, 

female tonic 

 24854 
NERI and GARI Ethnographic Overview and Assessment 

240 

Common 

Name 

Latin Name Habitat Winter Spring Summer Fall Properties/ 

Uses 

Status 

in 

NERI 

& 

GARI 

TSN 

Bloodroot Sanguinaria 

canadensis 

cold coves; 

deep, moist, 

rich 

woodlands 

 (mark 

patches) 

 roots toxic; plaque 

inhibitor in 

mouthwash, 

toothpaste 

 

Sassafrass Sassafrass 

albidum 

roadsides, 

fields, 

woods 

root 

bark 

tree 

bark 

leaves bark for tea 

(spring tonic); 

leaves as 

thickener (file) 

for gumbo 

 18158 

Chickweed Stellaria 

media 

moist shade 

around 

dwellings 

 all above 

ground 

parts 

 dietary 

supplement; 

used for 

respiratory 

ailments and 

coughs; weight 

loss. 

 

Comfrey Symphytum 

officianale 

rich, moist, 

stream 

banks, 

fields 

 above 

ground 

parts 

roots healing of 

wounds, 

bruises, ulcers, 

broken bones, 

pneumonia, 

bronchitis 

 

Red clover Trifolium 

pretense 

wide 

ranging in 

welldrained 

loam 

 stem, 

leaves, 

flowers 

 antispasmodic, 

asthma 

treatment, 

possible antitumor agent 

 

Stinking 

Benjamin 

Trillium 

erectum 

shady 

woods; rich, 

moist soils; 

cold coves 

 roots ease 

discomfort in 

childbirth, 

menses, 

menopause; 

respiratory 

treatment 

 43070 

Slippery 

elm 

Ulmus rubra moist rich 

soils, lower 

slopes and 

flood 

plains; dry 

hillsides 

with 

limestone 

soils 

 bark food 

supplement; 

gastrointestinal 

disorders, sore 

throats, cough 

 

Mullein Verbascum 

thapus 

roadside 

biennial 

 flowers, 

leaves 

roots 

(after 

seeds) 

earaches, 

respiratory 

ailments 

 

Culver’s 

Root 

Veronicastrum 

virginicum 

various roots 

when 2-

years -

old or 

older 

liver stimulant, 

laxative (dried 

only; fresh root 

is toxic) 

 
NERI and GARI Ethnographic Overview and Assessment

241 

APPENDIX III: 

TIMELINE OF NEW AND GAULEY RIVER HISTORY 

1641 Upper New River encountered by English explorers Walter Austin, Rice Hoe, Joseph 

Johnson, and Walter Chiles. 

1671 Expedition of Batts and Fallam: discover New River, known until 1750 as Woods River, 

after Abraham Wood, sponsor of the expedition. Explorers who went included: Thomas 

Batts, Thomas Wood, Bob Fallam, Jack Neasam (indentured servant). This river, which 

drained West, afforded an opportunity to claim all the lands it drained for the British 

crown. They named it Woods River. This discovery became a way for England to claim 

the entire Ohio River Valley and its tributaries, inc. New and Kanawha Rivers. Batts and 

Fallam were the first Englishmen to set foot in Fayette County, and reached Kanawha 

Falls on September 16, 1671. 

Late-17th century French traders and other European traders enter the region for extraction of 

roots and furs, and for trade with Shawnee and Delaware people. This was a period of 

trading as well as of land-seeking and generated information later used to settle the region. 

Loop Creek lies along border between Cherokee and Shawnee hunting territory (Cavalier, 

p. 273). 

1674 Gabriel Arthur, a trading agent of Abraham Wood, is captured by Cherokee and taken to 

a Mohetan Village near present day Marmet on the Kanawha River. 

1700s Early on, central WV used as hunting ground by Mingo, Delaware, and Seneca, who 

boasted that they had conquered the Conawese or Conoy people and incorporated them 

into the IC. The Cherokee, based in North Carolina and Tennessee, claimed southern WV 

for their territory. 

1716 Virginia governor Alexander Spotswood opens the present day panhandle of West 

Virginia for settlement. 

1719 Welsh, Scotch-Irish, and Germans enter the panhandle via Pennsylvania and Maryland. 

1731 Morgan ap Morgan moves from Delaware into Berkeley County; Thousands of Germans, 

Scotch-Irish, and English follow, settling the eastern panhandle by 1754. 

1737 John Salling is captured and taken across the New to Cherokee towns. 
NERI and GARI Ethnographic Overview and Assessment 

242 

1742 By way of the Greenbrier Valley, John Peter Salley arrives at New River andfollows a 

trail west of NRG enroute to Ohio River, becoming the first Englishman to set foot in 

present day Raleigh County. 

1744 Treaty of Lancaster sets stage for advance of western settlement. It reduces Iroquois 

presence in West Virginia, but ignores the claims of Cherokee and Shawnee to the 

territory. 

1745–1800 Many settlers cross the divide between Blacksburg and Christiansburg to get to 

the upper New River. 

1745 Woods River Grant issued to James Patton, from Ireland. 

1747 Ohio land company forms, a land speculation venture promoting settlement of transAppalachia. 

1749 Land grants issued to land companies: 500,000 acres bounded by Ohio and Kanawha for 

settling, and for locating a fort (Ohio Land Company). 800,000 acres at line between VA 

and NC (Loyal Land Company). 100,000 along Greenbrier River (Greenbrier Land 

Company). Longhunters Stephen Sewell and Jacob Marlin come into Greenbrier County, 

settling near Marlinton, becoming the first to settle this far west of the Alleghenies. 

Following a dispute between them, Sewell travels across Big and Little Sewell Mountains, 

and is believed to have been killed by Indians. 

1749–1754 General Andrew Lewis surveys 50,000 acres in Greenbrier County, VA (A 

Cherokee guide traveled with him). 

1750 Thomas Walker, of Loyal Company, explores Greenbrier Valley, then Kentucky, via 

Cumberland Gap. 

1751 Christopher Gist explores region, crossing New River at Crump’s Bottom, after following 

a trail to the west of NRG 

1753 Andrew Culbertson, first settler in present day Summers County, establishes settlement at 

Culbertson’s or Crump’s Bottom, now partly submerged under Bluestone Lake. 

1755–1763 French and Indian war; English interested in settlement; French in trade. 

1755 Shawnee massacre at Draper’s Meadows takes place. 

1758 Treaty of Easton: Proprietors of Pennsylvania agree with Six Nations to leave land west 

of the Alleghenies as Indian hunting grounds, not open to settlement, to the 

dissatisfaction of Ohio, Greenbrier, and Loyal land companies. 
NERI and GARI Ethnographic Overview and Assessment

243 

1761 Terms of treaty of Easton extend to trans-Allegheny Maryland and Virginia; settlers start 

poking into Greenbrier region anyway: Archibald Clendenin, 2 miles west of Lewisburg; 

Frederick See and Felty Yocum on Muddy Creek. 

1762 Lord Jeffrey Amherst, for whom Amherst County, VA is named, favors distributing 

blankets contaminated with smallpox to Indians. 

1763 Ottowa attack Detroit; Shawnee and Delaware attack Fort Pitt. Cornstalk destroys See, 

Yocum, and Clendenin homesteads along the Greenbrier River. Proclamation of 1763: 

British negotiation with Cherokee, following French and Indian War, prohibits further 

surveys on Western Waters. 

1768 Treaty of Fort Stanwix extinguishes rights of Six Nations to transallegheny WV, and 

settlers begin moving into Ohio, Monongehela, and Kanawha valleys and intervening hill 

country. Treaty of Hard Labor extinguishes Cherokee rights to WV, except for 

southwestern part of the state, bounded by the New and Kanawha Rivers. 

1769–1777—Settlers pour into the Greenbrier and Kanawha Valley region, mostly Scotch-Irish 

from Virginia, several generations removed from Pennsylvania. 

1770 James Graham builds house on Greenbrier, between Hinton and White Sulphur Springs, 

in prime Shawnee hunting territory (Donnelly). James Ellison comes to Culbertson’s 

Bottom. The Indian Kiashuta tells George Washington about the impassibility of a certain 

thousand foot deep canyon. Levi Morris comes from Alexandria, VA, and settles on 

Armstrong Creek, the first permanent white settler in present day Fayette County 

(Cavalier, 302). 

1771 John Floyd discovers natural gas in the Kanawha Valley 

1773 Walter Kelly, also called the first white settler in Fayette County, is killed by Indians for 

trespassing. William Morris then settles at Cedar Grove on the mouth of Kelly’s Creek 

(Kanawha County). 

1774 Andrew Lewis (son of John Lewis, from Ulster) leads militia along trail east of the New 

River Gorge to Point Pleasant, where they defeat Chief Cornstalk and the Shawnee. 

Lewisburg is named for Andrew Lewis; William Morris becomes the first Englishman to 

settle in Kanawha County, in Cedar Grove, mouth of Kelly’s Branch. 

1775 Thomas Farley, Sr. settles in Culbertson’s Bottom (later Harmon’s Bottom). Builds 

“Farley’s Fort” above Bull Falls and Warford Ferry. Mitchell Clay settles his family 

along the Bluestone River, in Mercer County, on 800 acres. 
NERI and GARI Ethnographic Overview and Assessment 

244 

1776 Western VA petitions the Continental Congress for statehood. 

1777 Warfare with Indians escalates 

1779 John Cooke, veteran of Point Pleasant and Revolutionary War, who served at Fort Lee 

against Indians, is the first to settle in present day Wyoming County, with a corn title. His 

sons organize Wyoming County, out of what was then Montgomery County. 

1780 A man named Brooks, with VA land grant, settles downstream of Hinton, near Brooks 

Falls and Creek on the New River, which are named for him. 

1783 Shawnee Indians attack Mitchell Clay’s home, killing two children. Farley helps pursue 

the attackers to Boone County; killing several. Farley then sells Farley Fort to John 

Burnside, and moves to Walker’s Creek in present day Giles County. 

1784 GW proposes James River and Kanawha canal, a waterway that would link tidewater VA 

with the Gulf of Mexico. It is never completed, because the railroad outcompetes it. 

1785 VA legislature, in order to bring western settlers into national economic orbit, approves 

the James River Company, which would become the James River and Kanawha 

Company, charged with forming a road to connect James River to Kanawha Falls. 

Earliest recorded land survey of 40,680 acres is made for Henry Banks, a wealthy 

Richmond merchant who provided ships to the colonists in the revolutionary war. His 

grant, the largest ever made in Fayette County, includes lands along the New River. Over 

the next five years, numerous patents were made along the creeks and tributaries of the 

New River Gorge – Manns, Glade, Laurel, High, Meadow, and Buffalo Creeks, Big 

Sewell, Round Bottom, and so forth. Settlers coming in are mostly of English, German, 

and Scoth-Irish descent, and mostly from the upper New River Valley and Piedmont 

areas of Virginia, as well as Pennsylvania. 

Late-18th century Isaac Ballengee settles in Hinton vicinity. Earliest known settlement of 

Nicholas County began – via the Pocahontas trail, which connected Greenbrier Valley 

with area drained by Kanawha River. 

1786 Koontz New Road opens from Lewisburg, extends toward Charleston. Passes through 

Ansted, follows Rich Creek to Gauley River at Jodie, crosses Gauley, up Twenty Mile 

Creek, thence to Charleston. Also known as the Midland Trail (Route 60), this is the 

precursor of the James River and Kanawha Turnpike (Donnelly). The Old State Road left 

this route to pass through Vandalia via Bowyer’s Ferry, then to Cotton Hill and 

Montgovmerry’s Ferry. Both roads influenced the settlement of Fayette County. William 
NERI and GARI Ethnographic Overview and Assessment

245 

and Sarah Austin are granted 3,062 acres (within Banks allotment) at junction of Sugar 

and Dunloop Creeks (Mount Hope). 

1787 John Alderson organizes Old Greenbrier Baptist Church at Alderson 

1787–1789 Joint patents are issued to Philadelphians Warder and Parker for 12,000 acres of 

land on New, Meadow, and Gauley Rivers. 

1788 First permanent settlement built at Charleston 

1790 Old State Road, connecting the James River and Kanawha Falls, is completed. Census 

this year shows 55,000 people living in present day WV. Families of James Lykens, 

William Parrish, James Taylor, and Bailey Woods settle at present site of Ansted. 

1791 Henry Morris, son of William, is first to settle on Peter’s Creek, which he names for his 

father’s slave, Peter Morris. 

1792 Daughters of Henry Morris, the son of William, are killed by Indians who are assisting a 

white man, Simon Girty in an act of revenge, near Lockwood in Nicholas County 

(Donnelly, 39). Conrad Young and Edward McLung settle on Peter’s Creek at this time. 

1793 Tom Smith settles in Cross Lanes, then Twenty Mile Creek (Nicholas County) 

1795 Arbuckle brothers, hunters and ginseng diggers, settle in what is now Minden; William 

Johnson, a Revolutionary War Veteran from Bath County, Virginia, settles at head of 

Peter’s Creek. His sons later settle Johnson Branch (formerly Gunnoe Camp Branch) on 

Loop Creek (Donnelly). 

1796 William Blake, Sr., purchases 3,062 acres in Mount Hope, from William and Sarah 

Austin, part of Henry Banks survey. 331 acres are granted to William Richmond, 

Revolutionary War veteran, at Sandstone Falls; Old Stone Church built in Lewisburg 

(Presbyterian) the oldest continuously operating unrestored church west of the 

Alleghenies. 

1798 Peter Bowyer builds a cabin in the New River Gorge. The first recorded settlement is 

made in NRG, at the mouth of Mann’s Creek, and is called Bowyer’s Ferry; the 

beginnings of Sewell, which would be the most important place between Hinton and 

Montgomery, where the ferry would shuttle soldiers from both sides of the Civil War 

across the river. Andrew Lykens purchases land on Loup Creek (Page). Bluestone Baptist 

Church is organized in Jumping Branch 

Early-19th century Ben Taylor settles on Garden Ground, near present day Glen Jean. Hatter 

and farmer (Donnelly, 26). 
NERI and GARI Ethnographic Overview and Assessment 

246 

1800 Old State Road extended to Ohio River. 78,000 people now live west side of the 

Alleghenies. 

1805 William Blake is first settler in what is now known as Mount Hope, on 3,062 acres, 

within the Henry Banks survey on waters of Loup Creek and New River. 

1806 Peter Bowyer licensed by VA to operate ferry across river connecting road from 

Fayetteville to Midland Trail (Rt. 60) (still the only settler in Fayetteville, though Seth 

Huse is supposed to have been the first) First salt well drilled in Kanawha Valley 

1808 William Richmond is first to settle in present day Raleigh County 

1810 John Spangler purchases land on Loup Creek (Kincaid). During this decade, Isaac Abbott 

migrates to Beckwith area from Andover Mass, sets up basket making industry, using 

withes growing along stream bank. Peter Bowyer is the only settler in Fayetteville 

(Donnelly). Establishes water-powered grist mill at Oak Hill. Oil discovered in WV. 

1812 Aaron Stockton (NJ) settles at Glen Ferris (known as Stockton until 1895) Runs a tavern 

there. Samuel Pack applies for permit to operate a ferry on New River; James Kincaid, 

from Roaring River, Tennessee, settles near mouth of Cane Branch. 

1814 Old State Road is chief route for people traveling west from southern and middle counties 

of Virginia. It connects Lewisburg, Bowyer’s Ferry, Fayetteville, Cotton Hill, and 

Kanawha Falls. 

1815 Sixty-three families live in Raleigh County, on Beaver Creek, Cooper’s Creek, Joe’s 

Ridge, Glade Creek, Piney Creek, Little Falls of New River, and on Clear Fork, and 

Sycamore Fork of Coal River). 

1816 Richard Tyree moves family from Lewisburg to settle along Old State Road, five miles 

east of Bowyer’s Ferry. Apple orchards still there in 1966 (Donnelly). 

1817 State Assembly authorizes the establishment of a road from Montgomery’s Ferry along 

Gauley to intersect Old State Road between Fleshman plantation (Pembroke Hollow) and 

Big Sewell Mountain. John Anderson, from Scotland via Virginia, settles in present day 

Maplewood. 

1818 Completion of National (Cumberland Road) along northern boundary of present day 

West Virginia promotes more settlement. First commercial coal mine in what is now 

West Virginia is opened at Fairmont. Sometime between this year and 1825, Abraham 

Vandal obtains property in Fayetteville to establish Vandalia. Congress passes an act 

pensioning revolutionary war soldiers. One was James Sims, buried at Swiss. John Jones, 
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247 

revolutionary war soldier, sells his land on Jones Branch of Peter’s Creek (purchased 

from William James after the revolutionary war) to Isaac Fitzwater. Nicholas County is 

formed, named for governor of Virginia: Wilson Cary Nicholas. 

1820 Summersville is established by Virginia assembly, named for Judge Lewis Summers (see 

bibliography for his historical works). West Virginia’s white population numbers 177,000. 

William Blake settles at Oak Hill, near site of present Lundale Farm. Luther Warner 

settles at Beckwith, and begins operating a mill on Laurel Creek. 

1824 Samuel Tyree constructs Old Stone House, at foot of Sewell Mountain. Laurel Creek 

(Cotton Hill) settled by Warner family from Massachusetts. Grist mill operates there. 

Cassidy family settles upstream of Warners. (Kennedy Cassidy becomes a Union 

sympathizer in Civil War, and dies in confederate prison in Richmond). Bartholomew 

Ramsey, from Union in Monroe County, establishes gristmill near present-day Leander. 

Jessie and Mahala Treadway sell John Lykens place at Page to Andrew Lykens, and 

move to Dunloop Creek. (Page named for Captain W.N. Page, manager of Loop Creek 

Colliery Company at Page.) 

1825 John Bayes is first to settle in Nallen, then known as Miller’s Ferry, after the Millers who 

lived across the Meadow River from the Bayes. 

1826 Samuel Tyree moves family to Old Stone House, in Clifftop, operating it as a tavern 

along the James River and Kanawha Turnpike. James Kelly is living on Beard’s Fork 

(Cavalier). 

1827 Jacob Smith settles in present day Quinnimont. George Hunter, from New England, buys 

house from Joseph Skaggs in what will become Ansted. John and William Johnson, sons 

of a revolutionary war soldier who settled on Peters Creek, move from the Gauley River 

region to settle on Loop Creek. 

1828 Jacob Kelly operates a grist mill at Robson on Loup Creek. Mulberry School is built on 

Jenkins Branch (named for Jenkins, who lived there). The school was named after a large 

mulberry tree that grew beside it, and the branch came to be known as Mulberry Branch 

after the school, near the mouth of Bee Fork, and the head of Settle Fork. 

1829 Charles Bibb settles at Bowyer’s Ferry. Counties west of Alleghenies protest VA 

legislation that favors slaveholding counties. 
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248 

1830 Wheeling Gazette proposes separate state. Henry and Joe Haynes, from Monroe County, 

and Robert Nickell settle at Russellville on opposite sides of Meadow River, sometime 

during this period. 

1831 John Hinton lays out town of Hinton on land of his wife, Avis Gwinn Hinton. James 

Hodge Miller settles at Gauley Bridge. Was born 1805 in Greenbrier County. Miles 

Manser comes from Cincinnati Ohio and builds boats with Elisha Williams at Kanawha 

Falls. William Kincaid granted four acres in present day Robson, on Loop Creek. 

Virginia legislature begins passing laws to protect “tomahawk rights,” allowing settlers to 

perfect title by claiming adverse possession and forfeiture of title for tax delinquency. 

1832 Abraham Arthur purchases acreage in present day Minden. Eli Wickell builds tannery 

and gristmill at Russellville. 

1834 Tyree Tavern opens in Ansted, in house owned by George Hunter. Abner and James 

Settle purchase 57 acres on Beard’s Fork from James and Nancy Kelly. 

1835 Sewell P.O. opens 

1836 Alfred Beckley moves family to property named “Wildwood,” in what would become 

Beckley. 

1837 Charles Bibb, from Amherst County, Virginia, purchases 300 acres at Gatewood, named 

after his wife, Elizabeth Gatewood. Their daughter Sarah marries Captain William D. 

Thurmond, also of Amherst County. 

1838 Giles, Fayette and Kanawha Turnpike authorized by VA Assembly, to connect Giles 

County, VA, to Fayetteville, via Beckley, Mount Hope, and Oak Hill. 

1840 William Humphrey settles at Pax, on waters of Paint Creek. Pax = corruption of Pack for 

whom Pack’s Branch is named (Donnelly); formerly known as Paintsville because of 

trees painted by Indians (Cavalier 356). 

1843 Bibbs, Thurmonds, and others from Amherst County, Virginia, organize a Baptist Church 

in the Salem section of Gatewood, naming it after the Fancy Hill section of Amherst 

County, where they came from. This is the forerunner of the present-day Bethel Baptist 

Church in Oak Hill (Cavalier, 338). 

1844 Philip and Mary Thurmond, from Amherst County, VA, purchase tract on Arbuckle 

Creek from Abraham Arthur. 

1846 Sometime after this date Daniel Griffin, Caleb Lively, and Adam Hutchinson families 

settle in the Meadow Bridge vicinity. Parker Foulke, of Philadelphia, visits the Foulke 
NERI and GARI Ethnographic Overview and Assessment

249 

Meadow River Lands (12,000 acres), and develop relationships locally, hiring the Bayes 

family to manage the property. Henry Gentry, from Albemarle County, settles near 

Layland, at head of Laurel Creek. Squire John Gwinn settles in Meadow Bridge. 

1849 Llewellyn W. Jones, a tobacco planter from Amherst County, Virginia, establishes 

Sanger on the Dunn Survey on Meadow Fork Creek. He builds his house not from logs 

but from bricks fashioned from a nearby field. His slave hacks out the road. He is 

followed by William Bibb (who sells his share to Henry Sanger), J.W. Stone, J. Garland 

Hurt. 

1850s–60s Coal is mined in Kanawha field, using slaves leased from planters in Franklin 

and adjacent counties, as well as slaves already working in the salt manufacturing centers 

of Kanawha and Mercer County. Antebellum agrarian woods economy is characteristic 

for most households. Germans in particular seem intent on preserving soil fertility, 

sheltering livestock, practicing conservation. 

1850 White population in present day West Virginia counties numbers 302,000; slave 

population 20,500; free blacks, about 2,000. New Englanders come to New Haven with 

Captain J.H. Hopping, belong to a religious group called “Spiritualists.” Only three 

families live in Oak Hill at this time: Bowyer, Jr.; Blake, Jr.; and Charles Windsor. Jack 

McCoy runs a mill at Glen Jean. 

1850s Sometime in this decade the Harrahs, Gwinns, and Wards move onto War Ridge, now 

Backus Mountain, to occupy a tract of the Mann Patent. 

1855 John Gwinn purchases Round Bottom from Isaac Sanner (owner since 1808). Maurice 

and Margaret Sullivan, from County Kerry in Ireland, purchase 435 acres from John and 

Sara Guinn. 

1859 The first miners are settled at Cannelton, worked by slaves previously and up until the 

Civil War (Cavalier, 119). 

1860 Slave population under 18,000. Free blacks: ca. 3,000 

Civil War Captain Thurmond, a confederate loyal to Virginia, burns the Gwinn farm 

because Lewis Gwinn (Mabel Gwinn’s husband’s grandfather) was sympathetic to the 

Union. Other Amherst County settlers in the Gatewood vicinity join Thurmond in raids 

against the Yankee sympathizers. Three families live at Gauley Bridge: Millers, Hills, 

Paddlefords. The Old Stone House is used as Confederate headquarters by Robert E. Lee 

and Rosecranz. 
NERI and GARI Ethnographic Overview and Assessment 

250 

1861 Civil war battles at (Kessler’s) Cross Lanes and Carnifex Ferry. Western counties of 

Virginia supply 32,000 troops to Union, 10,000 to Confederates. Fayette County supports 

the confederacy. General John B. Floyd attacks Rosencrantz Yankees at Gauley Bridge. 

1862 Yankees burn the town of Jumping Branch. VA consents to formation of new state out of 

the western counties. The Union army defeats confederates at Lewisburg. 

1863 West Virginia becomes a state. Population of whites: 355,000. Slaves: 13,000. Free 

blacks: 3,000. Blume given a farm in Lookout after the Civil War; originally part of the 

Alderson Tract. 

1865 Reuben James, originally from England (1830s), moves to Beard’s Fork from Franklin 

County, Virginia. Beard’s Fork was named after a ginsenger/hunter who lived in a cave 

along the branch (Cavalier, 104). 

1869 Railroad construction begins in New River Gorge. 

1870 Charter Oak and Iron Company builds an Iron Furnace at Quinnimont; William (former 

Confederate soldier) and James Prince (cousins of Maria Prince Beckley, Alfred’s wife) 

purchase 300 acres of ground from Alfred Beckley in anticipation of a railroad station at 

Prince. Fud McGinnis, an attorney, acquires part of William Blake’s holdings, including 

what is now Kilsyth. He names the school in the town Mount Hope. The district between 

Oswald and Thurmond is named “Egypt” because of the luxuriant growth of wild pea 

vines, on which settlers grazed their cattle. Robert Gore conveys Cash’s Hill (near Island 

Creek) to Sarah Gore – a freed mulatto. Col. George Imboden moves to Ansted, to open 

Gauley Mountain Coal Company Mines, from Christmas Creek, Augusta County, VA. 

He is married to Mary Frances Tyree, Col. Tyree’s daughter. 

1871 Arnold Middleburg opens first store at Sewell; builds houses and paints them red, hence 

“Red Row” 

1872 Joseph Beury leaves Pennsylvania, traumatized by violence from the Molly McGuires. 

He settles on Laurel Creek of New River. Civil War Colonel George W. Imboden 

purchases land in Ansted for David T. Ansted, a London Geologist. Early settlers in 

Ansted, previously known as Woodsville, include Skaggs, Westlakes, and Tyrees. (The 

mother of Stonewall Jackson is buried in Westlake cemetery) 

1873 Railroad completed through New River Gorge. Quinnimont is established by Col. Joseph 

L. Beury, and the first coal is mined there. P.O. established at Hinton. John Nuttall, also 

from Pennsylvania, opens Nuttall mine on Keeney’s Creek, second mine to ship coal out 
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of the gorge. Nuttall bottom was a company town with 110 houses. Nuttall Top was 

independent, people owned their homes. Short Creek mine was opens. P.O. is established 

at Dimmock. The Financial Panic of 1873 slows development. The first branch line is 

built along Laurel Creek. British Chemist Robert Angus Smith links sulfuric acid in black 

coal smoke with acid rain in Manchester (Shabecoff 1998:187). David Ansted, English 

geologist, moves to Fayette County, purchasing 900 acres from Tyree, Westlake, and 

others. He chairs the London-based Gauley-Kanawha Coal Company, formed by Civil 

War veteran General John D. Imboden. Ansted P.O is established with James Taylor as 

postmaster (Cavalier). 

1874 Longdale Coal Company opens town and mine at Sewell. Prince brothers open the Prince 

Brothers General Store, a private enterprise in a coal dominated economy. 

1875 Central Land Company acquires land for settlement of Hinton. Martin Blume founds 

Fayette Coal and Coke Company and opens the Fayette Mine, establishing a P.O. this 

year. 

1876 With his brother and with Jenkin Jones, Col. Joseph Beury opens a mine and company 

town at Fire Creek. 

Late 1870s Beury opens mines at Ansted, Hawks Nest, and Gauley Mountain. Bowyer’s 

Ferry is renamed Sewell’s Depot, after frontiersman Stephen Sewell. Samuel Dixon 

emigrates from England to New River. African Americans are brought into New RiverKanawha coalfields to augment the labor force. 

1877 Fire Creek P.O. opens. Samuel Dixon comes to Fayette County, and works for his uncle, 

Fred Faulkner. 

1879 Knights of Labor Local is established at Fire Creek. Fire Creek miners join strikers in the 

Kanawha coal field. 

1880s–1920s: “Golden Age of Coal Mining” 

1880 Stone Cliff Collieries company opens the Stone Cliff mine, town, and coke works. John 

Nuttal builds the company town of Nuttalburg. Hinton incorporates. Prince passenger 

station opens. Beury opens Caperton mine, with John Cooper at Ellen (or Elm). In the 

1880s Knights of Labor would establish a local assembly at Caperton. WV population: 

Whites 422,000; about 18,000 blacks, 17,000 foreign born (60% of foreigners are 

German/Swiss; 30% are from Ireland). During this decade, Foulkes heirs decide to take 
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up farming on their Meadow River lands. The first major coal strike draws state militia to 

Hawk’s Nest. 

1881 Mine and town of Beury open. George Caperton opens town of Caperton at site of “Min 

car”. George Henry Caperton was from Amherst County, Virginia, educated at VA 

Polytechnic Institute and president of numerous coal companies. White students went to 

Ansted High School. Black students went to Simmons High in Montgomery. Col. Beury 

opens Echo Mine. Frederick Kimball of Germantown, PA (Phila.) joins other 

Philadelphians to purchase Atlantic, Mississippi, and Ohio Railroad. Kimball creates the 

Norfolk and Western Railroad and opens a New River branch in 1881–82. 

1882 Noah Jenkins and Mr. Bramwell open Stone Cliff mine as Stone Cliff Collieries 

Company. 

1883 Mines at Sewell Top exhausted. Longdale Company relocates workers and houses to 

Clifftop to mine coking coal. Manns Creek railroad is started. 

1884 UMWA holds a New River district convention at Sewell. Longdale Iron Company 

purchases the Old Stone House, also known as “Halfway House,” halfway between 

Lewisburg and Charleston two miles from Clifftop, on western foot of Big Sewell 

Mountain (Donnelly). Philip Thurmond migrates to Minden, finds Arbuckle brothers 

living there in a log cabin. Joseph Lively comes from Monroe County, and is the first to 

settle in Lively. 

1885 Central Mine is opened between Fire Creek and Beury, by Major Gordon and Mr. Seal, 

owners of the Central Coal Company. This company is later acquired by Beechwood 

Mines operating at Quinnimont, Stone Cliff, Echo, Fire Creek, Sewall, Caperton, 

Keeneys Creek, Nuttallburg, Fayette Station, Elmo, Sunnyside, and Gaymont. A foreign 

syndicate, including Williams Edwards of England, Kenelm Digby of Paris, and 

Symington McDonald of Scotland, acquires coal rights at Mount Carbon (Adena Village) 

(Cavalier, 317). 

1886 Longdale builds an eight and half mile narrow gauge railroad that follows the Glade 

Creek Ravine, which is operated by Babcock Coal and Coke. It is later extended three 

more miles to Landisburg. More than 1000 black men work in the Fayette County 

coalfields. Foulkes plants a walnut grove. 
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1887 Beechwood Coal and Coke Company opens Beechwood (which will become Claremont). 

Rush Run Coal Company is formed by J. Fred Effinger, and company town and mine are 

opened at Rush Run. 

1888 Alaska Coal and Coke Co. opens Alaska mine. Beury P.O. opens. 

Rosa Etta Huddleston, of Boomer, “granddaughter of three of the wealthiest families of 

antebellum Virginia” marries Sheldon Thomas Nutter. Boomer, “a corner of the family 

estate since 1765,” is named for John Boomer Huddleston (Cavalier, 115). 

1889 Beechwood Coal and Coke Company builds the town of Claremont. An iron truss bridge 

is built to connect South Fayette and Fayette. Central Mine is renamed Claremont Mine. 

New mines opened since 1885 include Alaska, Claremont, and Central. As these were 

mainline operations, no branch railroads were needed. Arbuckle Creek subdivision is 

built, connecting Minden to Thurmond. 

1890s Whipple Company Store is constructed. Red Ash town and mine open for business. Low 

Moor Iron Company opens mines at Kaymoor (top and bottom), and expands the 

construction of branch and narrow-gauge railroads. Smallpox victims are quarantined at 

Red Ash Island. 

1890 Knights of Labor National Trade Assembly local is established at Beury, with N. Miller 

appointed as organizer for the New River district. United Mineworkers is organized, the 

beginning of UMWA Local 988. Hawk’s Nest Subdivision is built, and a standard gauge 

railroad constructed 3.4 miles along Mill Creek from Hawk’s Nest. 

1891 James Kay and James Laing form Royal Coal and Coke Company, and open mine in Fire 

Creek seam at Royal, the first mine to open in Raleigh County. Piney Creek Branch line 

will be developed by Kay and Laing. 75 houses are constructed and 80 miners employed. 

Keeney’s Creek subdivision built, five miles from mouth to top (deep switchbacks 

increased the distance). Lawrence William Nuttall discovers Carex fraseri at Nuttallburg. 

(also collects 1400 kinds of fungus in Fayette County; 980 specimens he collected came 

from between Thurmond and Cotton Hill). Ansted incorporates, with George Imboden as 

mayor. 

1892 Farmers along White Oak Creek, including Joseph Hugart, Michael Bragg, Charles 

Huddleston, Charles Blacke, and Llewellyn Hundley, sell their mineral rights to White 

Oak Fuel Company. 
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1892–1896 John Nuttall builds Keeneys Creek Branch Line to serve a string of mines 

including Boone, Winona, Dubree, and Lookout. 

1893 Nuttallburg P.O. opens. Knights of Labor local is established at Rush Run. McKell 

persuades the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad to build a branch line from Thurmond to 

McDonald. Magyars and Slovaks are brought in by Glen Jean company from 

Pennsylvania. Dunloup Creek subdivision, linking Thurmond with Glen Jean and 

McDonald (11 miles) is completed. The State of West Virginia attacks Foulkes family’s 

rights to their Meadow River property. Foulkes successfully defends his claim. Red Star 

mine is named by C.T. and G.W. Jones, of Oak Hill, descendants of Llewellyn Jones, 

after the town of Star in Virginia. 

1894 McDonald Colliery Company opens. Jacob Coxey’s army of unemployed workers sleep 

in coke ovens at Nuttalburg enroute to a demonstration in Washington, D.C. during the 

depression of this period. Fire Creek miners are leaders in UMWA sponsored strike. 

Southside Subdivision is built, connecting Thurmond to Bridge Junction (near Sewell) 

12.6 miles. 

1893–1894 Nuttallburg Coal and Coke Company opens Fern Creek mine. Gauley Branch (8 

miles) is constructed connecting Gauley Station to mouth of Twenty-Mile Creek. George 

Holland opens Ballenger Mine at Winona, on land that had been granted to pioneering 

farmer Robert M. Holliday. 

1895 Drexels and other Philadelphia families own coal acreage in Raleigh County. 

1896 Mulvane (after Irish surname) is the name of present-day Ramsey 

1897 UMWA organizes national strike. Mother Jones and John Mitchell come to WV. 

1898 Chapman Coal and Coke builds Elverton (or Branch Coal and Coke). Blue Jay lumber 

company builds Glade Creek and Raleigh Railroad branch, 13 miles up Glade Creek from 

Glade Station. Samuel Dixon names Longacre mines after his hometown in Yorkshire, 

England. W.N. Page of Ansted starts Deepwater Railway, which runs four miles from 

Roson to Deepwater. 

1899 W.P. “Paddy” Rend opens two mines on Arbuckle Creek at Rend (now Minden) 

Chicago’s smoke abatement legislation motivates increased mining of “smokeless coal.” 

Sam Dixon opens mine at Scarbro (named for a town in England). Carlisle Mine opens 

(named for town in Scotland) under White Oak Fuel. 

 Low Moor Iron Company opens Kaymoor. 
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 McKendree Miners Hospital is established by State legislature on lands formerly owned 

by a small lumber company. 

1900–1925 Immigrants arrive from Hungary, Poland, Italy, and Slavic countries. 

Early 1900s Dunedin Coal Company builds town of Terry. Queen Victoria owns Caperton, 

operated by Victoria Coal and Coke. Prudence mining camp opens. Kaymoor 1 and 2 

mines open. 

Explosion at Red Ash kills 46 men 

1900 Beury has population of 500. Nuttalburg has 350. Michigan Coal Company is established. 

McKell Coal and Coke opens Derryhale, Kilsyth, Oswald, Graham, and Tamroy mines 

over next few years. A black man named William Lee, accused of raping a white woman, 

is lynched in Hinton. 

1901 Piney Creek Branch of Railroad constructed, 13 miles up Piney Creek from bridge above 

Prince. Dunglen hotel is constructed (100 rooms). Rend Branch is constructed, covering 

4.5 miles to connect with Loup Creek Subdivision, Thurmond, to Minden, along 

Arbuckle Creek. Old road bed is a segment of Mary Draper Ingles Trail. Fayette County 

citizen Morris Harvey makes large gifts to Barboursville College, which changes its 

name to Morris Harvey College. Morris Harvey House is still in Harvey, West Virginia, 

above the New River Gorge. 

1902 Ephraim-Dundee Coal Company builds town of Thayer for Buffalo-Slater Mine. Mostly 

white Americans and Russians live there (Cavalier, 421). National Guard troops come to 

keep peace during mine strike, and sleep in coke ovens between Rush Run and Red Ash. 

Unions are established at Mount Hope and Thayer. Coal operators defeat the UMW 1902 

organizing campaign. Miners at Royal strike and seven are killed in a gunfight at 

Stanaford. Old timers blame this strike for taking down Sewell (Cavalier). UMWA 

activity stops for 10 years. Immigrant population from southern and southeastern Europe 

begins to increase. White Oak Railway commences to connect White Oak Junction on 

Loup Creek to Lochgelly. Mother Jones campaigns to organize 7,000 miners in Kanawha 

Valley. Mulvane changed to Ramsey, after settlers living there, near Shade Creek 

Mountain. 

1903 Thurmond Depot is constructed. Col. Beury dies. John Nuttall sells Nuttall and Keeney 

Creek mines. Brown Mine, opened by Eli Taylor, David and John Boone and Dr. Brown 
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is later known as South Nuttall. Oak Hill, originally at Hilltop, incorporates, naming itself 

after the large tree that grew on Hilltop. 

1904 McKell dies while in Atlantic City, NJ. Arbuckle branch line is completed, connecting 

Rend and Thurmond. Laurel Creek Branch is extended 6.3 miles to Layland. A fungus 

from Asia strikes chestnut trees in New York City, and spreads rapidly through the 

forests of the Eastern United States. Dixon partners with New England businessmen to 

form New River Company. 

1905 Edward J. Berwind, of Philadelphia, purchases Rend property on Arbuckle Creek. Name 

of Rend is changed to Minden, after Berwind’s home town on Weser River in Westfalen, 

Germany. A mine explosion at Rush Run claims the lives of 24, including 11 rescue 

workers. Catholic Church established in area, celebrating first masses at the Opera House 

in Glen Jean. It was called the Mission on Loup Creek, tended from Hinton (Cavalier, 

339). Missions developed from here to serve Catholics in Scarbro, Minden, and Kilsyth. 

1906 White Oak Railway, 10.3 miles long, is finished. 

1907 Justis Collins’ Whipple Colliery Company mine explodes. 

 Stuart mine explodes, killing 84. The name of Stuart is changed to Lochgelly, to 

dissociate the mine from the disaster, facilitating the hiring of new workers. New River 

Coal Company opens Sprague Mine. Meadow River Lumber Company opens Sewell 

Valley Railroad, connecting Meadow Creek and Sewell Creek to Rainelle. 

1908 Parral mine explodes, killing 23. The name of Parral is changed to Summerlee, to 

dissociate the mine from the disaster, facilitating the hiring of new workers. Immigrant 

populations in coalfields: Italians (1,500), Magyars (780), Poles (750), English (375), 

Slovaks (350), Germans (350) (Unrau, 38). 

1909 Six miners are killed in an explosion at Beury (Echo Mine). UMWA charters locals at 

Stanaford, Royal Ansted, Signal Knob, and Caperton. The locals are not recognized by 

the operators. 

1910 Claremont has 600 residents, Thayer 500, Fayette 400, Stone Cliff 520. Mount Hope is 

destroyed in a fire. 

1910s Sewell Colliery owns Caperton, calls it “Sugar Camp.” New River Colliery Company 

operates Red Ash. There is a payroll robbery on the Ferry operating between Dimmock 

and Rush Run. The coke industry declines. Labor battles with industry escalate. 
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1912–1913 Samuel Dixon’s New River Company is absorbed into Ajax (owned by English 

investors). Outside financial interests absorb local coal operators throughout this period 

of consolidation. Violent confrontations between labor and management at Paint 

Creek/Cabin Creek lead to the bloodiest labor conflict in U.S. history. Companies put 

down the strikers with “company thugs” – Baldwin-Felts guards who evict miners and 

families, destroy their furniture and lacerate the tents provided for them by the UMWA 

with machine gun fire. These events form the backdrop for the armed march on Blair 

Mountain in 1921. 

1913 District 17 forms at Montgomery. McKell builds Kanawha, Glen Jean and Eastern 

Railroad (KGJ&E), a fifteen mile spur connecting Glen Jean to MacDonald, and 

Macdonald to Tamroy at head of Dunloup. 

1914 Alaska mine closes. Explosion at Eccles (on the other side of Beckley) kills 174 miners. 

1915 Layland Number Three mine explodes, killing 112 men. District 29 forms at Fayetteville. 

McKell extends KGJ&E through tunnel at Pax to connect with the Virginian Railroad 

because the C&O freight charges were too high. 

1916 Scarbro tipple is constructed. Brooklyn, also known as Finlow, is operated by Scotia Coal 

and Coke Company. Brown, between Elverton and S. Nuttall, is operated by Brown Coal 

Company, which also operated at South Nuttall. The Sunnyside mine is abandoned. 

Miller’s Ferry is renamed “Nallen” in honor of J.I. Nallen, general manager of the 

Wilderness Lumber Company (Cavalier, 330). 

1917 WWI –West Virginia loses 624 soldiers (out of 45,000 who serve). More men have been 

killed in the mines than at war. The Village of Beard’s Fork opens. Loup Creek Colliery 

has an office there. There is a black school and a white school there. 

1919 Fire Creek has 260 people, Rush Run 210, Elverton 200, Sewell has 410, and McKendree 

61. Union locals have been established at Lochgelly, Summerlee, Layland, Laurel Creek, 

Terry, Royal, and Ansted. 

1920s E.G. Blume Coal Company operates Fayette mine. McKendree Road, built from 

Thurmond to Prince, provides automobile access to hospital. Previously the only access 

was by railroad. Corporate mergers sweep Fayette and Raleigh counties. Berwind 

White’s New River and Pocahontas Consolidated Coal and Coke Company becomes one 

of largest conglomerates. Following WWI, hard roads and the introduction of automobile 

make it possible to live farther away from the mines, and the company towns begin to 
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dissolve as mines work out and as remaining miners move to the plateaus. Planned 

developments begin to appear. Private enterprises begin meeting needs of population. 

The railroad begins to decline in significance locally. 

1920 Dimmock P.O. closes. Nuttall sells Nuttalburg mine to Henry Ford and his son Edsel 

Ford. The sawmill town of Hamlet is started. 

1921 Thousands of armed miners (2,000 of them WWI veterans) assemble at Marmet on Lens 

Creek. Their plan is to march across Blair Mountain in order to liberate Logan County 

from the mine-guard system paid for by coal operators to help Sheriff Don Chafin keep 

the union out of Logan County. Many wear red bandanas, affiliating with laborers who 

were historically known as “rednecks” in Great Britain (Fischer). President Warren G. 

Harding sends 2,500 troops and fourteen bombers to put down the uprising. A road is 

built connecting Thurmond to Glen Jean. Taxis start operating between Thurmond and 

Beckley. 

1922 Kaymoor Number Two mine closes. 

1923 Sun Sand Company opens a quarry on top of Thayer Mountain. Longdale Iron Company 

sells its operations to Babcock Coal and Coke. Elverton Mine, operated by Branch Coal 

and Coke Company, produces 71,809 tons of coal. Michigan mine is operated by New 

River Export Smokeless Coal Company. Elmo is operated by Elmo Mining Company, 

Ajax is operated by Ajax Coal Company. Scotia Coal and Coke is operating Rush Run. 

Babcock Lumber closes. 

1924 Kaymoor is purchased from Lowmoor by New River and Pocahontas Consolidated Coal 

Company, a subsidiary of the Philadelphia-based Berwind-White Corporation. 

1925 Beury P.O. closes. (“Beury went down before Fire Creek. We had to go to Fire Creek to 

get our groceries,” states Darsie Johns.) 

1926 New River Coal Company purchases Slater and Buffalo mines, takes coal out through 

Layland. 

1927 Erskine mine railroad branch closes. Rush Run Coal and Coke branch closes; 

1928 New River Company builds Oakwood Store at Carlisle. Railroad branch to Rock Lick 

Coal Company (Concho) is retired. Thayer Coal and Coke Company retires the railroad 

branch from Thayer tipple to Pennbrook. WV coal mines are mostly non-union. 

1932 A black school is built at Beckwith. 
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1933 UMWA organizes Elverton. Section 7A of the NLRA passes, precipitating the 

reorganization of Southern WV coalfields. 

1934 WV legislature passes “stock laws,” requiring livestock owners to keep animals fenced in 

so they do not wander onto railroad tracks. 

1937 Saloons are gone from the Gorge (Burgess). 

1939 Rush Run P.O. closes. McDonald houses are offered for sale to residents. Some are torn 

down later to make room for highway construction. 

1940 New River Company opens Garden Ground mine. 

1941 Ames is established out of Ajax, Michigan, Elmo, and Sunnyside mines. Seventeen 

companies are operating in New River field, at Ansted, Nuttallburg, Prudence, Winona, 

Whipple, Lochgelly, Summerlee, Kaymoor, Layland, Minden, Stone Cliff, Claremont, 

Brooklyn, Beelick Nob, Red Star, Clifftop, Fire Creek, Landisburg, Lawton, Laurel 

Creek, Kathryn. McKendree hospital closes, and re-opens as a “home of aged and infirm 

negro men” (Unrau 33). 

1942 Mine closes at Claremont. U.S. enters WWII, and the U.S. government takes over coal 

production to ensure continuity. This yields a boom era in the coalfields, where miners 

become the best organized and most highly paid blue-collar workforce in the U.S. (Couto 

1993: 167). 

1946 Mine closes at Fire Creek. Major chemical industries begin operating in the Ohio River 

Valley. 

1947 Fire Creek P.O. closes. Coal production in the state reaches an all-time high: 173 million 

tons; 167,000 miners are employed statewide. 

1948 Stone Cliff Post Office Closes. Coal industry’s traditional markets (home heating and the 

railroads) switch to natural gas and oil. The Bituminous Coal Operators Association goes 

after the electric utilities market, and promises to finance health plans and pensions to 

miners who agree not to strike over layoffs related to mechanization. This sets the stage 

for massive out-migration and investment in strip-mining technology. 

1950s Berwind-White closes Minden mine closes. West Virginia Coal Company closes Stone 

Cliff mine. Maryland/New River Company closes Nuttalburg. Sewell and Kaymoor 

mines close. Mines elsewhere mechanize, railroads dieselize, and outmoded workers 

(including miners, machinists, pipefitters, boilermakers, and blacksmiths) migrate by the 
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thousands to find work in Midwestern factory towns. Layoffs mount, along with early 

retirements, as 250,000 miners lose their jobs nationwide. 

1951 Branch Coal and Coke closes Elverton Mine. 

1952 Sprague mine closes (now part of Beckley Exhibition coal mine). Bluestone Dam is 

completed. 

1954 Sewell P.O. closes. West Virginia turnpike is completed. McKendree home for “aged and 

infirm negro men” closes. 

1955 Nuttalburg P.O. closes. Kaymoor starts moving former workers and families out of 

Kaymoor bottom to Kaymoor Top and to Minden. 

1956 Coke ovens at Sewell close. Sewell P.O. closes. 

1957 Whipple Colliery Company mine closes. 

1958 Summerlee Mine and Company Store close. 

1960s Siltex Mine explodes. Brooklyn Mine closes. RR tracks serving Rush Run, Red Ash, and 

Brooklyn are removed. 

1961 Garden Ground mine (also known as Terry Top) closes. New River and Pocahontas sells 

Layland mine to Sparks Coal Company. Public Employees Retirement System, the 

Department of Natural Resources, the Air Pollution Control Commission, the Human 

Rights Commission, the Industrial Development Authority, and the Department of 

Commerce are created at the state level. 

1962 Kaymoor 1 mine closes. Nuttalburg depot closes. 

1963 Fayette Station closes. WV legislature adopts “West Virginia Hills” as state song. 

1964 Barbara Gale Coal Company closes mine at Kaymoor. 

1965 New River Company closes White Oak Mine at Carlisle. Rush Run Land Company 

acquires railroad rights from the C&O near Rush Run, Red Ash, and Brooklyn. 

1966 Sts. Peter and Paul Church moves from Scarbro to Oak Hill. Siltix mine explodes, killing 

seven miners. Summersville Dam is completed. 

1967 Last mining done at Terry. WV legislature passes laws to control air and water pollution 

and strip mining. 

1969 New River company closes Scarbro Company Store. Sparks Coal Company sells Layland 

operation to A.T. Massy Coal Company. 

1970 A.T. Massey sells Layland to Royal Coal Company. 
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1972 Makeshift impoundment holding water used to clean coal on Buffalo Creek in Logan 

County collapses, killing 126 people and destroying the communities. Sixty-five families 

on Longacre and Simm’s Branch receive eviction notice from Kanawha Gauley Coal and 

Coke Company. 

1974 Lochgelly store and mine close. Store is remodeled into a clinic. Foulkes family begins 

coal mining on Meadow Creek lands. Factory closings in Dayton, Ohio lay off 25,000 

workers, stimulating return migration to southern West Virginia. Oil embargo stimulates 

mining jobs, precipitating more return migration. 

1977 U.S. Congress passes legislation creating the New River Gorge National River, and 

passes the Surface Mine Control and Reclamation Act (SMCRA) requiring mine 

operators to restore stripped mountains to “approximate original contour,” except where 

economic benefit can be demonstrated for flattened terrain. 

1980s Siltex Mine, the last open mine in Mt. Hope, closes. Pocahontas Coal Company ceases 

mining operations at Claremont. New River Pocahontas Consolidated Coal (subsidiary of 

Berwind-White) closes mine at Layland. Gwinns move away from property at Round 

Bottom after four generations of living there. Coal industry retools for transition to 

mountaintop removal mining, investing in giant-earthmoving technology. 

1990 New River Company closes mine at Meadow Creek. 

1990s U.S. Congress amendments to Clean Air Act heighten demand for central Appalachia’s 

cleaner burning bituminous coal. Mountaintop removal mining permits proliferate. Local 

and regional citizen networks sue the U.S. EPA for not protecting streams from mine 

spoil. A federal judge rules for the plaintiffs. U.S. government seeks to change Clean 

Water Act, in order to allow dumping of mine spoil in Appalachian headwaters, which 

would affect most of the cove topography in which the mixed mesophytic forest 

originated. Mountaintop removal mining continues. 

1998 WV produces 170 million tons of coal with the smallest work force in its history, 14,854 

workers. 

2001 1200 to 1500 persons are left homeless in McDowell county as a result of floods. Gov. 

Bob Wise declares a state of emergency in Wyoming, Mercer, Raleigh, Boone, Fayette, 

McDowell, Doddridge, and Summers counties. 
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APPENDIX IV: 

ETHNOGRAPHIC ASSESSMENT AND OVERVIEW 

NEW RIVER GORGE AND GAULEY NATIONAL RIVERS: 

WORK PLAN 

Prepared by Dr. Mary Hufford, Director 

Center for Folklore and Ethnography, 

University of Pennsylvania 

January 8, 2004 
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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Project Context and Rationale 

Project Timeline 

Archival Research 

Fieldwork Methodology 

Cultural Conservation and Historical Discourse 

Project Archive and Database 

Final Report 

Project Personnel 

Working Bibliography 

Attachments: 

• Rita Moonsammy, curriculum vita 

• Thomas Carroll, curriculum vita 

• List of Settlements, Reunions, and Landscape Features found in AFC database 
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PROJECT CONTEXT AND RATIONALE

“There has been homesites all over this mountain top [Grandview Mountain] 

from Beaver to the overlook that are gone and ever so many people come here 

that grew up in those homesites, and they all want to go back out in this field and 

that field, and that field, and back over to Hylton property to find their old 

homesite. From where we’re sitting here no there was homesites all the way 

down to Mill Creek.... And down to Piney River – see Piney’s our other 

boundary over here. The Piney River Gorge.”

—Ritchie Carper, Grandview (1992) 

“I was raised down there and I know every rock up and down that river!” 

—Paul Bennett, Summerlee (1992) 

“You need to see how the gardens are laid out, because that’s a tradition. 

Everybody does that.” 

—Ellen Reese, Wriston (1992) 

“If you want this to grow out of the community, then it’s incumbent on you that 

you provide a process.” 

—Jacqueline Cook, Beaver (1992) 

The Ethnographic Assessment and Overview of the New and Gauley National Rivers will 

provide the New River Gorge National River planning team with ethnographic information 

relevant to the formation of a new General Management Plan for the Park. It is our understanding 

that with this general management plan, the park planners and administrators will address the 

needs of “traditionally associated communities” whose cultural and physical survival are tied to 

resources within the park boundaries. This revised mission represents in some ways a reversal of 

the earlier official story of the New River Gorge, which celebrated the capacity of nature to 

restore itself around the declining ruins of industrial history. Such a narrative of social decline is 

at odds with the needs of individuals and communities still living within and around the park, 

continuing to imagine a future there. Moreover, the narrative repudiates the processes that gave 

form and life to communities that still define themselves in relation to the spaces and history of 

industry on the New River Gorge. 

One effect of the dissonance between the Park’s official narrative to this point and local 

historical discourse emerges in the database created by the American Folklife Center’s field study 

on New River in 1991–92.While the NPS visitor’s map shows a number of the populated sites 
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found in and around New River, many of the places cited in conversation with local community 

members do not appear on the map. Recounting several generations of family history, a number 

of people spoke of working at Siltex, Oswald, and Sun, moving around from mine to mine. Or 

meeting one’s husband while tending injured miners as a nurse at the hospital at McKendree, or 

working even now for the same company that founded the town of Concho at the turn of the last 

century. Dozens of names for places in and around the New River Gorge are continually 

mentioned in stories that tell family and community history. Such stories often track the material 

evidence of community history – a couple of apple trees, a stone foundation. Where it is 

permissible to hunt, gather, and fish, reading history out of the landscape is not only a way of 

maintaining identity, but of finding one’s way to the resources. Therefore, a central goal of this 

project will be to learn the continuing significance of names for places, and the cultural practices 

of tracking of signs of community life past and present embedded in natural and built aspects of 

the landscape. 

Some of the members of these traditionally associated communities live within the park, 

but many do not. While the park itself is a geographically bounded entity, members of the 

communities are scattered throughout the region. In local historical narratives, the shape of life in 

the coalfields does not align neatly with the park’s boundaries. These narratives suggest an 

integral relationship between spaces in the park and spaces outside the park. We hope to 

recommend ways in which the park can support the integrity of that relationship as it is suggested 

in narratives and in other structures of life, including forms of time like the seasonal round and 

biographical trajectories (for instance, outmigration in youth, return migration in retirement). 

Community members are also scattered throughout the country, a condition of diaspora 

deeply rooted in the industrial history that the park already interprets. Many New River families 

and towns address this diaspora by reassembling and renewing their connection to New River 

through the social institution of the reunion, which will form one point of focus and entry into the 

communities for the field team. Thus our research will focus in part on town reunions throughout 

the reunion season in order to gather information about spaces, sites, and species vital to 

traditionally associated communities. This does not preclude a focus on other social settings, 

structures, and events (i.e. fishing camps, employment of area residents as guides, and gatherings 

centered around religions, music, or hunting), but given the size of the New River Gorge and 
NERI and GARI Ethnographic Overview and Assessment

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Gauley Rivers, a focus on town reunions will help us to fill out a documentary profile we will 

develop simultaneously through archival research (i.e. census research) and focused interviews 

(i.e. on land and resource use in the park). This work plan will sketch out the general direction the 

research will take, especially in the beginning, bearing in mind that ethnography is shaped by 

unforeseeable discoveries, and must be flexible enough to shift direction, if need be. 

Bearing in mind the advice of Jacqueline Cook to “provide a process,” working through 

the social structure of the reunions has a political advantage. Through their reunions, 

communities traditionally associated with the New River profile themselves publicly as 

collectivities with whom the National Park Service already formally engages as the administrator 

of reunion facilities, and might continue to engage in planning for the future of resources vital to 

community life. The reunions have the advantage of a shared interest with the Park Service in 

cultural conservation. Through reunions, communities celebrate themselves, renew their 

connection to places in the park, rehearse and explore further the history of their formation and 

monitor their continuing growth. With their ephemeral bulletin boards, displays of photographs 

and artifacts, resolution of genealogical puzzles (one resident calls this “sifting it out”), and 

pilgrimages to old homeplaces and cemeteries, the reunions form an ongoing living archive of 

park history. They form vital ephemeral sites for the continuing stewardship of collective memory. 

One question our project will seek to answer is what is the role of the Park Service in this 

stewardship? To answer this question, we will explore the history of New River as a resource for 

community development, paying special attention to the relationship between economic 

development and the development of traditionally associated communities. 

 

In the transcriptions of interviews with residents in and around the park, the coal, timber, 

and railroad industries emerge as vital resources for community development for nearly a century 

in the New River Gorge (1860s–1950s). However, while the Gorge remains a crucial resource for 

the extractive industry (C&O railroad transports record quantities of coal through the Gorge 

daily), such industry itself no longer forms a vital resource for community life anchored in the 

historic sites and habitats of the New River Gorge and the Gauley River. Through reunions, 

communities celebrate an achievement for which they no longer rely on the coal industry: the 

perpetuation of community life. The reunions themselves form ways not only of physically 

convening those who constitute communities (“constituencies”), but of celebrating the capacity of 
NERI and GARI Ethnographic Overview and Assessment 

268 

community to endure beyond the cycles of boom and bust that fueled the Appalachian diaspora, a 

story in which the New River Gorge figures prominently. Questions we have about the reunions: 

how many are held annually? Who attends? What resources and practices are involved in 

generating collective memory at these events? What products are generated that convey the 

history of the Gorge? 

Here is a partial list of the reunions that turn up in the AFC database when one searches 

on “reunion”: 

Family Reunions 

Richardson/Bailey reunion 

Whitt family reunion 

Hundley reunion 

McGrady reunion 

Lilly reunion 

Green reunion 

Harvey reunion 

Shumate Reunion 

Hurt 

McGinniss 

Creed 

Honaker 

Stover 

Carper 

Phillips 

Cox 

Polk 

Shrewsbury 

Gilkeson 

Richmond 

Burleson 

Caldwell 

Hunter 
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Alberts 

Ballengee 

 etc. 

Town Reunions 

Summerlee reunion 

Grandview reunion 

Thurmond 

Raleigh 

Minden 

Scarbro 

Pax 

Prosperity 

Mount Hope Jubilee Days (formerly New River Coal Company Reunion) (etc.) 

We will develop additional contacts through public institutions such as churches, brokers 

for products gathered in the New and Gauley Rivers (for instance, the Appalachian Herb 

Company in Rainelle, bait shops, and deer checking stations), libraries, post offices, rafting 

companies, and town governments where they exist within the Park, as is the case in Thurmond. 

We may assume that the tourist industry forms a resource, but in order to get at that question, we 

need to know how communities are continuing to use the resources of the New River Gorge to 

survive both materially (in permanent dwellings and seasonal structures within the park) and 

culturally (through forms of assembly known as reunions.) 

We will begin then, by consulting with park service staff as well as with other contacts in 

the region to identify preliminary contacts, including coordinators of town reunions who would 

know of people within the community who are most knowledgeable about physical resources in 

the park that are vital to community life. Referrals from coordinators and park staff will help to 

pave the way for preliminary interviews with people who live in the park and make use of the 

park’s resources. Working through coordinators provides us with a process for engaging with 

communities through their representatives, while helping us learn more about the collective 

historical memory associated with the Gorge and its habitats. 
NERI and GARI Ethnographic Overview and Assessment 

270 

Since not all of the sites that are important to community life lie within the park 

boundaries, this project will document the sites within the park in relation to the larger social 

reality those sites anchor, and the participation of places in New River Gorge in a network of 

places outside of the park. Research in earlier projects indicates that nearly everyone we spoke 

with attends reunions – more than one each year. Our hypothesis is that entering the communities 

through the visible, public structures of the reunions will lead us, first in conversation, and then 

through tours, to the sites within the Gorge that are vital to community life, and that this will help 

us determine their significance. We plan to collect information related to the following 

settlements, historical and contemporary, in the Park: 

Ames Heights + * 

Bachman 

Sunnyside * 

Elmo* 

Michigan* 

Newlyn* 

Fayette* 

Kaymoor* 

Brown 

Nuttalburg* 

Elverton* 

Caperton* 

Cunard* 

Sewell* 

Clifftop* 

Brooklyn +* 

Pennbrook* 

Fire Creek* 

Beury* 

Red Ash* 

Dimmock* 

Rush Run 

Thurmond * 
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271 

Concho* 

Minden + * 

Prudence* 

Harvey* 

Red Star* 

Dunloup Creek + * 

Stone Cliff + * 

Claremont* 

Alaska 

Thayer+* 

McKendree * + (as McKendree Road) 

Terry + * 

Prince + * 

Quinnimont + * 

Layland* 

Lawton 

Royal * 

McCreery +* 

Grandview +* 

Meadow Creek +* 

Sandstone +* 

Brooks+* 

Hinton +* 

Wright * 

Stonewall 

Stanaford * 

Raleigh * 

Mabscott * 

Wickham 

Sprague * 

Skelton * 

Cranberry * 

Tamroy * 
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272 

Oswald * 

Price Hill * 

Kilsyth * 

Mount Hope + * 

Willis Branch * 

Pax * 

Sun * 

Glen Jean + * 

Wingrove * 

Scrabro * 

Carlisle * 

Whipple + * 

Summerlee (Parral) * 

Lochgelly (Stewart) * 

Ingram Branch 

Page 

Beard’s Fork * 

Deepwater 

Boonesborough 

Gauley Bridge + * 

Gamoca 

Swiss 

Jodie 

Kessler’s Cross 

Winona + * 

Edmund + * 

Lansing + * 

Lookout + * 

+ appears on NRG visitors map 

* appears in AFC database 
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PROJECT TIMELINE

Phase 1: Archival research and preliminary interviews 

January – February: 

Tasks for Research and Fieldwork in the First Phase 

1. Review transcriptions of interviews in the Park Archive (December- January) to 

construct a list of sites, a timeline of dates (including dates of opening and 

closing of mines and a profile of the census throughout the life of towns 

throughout the NRG) and an annual round indexed in local historical discourse; 

2. Compile bibliography and resources for fieldworkers; 

3. Compile a list of reunions and coordinators; 

4. Set up system for archiving project materials, including interactive website for 

fieldworkers to enter data (place names and dates); 

5. Develop list of contacts and potential interviewees (MH, TC, RM) 

6. Interview reunion coordinators about the reunions, sites, people (February – 

March); 

7. Interview selected NPS personnel about the annual round of the park and its 

users from their perspective; 

8. Develop preliminary interview schedules for fishing, hunting, gathering, 

gardening, and reunions. (MH with students) 

9. Develop list of collections containing information on the towns and coal camps 

in the New River Gorge 

10. Survey archival holdings in Glen Jean and Oak Hill, Washington, D.C., Staunton, 

VA, Charleston, WV, and Philadelphia, PA for maps and manuscripts relevant to 

this phase of the documentation. If time and resources permit, in a follow-up 

phase we would like to revisit archives for information indicated in the 

interviews. 

11. Prepare plan for phase two, which will include planning of phase 3, which in turn 

will include the planning of phase 4. 

Phase 2: Fieldwork and Interviews with communities

March – August (MH, Students, TC and RM) 

Specific list of tasks by February 20. 

Presentation to NPS Staff and Study Team – Late June 
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Phase 3: Writing, archiving, and compilation of materials 

July – October (MH, students, TC, and RM) 

Specific table of contents and tasks by June 30. 

Draft Report and Preliminary Database Due – August 31, 2004 

Phase 4: Review (by Park Service) and revision (by CFE) 

Revisit archives and field consultants as needed – September – December (MH and 

students) 

Final Report, Updated Database, and Archive Due – December 30, 2004. 

ARCHIVAL RESEARCH AND FIELDWORK METHODOLOGY

Archival Research 

Historical information on communities in the New River Gorge is available in local, state, 

national, corporate, and family records and collectanea. Some of this historical information is 

published in books and pamphlets on communities in the New River Gorge, and in the gray 

literature of National Park Service reports. Much of the official story of the New River Gorge 

centers on industrial development. In an effort to understand what uses were made of the Gorge 

prior to industrial development and beyond the purposes of industry, we will inquire into the 

holdings of: 

University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia) 

Drexel University (Philadelphia) 

Berwind Natural Resource Corporation (Philadelphia, PA) 

Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad Archives (Staunton, VA and Alderson, WV) 

Division of Culture and History (Charleston, WV) 

National Archives (Washington, D.C. and Suitland, MD) 

Coal Archives (Bluefield, WV) 

West Virginia University (West Virginia and Regional History Collection (Morgantown, 

WV) 

Archives of the Beckley Register Herald and the Charleston Gazette 

University of Virginia (Alderman Library) 

West Virginia Division of Cultural History 
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Library of Congress (Archive of Folk Culture) 

And other holdings as they are brought to our attention. We will compile a list of the 

institutions containing documents, noting the kinds of documents and the places within the Park 

to which these documents refer. We will make use of specific information from the archives will 

round out the ethnohistorical portrait we develop through our interviews with residents in and 

around the New River Gorge. 

Fieldwork Methodology 

The goal of this project is to assist the National Park Service in developing a general 

management plan informed by new ethnographic knowledge in relation to the New and Gauley 

National Rivers. If ethnographic knowledge is the knowledge of cultural difference, what are the 

cultural differences that it is important to recognize and accommodate in the general management 

plan? A salient category here is resource management and use, which we will discover through: 

1. A survey of existing transcriptions, together with survey of literature (see 

bibliography) 

2. A survey of archival holdings, with special attention to census information and 

aerial photographs 

3. Tours of the park with knowledgeable parks personnel 

4. Interviews with local residents and other members of traditionally associated 

communities (“field consultants”) 

5. Field excursions with field consultants. 

We will document traditional sites, uses, and associations through interviews, guided 

tours, and observations both before and during the reunion season. Our work will not be limited 

to attending reunions, but our conversations early on with reunion coordinators will help us to 

develop a plan that will encompass all of the communities and sites that are located within the 

Park Boundaries. Although there are dozens of such communities, previous research suggests that 

these can be grouped into roughly ten clusters, each centered around a railroad spur, a creek, or a 

town, which will help us to distribute our time and resources equitably. We will identify the exact 

number and names for these “clusters” in early spring (March). 
NERI and GARI Ethnographic Overview and Assessment 

276 

We will identify field consultants based on information from past ethnographic research 

(the American Folklife Center’s New River Gorge Folklife Project and the NERI archive of oral 

histories). We will also elicit suggestions from reunion coordinators and from contacts made 

through public places and institutions such as churches, the agricultural extension service, 

markets, and advertised community events such as shooting matches and fundraising dinners. 

These sources will become clearer during the first few weeks of field research, but we will try to 

ensure representative geographic and demographic (age, ethnicity, race, gender, and class) 

participation by networking through 1) reunion coordinators; 2) other community leaders; 3) 

public spaces and services (i.e. Gauley Bridge Gift Shop, Fishing and hunting supply places, 

brokers for herbs, roots, and recycleables, and public community-based events). 

Our approach will be ethnomethodological. The ethnomethodological approach assumes 

there is not one fixed perspective on the park and its resources; it assumes that there is not one 

objectively knowable New River Gorge. Rather it enters multiple worlds anchored in the Park 

through multiple perspectives via the material, ritual, and linguistic practices whereby people 

inhabit and dwell in the first place. In line with the Park’s needs, we will focus on the 

perspectives of “traditionally associated communities.” This method allows us to recover the 

significance of those resources, and hopefully to set up process that allows the significance to 

continually emerge. 

We will use a combination of directed and open interviewing techniques for gathering 

information about sites that are significant to communities anchored within the Park. Direct 

questions will elicit information about specific species, practices, sites, using emic terms, names, 

and categories where appropriate. Open-ended interviewing will elicit information by engaging in 

historical discourse, with the ethnographer following the lead of the field consultant in order to 

understand local modes of cultural representation and conservation. 

Cultural Conservation and Forms of Historical Discourse 

In the scope for the project, the Park Service indicates an interest in a cultural 

conservation approach. Such an approach bridges official and vernacular discourses on heritage. 

Whether official or vernacular, as folklorist James Abrams points out, “heritage discourse is 

formulated during and after periods of significant social transformation, and it functions as an act 
NERI and GARI Ethnographic Overview and Assessment

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of cultural redefinition and repair. Migration, economic dislocation, and a sense of generational 

discontinuity are a few stimuli that provoke intense feelings of loss, absence, and yearning, 

conditions that heritage projects attempt to assuage by recovering memories and traditions 

presumed emblematic of a group’s desired cultural continuity” (1994: 23). 

Because migration, economic dislocation, and a sense of generational discontinuity have 

been chronic conditions for communities in and around the New River Gorge, one would expect 

to find vernacular practices that shape cultural identity in relation to resources now under the 

stewardship of the National Park. We will bring an ethnomethodological approach to bear on 

bridging the official and vernacular discourses on heritage centered on park resource. 

A number of related distinctions salient to a cultural conservation approach are outlined 

in Conserving Culture: A New Discourse on Heritage: recognizing a difference between 

traditional and western historical discourse (Downer et. al, 1994); a difference between 

managerial and community-based approaches to resource stewardship (Marks, 1994); a difference 

between notions of what makes places significant (DeNatale, 1994). Many of these differences 

are also described and accommodated in the Park Service’s own “Bulletin 38: Guide to 

Documenting Traditional Cultural Properties” (King and Parker). 

In our approach to identifying community-based modes of resource stewardship we draw 

on the notion of historical discourse (Briggs, Foster), as a set of linguistic, material, and ritual 

practices that locate a community in a particular ongoing historical process. For communities to 

survive culturally, they need to be able to collectively imagine a future as well as a past. As Roger 

Cunningham points out in Apples on the Flood, communities cohere as much through a shared 

sense of destiny as through a shared sense of origin. Historical discourse sutures time, space, and 

society together, and is especially important in the presence of the ruptures and disruptions of 

diaspora. Genres of historical discourse on New River evident in the transcriptions include, but 

are not limited to the following: 

Foundational narratives, in which accounts are offered of early settlers, why they came 

to New River, how they named the places; offered also of prospectors, including John 

Dragan himself -- 
NERI and GARI Ethnographic Overview and Assessment 

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Genealogical digression: Discourse that interrupts conversation to establish relationships 

among people. Clarence Lewis called this “sifting it out.” This conversational practice is 

linked with a kind of topological digression that locates place and people in relation to 

each other. 

Place name etymologies; In the AFC database, there are, for example, etymologies of 

Irish Mountain and Batoff Mountain. 

Reunions – feature not only narrative, but material and ritual practices, including, for 

example, ephemeral archives and pilgrimages to family homeplaces and historically 

significant sites. To elaborate: 

The ephemeral archives intensify memory by putting it all in one place for a day. Floyd 

Bonifacio described the dynamic, recurrent, ephemeral archive posted in the store windows of 

Mount Hope at the Mount Hope Jubilee, which happens in October (formerly the New River Coal 

Company Reunion). “All these old timers come back in here, I mean the ones that live in Ohio or 

Florida, and they come in and everybody has an old picture, and we put em all in the windows... 

I mean hundreds of pictures, all the coal mines, all the old-timers.” 

Pilgrimages – As Ritchie Carper observes, “There has been homesites all over this 

mountain top [Grandview Mountain] from Beaver to the overlook that are gone and ever so many 

people come here that grew up in those homesites, and they all want to go back out in this field 

and that field, and that field, and back over to Hylton property to find their old homesite.” We 

want to know more about these homeplaces, how people recognize them, how often they visit, 

what the sites mean in family and regional histories and so forth. 

Material practices of scavenging and display whereby bits of a fading social and 

economic world are resituated as components of contemporary life – the bricks from the Mount 

Hope Bottling plant reconfigured into a fireplace in a refurbished company house; a paw pole 

ladder converted into a climbing structure for children; bar museums, home museums, etc. 

General topics for eliciting narratives: History of particular communities, spaces and 

resources on the New River; History of particular reunions, their spaces and resources; activities 

pursued by people attending reunions or otherwise spending time in the park including: mining, 

railroad work, agriculture, fishing, whitewater rafting, hunting, rock climbing, bird watching, 

walking, biking, picnicking, writing, graphic arts, camping, collecting of materials for domestic 

or commercial consumption or for hobbies or educational purposes. Collection of names and 
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279 

documentation of spaces where these things happen, and the significance of existing structures, 

species, and landscapes to these activities. (Subject to modification as the project goes on). 

Project Archive and Database 

Because the Park is most concerned with identifying the material forms supportive of 

cultural memory and practice for the purpose of future management and development, we plan to 

generate, out of our archival research, interviews, and observations, and the attendant notes, 

transcriptions, and fieldnotes, an expandable database that links such memory and practice to 

specific sites as well as to species and habitats found within the park. The final report for the 

project will contextualize the database. 

Sample Fields and Entries 

Unless the Park Service has another preference, we will use Endnote to index 

transcriptions. A list of fields and a sample entry follows: 

Interview information: 

Date of Interview: May 15, 1992 

Place of Interview: Ramp, WV 

Fieldworker(s): Mary Hufford 

Consultant: Curtis Cales 

Topics Covered: 

Place names: Ireland, Germany, Brooks, Hinton, Dayton (Ohio), Ward Bench, Chester 

Mountain, Keaney’s Knob, Ford Place, Dunbar Mountain, Laurel Creek 

Activity or Event: Spring gobbler season 

Time period: present 

Habitats: hardwood cove, other -- 

Genres: Place name etymology (Ramp), hunting, gardening, animal calling, family 

reunions, fishing, music making (banjo) 

Species: turkey (jakes, hens), deer, rabbits, cur dogs, mountain feists, raccoon, muggins 

(morel sp.), bear, woodhens (pileated woodpeckers), quail, black walnut (juglans nigra), 

hoot owl (barred owl), squirrels, red-tailed hawks, great-horned owls, wild boars, 

minnows, crawdads, bee martins (great-crested flycatchers), joe reeds (rufous-sided 

towhees), john boats, ramps, groundhogs. 
NERI and GARI Ethnographic Overview and Assessment 

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Season: Spring 

Notes: (Here we will enter the searchable fieldnotes and transcriptions) 

Outline for Final Report 

(to be revised to fit the project findings in June, 2003) 

I. Background and Rationale 

II. Description of Methods 

III. Narrative: Ethnohistory of settlement and land-use, related to existing histories and 

documentary record 

a. Gauley River 

i. Periods of Settlement 

ii. Places, artifacts, species, habitats of value to traditionally associated 

communities 

b. New River Gorge 

i. Periods of Settlement 

ii. Places, artifacts, species, habitats of value to traditionally associated 

communities 

IV. Cultural Conservation and Community Survival in the Present 

a. Traditional Genres and Practices of Historical Discourse 

b. Relationship of traditional genres and practices to official genres and practices 

V. Recommendations for policy, programming, and ongoing assessment. 

VI. Appendices 

a. Ethnohistorical Timeline 

b. List of mappable places and landscaped features linked to traditionally associated 

community life 

c. The annual round of community practices and activities 

 VII. References 

Project Personnel: 

Fieldworkers: Mary Hufford, Thomas Carroll, Rita Moonsammy (see resumes attached 

for Carroll and Moonsammy) 
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Graduate Students in Folklore and Folklife at the University of Pennsylvania: Linda Lee, 

Cynthia Byrd Murtagh, and Dana Hercbergs 

Rita Moonsammy and Thomas Carroll will each contract for a total of 45 days (for a total 

of 90 “people days”). They will spend 15 days during the early phase of the project developing 

contacts for interviews throughout the parks. They will each spend 15 days interviewing and 

observing during the spring and summer, and they will each spend 15 days writing up portions of 

the final report. The terms and conditions of their work will be stipulated in letters of agreement. 

Two graduate students will assist with interviews, transcription of tapes, database entry, 

and the production of maps, timeline, and an annual round graphic. They will do much of this 

work through the spring for course credit, and through the summer as paid interns. 

Needs from Park Service: 

1. A staff member who can help the project team obtain resources that the NPS has 

that would be useful to the project (i.e. list of reunion coordinators, transcriptions 

of oral histories) 

2. Technical assistance with a) designing and setting up database, if this would be 

useful; b) translating resource information into terms useful to the park – i.e. 

designations for habitats. 

3. Orientations to sections and resources of the park as the need arises (with 

sufficient notice) 

4. Access to desk space, telephone, and computer for fieldworkers when in the area. 

WORKING BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Cultural Conservation Theory and Appalachian Culture and History 

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Space.” Cultural Studies Reader, ed. Simon During. New York: Routledge, pp. 146-66. 

Abrams, James. F. 1994. “Lost Frames of Reference: Sightings of History and Memory in 

Pennsylvania’s Documentary Landscape.” Conserving Culture: A New Discourse on 

Heritage, ed. Mary Hufford. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, pp. 24-38. 
NERI and GARI Ethnographic Overview and Assessment 

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Appalachian Land Ownership Task Force. 1983. Who Owns Appalachia? : Landownership and 

Its Impact. Lexington, Kentucky: University of Kentucky Press. 

Batteau, Allen W. 1990. The Invention of Appalachia. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press. 

Becker, Jane S. 1998. Selling Tradition: Appalachia and the Construction of an American Folk, 

1930-1940. Chapel Hill, NC, University of North Carolina Press. 

Brady, Erika. 1994. “The River’s Like Our Backyard: Tourism and Cultural Identity in the Ozark 

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Mary Hufford. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, pp. 136-151. 

Cantwell, Robert. 1993. Ethnomimesis: Folklife and the Representation of Culture. Chapel Hill: 

University of North Carolina Press. 

Carroll, Tom. 1992. “Monongahela Valley Ethnographic Case Study Project.” 

Corbin, David Alan. 1990. The West Virginia Mine Wars: An Anthology. Charleston WV: 

Appalachian Editions. 

Corbin, David Alan. 1981. Life, Work and Rebellion in the Coal Fields: The Southern West 

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Couto, Richard A and Guthrie, Catherine S. 1999. Making Democracy Better: mediating 

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Cunningham, Rodger. 1987. Apples on the Flood: Minority Discourse and Appalachia. Knoxville, 

TN: University of Tennessee Press. 
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DeNatale, Douglas. 1994. “Federal and Neighborhood Notions of Place: Conflicts of Interest in 

Lowell, Massachusetts.” Conserving Culture: A New Discourse on Heritage, ed. Mary 

Hufford. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, pp. 56-65. 

Dorst, John D. 1999. Looking West. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 

Downer, Alan, Alexander Roberts, Harris Francis, and Klara B. Kelley. 1994. “Traditional 

History and Alternative Conceptions of the Past.” In Conserving Culture: A New 

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Dunaway, Wilma. 1995. “Speculators and Settler Capitalists: Unthinking the Mythology About 

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Eller, Ronald D. 1982. Miners, Millhands and Mountaineers: Industrialization of the 

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the Making: The Mountain South in the 19th Century. Chapel Hill: University of North 

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Fine, Gary Alan. 2003. Morel Tales: The Culture of Mushrooming. Chicago, IL: University of 

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Fisher, Stephen L. 1993. Fighting Back in Appalachia: Traditions of Resistance and Change. 

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Foster, Stephen. 1988. The Past is Another Country: Representation, Historical Consciousness, 

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Friedland, LeeEllen. (Matewan Report) 
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Gaventa, John. 1982. Power and Powerlessness: Quiescence and Rebellion in an Appalachian 

Valley. Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press. 

Halperin, Rhoda H. 1990. The Livelihood of Kin: Making Ends Meet ‘The Kentucky Way’.” 

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Horton, Myles and Freire Paulo. 1990. We Make the Road by Walking: Conversations on 

Education and Social Change. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. 

Howell, Benita. 2000. Big South Fork Folklife: A Survey of Folklife Along the Big South Fork of 

the Cumberland River. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. 

Howell, Benita. 2002. ed. Culture, Environment and Conservation in the Appalachian South. 

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Hufford, Mary, ed. 1994. Conserving Culture: A New Discourse on Heritage. Urbana: University 

of Illinois Press. 

Hufford, Mary. 2001. “Stalking the Forest Coeval: Fieldwork at the Site of Clashing Social 

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Jones, Mary Harris. The Autobiography of Mother Jones. 

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and Social Change in West Virginia, 1880-1920. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North 

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Lockard, Duane. 1998. Coal: A Memoir and Critique. Charlottesville, VA: University Press of 

Virginia. 

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Lund, Jens. Flatheads and Spoonies: Fishing for a Living in the Ohio River Valley.

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Mary Hufford. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, pp. 111-121. 

McCarl, Robert. (Matewan Report) 

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The Mountain South in the Nineteenth Century. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North 

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. 
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Rosengarten, Dale. 1994. “Sweetgrass is Gold”: Natural Resources, Conservation Policy, and 

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Mary Hufford. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, pp. 152-165. 

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NERI and GARI Ethnographic Overview and Assessment

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II. New River Gorge 

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Prospectus. 

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Thurmond Historic District. 

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(Final Report; submitted to American Folklife Center, Washington, D.C.), March 1992. 

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National River, West Virginia. Report prepared for EDAW, Inc., Fort Collins, Colorado for 

National Park Service, Denver Service Center. On File at the New River Gorge National River, 

Glen Jean, West Virginia, 1994. Includes condition and assessment findings of CCC-era 

structures. 

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Services Report 51 prepared by NPS VSP Eastern Coordinator, Cooperative Park Studies Unit, 

University of Idaho for New River Gorge National River, Glen Jean, West Virginia, 1993. 

Consists of two volumes: volume one with demographics and other visitor information, 

and volume two with appendix containing visitor responses. 
NERI and GARI Ethnographic Overview and Assessment

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Marshall, Paul D., ed. A Cultural Research Project: The New River Gorge National River, West 

Virginia. Charleston, WV: 1981. 

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Landscape Report. Prepared by Institute for the History of Technology and Industrial 

Archaeology, West Virginia University, April 1993. 

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WV]: Institute of the History of Technology & Industrial Archaeology, West Virginia 

University, [1991]. [LC: NA6313.T48 N48 1991] 

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Cultural Properties. National Register Bulletin 38, Washington, DC: National Park 

Service, 1990. 

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Gorge National River, West Virginia (“NPS D-70, August 1992, 400 p.). [Denver, CO?]: 

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Accompanying Part of the Communication from the Secretary of the Interior... (“Reports on 

Studies of New Areas with Potential for Inclusion in the National Park System,” U.S. 95th 

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on Energy and Natural Resources, U.S. Senate & the Subcommittee on National Parks and 
NERI and GARI Ethnographic Overview and Assessment 

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Insular Affairs of the Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs, House; 95th Congress, 

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National River, Gauley River National Recreation Area, and Bluestone National Scenic 

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[UVA: ALD GOVT DOCS, Y 1.1/8:102-677] 

United States, Dept. of the Interior, National Park Service. New River Gorge National River: 

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1981. 

New River Gorge National River, West Virginia: Land Protection Plan, NPS Mid-Atlantic Region, 

July 1984. 

New River Gorge National River Headquarters Site Development, Glen Jean, West Virginia (“NPS 

D-11, June 1986”). Oak Hill, WV: 1986. [UVA: ALD GOVT DOCS, 129.2:N42] 

Environmental Assessment for a Development Concept Study: Canyon Rim/Fayette Station, New 

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[UVA: ALD GOVT DOCS, 129.7913:N42] 

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[1989]. [UVA: ALD GOVT DOCS, 129.7913:N42/4ldraft] 
NERI and GARI Ethnographic Overview and Assessment

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Development Concept Plan, Environmental Assessment: Draft: Glade Creek, New River Gorge 

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[1989]. [UVA: ALD GOVT DOCS, 129.7913:N42/2/draft] 

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River Gorge National River, West Virginia (“NPS D-34, October 1989”). [Denver, CO]: U.S. 

Dept. of the Interior, National Park Service, [1989]. [UVA: ALD GOVT DOCS, 

129.79/3:N42/3/draft 

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West Virginia (“NPS D-35-A, June 1990”). [Washington, DC?]: GPO, 1990. [UVA: ALD 

GOVT DOCS, 129,79/3:N42/5] 

Development Concept Plan/Interpretive Prospectus: Glade Creek, New River Gorge National 

River, West Virginia (“NPS D-36A, June 1990). [Washington: DC?]: GPO, 1990. [UVA: 

ALD GOVT DOCS, 129.79/3:N42/6] 

Draft, Study of Development Concept Alternatives, Environmental Assessment: Kaymoor, New River 

Gorge National River, West Virginia (“NPS D-45, September 1990). [Denver, CO]: GPO, 

1990. [UVA: ALD GOVT DOCS, 129.7913:N4217/ draft] 

New River Gorge, West Virginia. [Washington, DC?]: [1990]. [UVA: ALD GOVT DOCS, 

129.6/4:N42] 

New River Gorge National River, West Virginia. [Denver,’ CO: Denver Service Center, [1991?]. 

[UVA: ALD GOVT DOCS, 129.2:N4214] 

Title As Above (Brochure/folder). [Washington, DC?]: GPO, 1991. [FILE COPY] 

Coal Fields, Communities & Change. Prepared by the Division of Park & Resource Planning, 

Mid-Atlantic Regional Office, National Park Service, Philadelphia, 1991. 
NERI and GARI Ethnographic Overview and Assessment 

294 

Development Concept Plan: Kaymoor, New River Gorge National River, West Virginia (“NPS D-45-A, 

June 1992”). [Denver, CO?]: [1992]. [UVA: ‘..-D GOVT DOCS, 129.7913:N4218] 

Development Concept Plan/Interpretive Prospectus: Thurmond, New River Gorge National River, 

West Virginia (“NPS D-34-A, September 1992”). [Denver, CO]: Denver Service Center, 

[1992]. [UVA: ALD GOVT DOCS, 129.7913:N4219] 

Draft, Development Concept Plan/Interpretive Prospectus, Environmental Assessment: Middle 

Gorge: New River Gorge National Park [sic], West 

Virginia (“NPS D-79, March 1993,” microfiche). [Denver, ,

CO?]: Denver Service Center, [1993]. 

[UVA: ALD GOVT DOCS, microfiche, 129.79/3:N42110] 

Draft, Development Concept Plan/Environmental Assessment: Teay’s, New River Gorge National 

River (“NPS D-86, September 1993) 
NERI and GARI Ethnographic Overview and Assessment

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APPENDIX V: 

ETHNOGRAPHIC AND HISTORICAL RESOURCES: AN 

ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Ethnography 

Abrams, James F. 

 1994 Lost Frames of Reference: Sightings of History and Memory in Pennsylvania’s 

Documentary Landscape. In Conserving Culture: A New Discourse on Heritage. M. 

Hufford, ed. Pp. 24–38. A publication of the American Folklore Society. New series. 

Urbana: University of Illinois Press. 

 In this article, Abrams looks at how events from the past are remembered and performed, 

and the discourse practices at work in historical interpretations and reinterpretations. He 

considers the textualizing practices at work in heritage sites in Eckley, a Pennsylvania 

coal town. In 1968, the movie The Molly Maguires was filmed in Eckley, and today “film 

and place are inextricably linked in the consciousness of local residents” (32). He raises 

many questions about the nature of heritage, which voices are privileged in production of 

heritage projects and sites. Abrahms discusses how a museum, film, and bar tell “partial 

but intersecting” narratives about that past that each attempt to represent, and uses this as 

a way to illustrate the “clashes” that take place in the reception of heritage sites. 

Altman, Heidi M. 

 2006 Eastern Cherokee Fishing. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. 

Anglin, Mary 

 2000 Toward a Workable Past: Dangerous Memories and Feminist Perspectives. 

Journal of Appalachian Studies 6(1&2):71–99. 

 Anglin reassesses Appalachia’s history, considering gendered social dynamics and their 

intersections with ethnicity, culture, and class. She takes an anthropological and historical 
NERI and GARI Ethnographic Overview and Assessment 

296 

approach to reconstruct the lives of rural, non-elite women in 19th century western North 

Carolina. 

Batteau, Allen 

 1990 The Invention of Appalachia. Tucson, Ariz.: University of Arizona Press. 

 Batteau, in his discussion of Appalachia as a social construct, poses theoretical 

explanations for how a culture and its artifacts are viewed and used by cultures of which 

Appalachia is not an integral part. He presents an historical review of the social 

conditions by which Appalachia was invented out of political desiderata popular at 

different times. He asserts that Appalachia is the manifestation of urban imagination. 

Becker, Jane S. 

 1998 Selling Tradition: Appalachia and the Construction of an American Folk, 1930–

1940. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 

 Becker examines the reemergence of southern Appalachian handicraft traditions in the 

1930s, with close attention to the cultural politics among the producers, reformers, 

government officials, industries, museums, urban markets, and consumers of these crafts. 

The geographic area she focuses on is primarily the Great Smoky Mountains region. She 

uses this craft revival movement as a way to examine how the cultural categories of 

“folk” and “tradition” are constructed. She argues that the commodification of tradition 

relies on a series on deceptions, including the deliberate forgetting of the labor involved 

in producing the handicrafts, its meaning for the producers (as well as their individual 

preferences and needs), the circumstances of production, and the role that craft labor 

played in particular historical contexts. 

Billings, Dwight B., and David Walls 

 1980 Appalachians. In Harvard encyclopedia of American ethnic groups. S. 

Thernstrom, A. Orlov, and O. Handlin, eds. Pp. xxv, 1076 p. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap 

Press. 
NERI and GARI Ethnographic Overview and Assessment

297 

Callender, Charles 

 1978 Shawnee. In Handbook of North American Indians. W. Sturtevant, ed. Pp. 622–

635, Vol. 15. Washington, DC. 

Cantwell, Robert 

 1984 Bluegrass Breakdown. Urbana & Chicago: University of Illinois Press. 

 Bluegrass Breakdown is explores the makings of bluegrass, described as a uniquely 

American music deeply linked to working-class ideals and romanticism. Cantwell 

engages the historical background, commercial origins, internal workings, and cultural 

and social significance of popular, old-time music to provide a musicological and 

sociological perspective. Cantwell links bluegrass to its roots in Appalachia and shows 

how the music was transformed by African American folk traditions, the influence of jazz, 

ragtime, blues, and country music, and the growth of radio and recording technology. 

Cook, Samuel R. 

 2000 Monacans and Miners: Native American and Coal Mining Communities in 

Appalachia. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. 

 Samuel R. Cook presents a comparison of indigenous and immigrant communities in the 

Virginias. This study focuses on the political, economic, and social aspects of the 

Monacans, a Native American group of Amherst County, Virginia, and Scottish and Irish 

settlers of Wyoming County, West Virginia. Cook’s focus is divided equally between that 

of the Native American experience and the Scottish and Irish settlers, and he is ultimately 

interested in issues of power relations that have affected these groups. He takes a 

decidedly interdisciplinary approach in this regional comparative study, and positions this 

comparison as “two communities in a region that epitomizes the contradictions of 

capitalist expansion and global homogenization” (2). He draws on anthropology, history, 

and politics, as well as many cross-disciplinary theoretical and methodological 

perspectives. He analyzes both variations in colonial processes and the conditions of 

dependency that exist in Appalachia. 
NERI and GARI Ethnographic Overview and Assessment 

298 

Couto, Richard A., and Catherine S. Guthrie 

 1999 Making Democracy Work Better: mediating structures, social capital, and the 

democratic prospect. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 

 Couto examines the relationship of democracy and organized action by looking at the 

role of community-based organizations in addressing social and economic inequality in 

Central Appalachia. This is a region that exhibits the shortcomings of capitalism for 

securing social, economic and political equality. This book illustrates the ways in which 

community-based organizations can and have been successful at promoting the prospect 

of increased equality in these sectors, by looking at 23 such organizations in the region. 

Crissman, James K. 

 1994 Death and Dying in Central Appalachia: Changing attitudes and practices. 

Urbana: University of Illinois Press. 

 Documents Central Appalachian funerary traditions, including vigils, preparation of the 

body, and mourning, in association with the strong familism characteristic of mountain 

culture since the late 1600’s. Uses archival research, interviews and photographs from 

West Virginia, Tennessee, Kentucky, North Carolina and Virginia. 

Cunningham, Rodger 

 1991 Apples on the Flood: Minority discourse and Appalachia. Knoxville: University 

of Tennessee Press. 

 Considers Appalachian and Scotch-Irish history in terms of “peripheralization theory”, 

which poses collective identity as produced in the core of society against those on the 

fringe, relating to the frontier experience of Appalachians and their ancestors. Links 

Scotch-Irish experience of socio-economic marginalization with experience of 

Appalachian settlers. Considers psychological and communal identity of these peoples. 

Foster, Stephen William 

 1988 The Past is Another Country: Representation, historical consciousness, and 

resistance in the Blue Ridge. Berkeley: University of California Press. 
NERI and GARI Ethnographic Overview and Assessment

299 

Halperin, Rhoda 

 1990 The Livelihood of Kin: Making Ends Meet the Kentucky Way. Austin: 

University of Texas Press. 

 Halperin has attempted to deal with the problem of urban/rural dichotomies by 

differentiating between the traditional “deep rural” and the “shallow rural,” the latter 

referring to more complex rural settlements, or “the middle ground between country and 

city.” Community life, historically at the heart of southern Appalachian culture, is not 

defined primarily as an aggregation of non-related people maximizing their economic 

opportunities. “The deep rural parts of the region are the locations of family land, and 

land is at the base of the solidity that people find there” (58). Land, a specific place, 

provides the locus for community, and kin ties provide one of the mechanisms for 

community. 

Hill, David P. 

 1986 Notes Concerning Ruins of Motion Machinery in the Appalachian Landscape. In

Blue Ridge Parkway: Agent of Transition. B.M.a.B. Bruxton, Steven M., ed: 

Appalachian Consortium Press. 

Hirsch, Eric, and Michael O’Hanlon 

 1995 The Anthropology of Landscape: Perspectives on place and space. New York: 

Oxford University Press. 

Howell, Benita J. 

 1981 A Survey of Folklife Along the Big South Fork of the Cumberland River. Pp. 431. 

Knoxville, TN: Department of Anthropology, University of Tennessee. 

 This study uses a variety of research methods to develop statistical and historical 

background on the Big South Fork area, obtain a general picture of contemporary 

lifeways, and survey specific community activities. Special attention is paid to the 

economy and land use. 
NERI and GARI Ethnographic Overview and Assessment 

300 

—, ed. 

 1990 Cultural Heritage Conservation in the American South. Athens, GA: University 

of Georgia Press. 

 Focusing on the area from northern Alabama to West Virginia, Howell explores the 

historic and contemporary interrelations between culture and environment in a region that 

has been plagued by land misuse and damaging stereotypes of its people. Debunking the 

nature-culture dichotomy, contributors examine how physical space is transformed into 

culturally constituted “place” by a variety of factors, both tangible (architecture, 

landmarks, artifacts) and intangible (a sense of place, long-term family habitation of land, 

tradition, “a way of life worth fighting for”). Archaeologists, cultural geographers, and 

ethnographers examine how the land was used by its earliest inhabitants and trace the 

effects of agricultural decline, industrial development, and tourism in the nineteenth and 

twentieth centuries. Powerful case studies recount past displacement of local populations 

in the name of progress or conservation and track threatened communities’ struggles to 

maintain their claims to place in the face of extralocal counterclaims that would 

appropriate space and resources for other purposes, such as mountaintop removal of coal 

or a power company’s plans to export electricity from Appalachia to distant urban centers. 

Contributors also record successful community planning ventures that have achieved 

creative solutions to seemingly intransigent conflicts between demands for economic 

wealth and environmental health. 

— 

 1994 Mountain Foragers in Southeast Asia and Appalachia: Cross-cultural 

Perspectives on the ‘Mountain Man’ Stereotype. In Appalachia in an international 

context: cross-national comparisons of developing regions. P.J. Obermiller and W.W. 

Philliber, eds. Pp. 131–140. Westport, Conn.: Praeger. 

 This essay shows how similar economic and ecological conditions in Appalachia and 

various parts of Southeast Asia contribute to the development of the “mountain-man” 

stereotype in the minds of low-landers, who often are ethnically similar to their highland 

neighbors. Striking similarities in attributes of the stereotype exist cross-culturally, 

including images of backwardness, drunkenness and fear of highlanders are often traced 

to trade relations between them and coastal or lowland dwellers. Citing works based on 
NERI and GARI Ethnographic Overview and Assessment

301 

ecological and economic, rather than evolutionary perspectives, Howell makes a case for 

the stereotype being a product of particular conditions. 

Hufford, Mary 

 1998 Tending the Commons: Ramp Suppers, Biodiversity, and the Integrity of “The 

Mountains”. Folklife Center News 20(4):3–11. 

 Mary Hufford offers a discussion of the importance of ramps (very fragrant wild leeks) in 

southern Appalachian culture. Hufford’s fieldwork for this paper was conducted 

primarily in the area around Coal River in southern West Virginia. This food product is 

an important element of feasts and food traditions, such as ramp suppers. Hufford 

discusses many of the traditions surrounding ramp suppers, as well as the importance of 

gathering and processing ramps and other greens in Appalachian female society. 

Ultimately, she argues that ramps, ramp patches, and ramp talk are important aspects in 

the construction of the cultural landscape of the region, and the commons on Coal River 

provides a model for an alternative, integrated, community-based approach to naturaland cultural-resource conservation. 

— 

 2001 Stalking the Forest Co-Eval: Fieldwork on the Boundary of Clashing Social 

Imaginaries. Practicing Anthropology. 

— 

 2002 Interrupting the Monologue: Folklore, Ethnography, and Critical Regionalism. 

Journal of Appalachian Studies. 

— 

 2003 Knowing Ginseng: The Social Life of an Appalachian Root. Cahiers de littérature 

orale 53–54:265–291. 

 Hufford looks at the significance of ginseng in central Appalachia, which is the leading 

producer of wild ginseng. She examines the interrelation of the wild ginseng region with 

that of the coalfields, focusing on how the latter dominates the geographical space. She 

traces the importance of wild ginseng, specifically within the geopolitical context, 
NERI and GARI Ethnographic Overview and Assessment 

302 

arguing that the wild ginseng region is a cultural artifact that has been eclipsed by the 

region’s thematization as the “coalfields.” Finally she discusses how “knowing ginseng” 

informs the ethnomimetic process of the region. Hufford explores many aspects of the 

ginseng region, including epistemologies of wild ginseng, the time-spaces of ginseng, and 

expressions of ginseng in the culture such as seng hoes and seng talk. 

Johnson, Geraldine N. 

 1982 “Plain and Fancy”: The Socioeconomics of Blue Ridge Quilts. Appalachian 

Journal 10(1):12–35. 

 Johnson makes observations of Blue Ridge quilters which contradict some common 

notions about quilting while reinforcing the importance of continuing serious 

investigation into regional quilting styles. “Plain and Fancy” points to a need to examine 

the entire scope of women’s handwork and produce descriptive essays dealing with 

regional quilt types and techniques. She also calls for documentation of quilters’ words 

and narratives to better understand the history, vision, and spirit of quiltmakers. 

Jordan, James William 

 1983 Frontier Culture, Government Agents, and City Folks. In Appalachia and 

America. A. Batteau, ed. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press. 

 Jordan argues that anthropological community study conducted by the Forest Service can 

sensitize agencies to the cultural patterns of local communities and allow them to foresee 

and avoid conflict among the managers, residents, and users of forests. 

Lafitau, Joseph Francois 

 1718 Memoire presente a son Altesse Royale monsigneur le Duc d’Orleans. Paris: 

Joseph Monge. 

Mooney, James 

 1900 Myths of the Cherokee. St. Clair Shores, Mich.: Scholarly Press. 
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303 

Myer, William Edward 

 1928 Indian trails of the Southeast. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Bureau of American 

Ethnology. 

Nesbitt, J. Todd 

 2000 Ethnography and Participatory Rural Appraisal in Central Appalachia. Journal of 

Appalachian Studies 6(1&2):49–70. 

 Nebitt discusses the challenges and opportunities of conducting ethnographic research in 

two counties in West Virginia (Randolph and Pendelton). Specifically, he addresses 

positionality, reflexivity, and subjectivity, and argues for a critical feminist methodology 

augmented by Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA). He suggests that this combined 

approach is especially useful when a research is considered to be both an insider and an 

outsider. 

Neville, Gwen Kennedy 

 1987 Kinship and Pilgrimage: Rituals of Reunion in American Protestant Culture. New 

York; Oxford: Oxford University Press. 

 Kinship and Pilgrimage examines the way that Protestants have succeeded in maintaining 

their communal life and traditions in rural Scotland and, eventually, in the South and 

Southwestern United States. In describing the ways in which people are bound to a 

tradition and a place, Neville notes a remarkable continuity between the outdoor 

gatherings of Scottish folk in churchyards and fields, from the fifteenth century until well 

into the nineteenth, and the pilgrimages that their Presbyterian descendants have 

continued to undertake in the United States well into the twentieth century. According to 

Neville, these rites have acquired an element of protest against secularizing trends in 

American society and the erosion of family ties under the impact of modern society. 

Puckett, Anita 

 2000 Seldom Ask, Never Tell: Labor and Discourse in Appalachia. Oxford; New 

York: Oxford University Press. 
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304 

Reid, Herbert, and Betsy Taylor 

 2002 Appalachia as a Global Region: Toward Critical Regionalism and Civic 

Professionalism. Journal of Appalachian Studies 8(1):9–32. 

— 

 2003 John Dewey’s Aesthetic Ecology of Public Intelligence and the Grounding of 

Civic Environmentalism. Ethics and the Environment 8:74–92. 

Solecki, Ralph S. 

 1949 An Archeological Survey of Two River Basins in West Virginia. West Virginia 

History:319–42. 

Stewart, Kathleen 

 1988 Nostalgia: A Polemic. Cultural Anthropology 3(3):227–241. 

— 

 1996 A Space on the Side of the Road: Cultural Poetics in an “Other” America. 

Princeton: Princeton University Press. 

 Stewart vividly evokes an “other” America that survives precariously among the ruins of 

the West Virginia coal camps and “hollers,” existing as an excluded subtext to the 

American narrative of capitalism, modernization, materialism, and democracy. Local 

personal narrative tracks a dense social imaginary through stories of traumas, apparitions, 

encounters, and eccentricities. Stewart explores how this complex storytelling imbues 

everyday life in the hills and forms a cultural poetic. 

Taylor, Betsy 

 2002 Public Folklore, Nation-Building, and Regional Others. Journal of Indian 

Folklore Research. 

Taylor, Elizabeth Mary 

 1992 Self and Story in Appalachian Coal Mining Communities. Doctoral Dissertation, 

University of Michigan. 
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 Taylor examines the historical and causal patterns behind the development and 

transformation of workers’ consciousness by exploring the ways in which coal miners 

form a collective voice through structures of narrative. Taylor focuses on fundamentalism 

and ontology as battlegrounds for class structure as local communities attempt to 

maintain a continuing narrative while faced with the incursion of capitalism and mass 

culture. 

Thomas, James H. 

 1979 Truckstops, Truckers, and Trucks: 1976. Journal of Popular Culture XIII(2):221–

228. 

 Thomas examines trucking culture and the associations of trucks with power, sex, speed, 

and free spirit in America. He sees trucking culture as a form of self-expression by men 

with independence and “frontier pride.” 

Tice, Karen W. 

 1998 Social-Work and Mother-Work: The Interplay of Maternalism and Cultural 

Politics in the Educational Narratives of Kentucky Settlement Workers, 1910–1930. 

Journal of Appalachian Studies 4(2):191–224. 

 The article considers women educational reformers in two communities in the Kentucky 

mountains. Although the geographic area discussed is not West Virginia, gender issues 

have been neglected in Appalachia scholarship, and this study may help fill the gap. The 

“complex amalgam of social control and benevolent impulses” (193) that Tice describes 

may well be applicable to contemporaneous West Virginia mountain communities. 

Titon, Jeff Todd 

 1988 Powerhouse For God: Speech, Chant, and Song in an Appalachian Baptist 

Church. Austin: University of Texas Press. 

 This book is an in-depth portrait of a Blue Ridge Mountain Baptist preacher, his family, 

and their church, depicting and analyzing the fierce preaching, determined singing, 

autobiographical witnessing, and stern doctrine that characterize his religious community. 
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Tullos, Allen 

 1989 Habits of Industry: White Culture and the Transformation of the Carolina 

Piedmont. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 

 Drawing on oral interviews and workers’ letters, the Tullos recreates the cotton mills of 

the Carolina Piedmont region from 1880s until the 1930s. The emphasis is on how 

kinship and a common culture gave mill hands, mostly of rural origin, a shared identity 

and a hedge against poverty and management. 

Verbka, Joseph 

 1999 Phase I Archaeological Survey for the Proposed Edwight Surface Mine, Marsh 

Fork District, Raleigh County, WV. Nitro, WV: West Virginia Division of 

Environmental Protection. 

Williams, Michael Ann 

 1991 Homeplace: The Social Use and Meaning of the Folk Dwelling in Southwestern 

North Carolina. Athens, Ga: University of Georgia Press. 

 This book offers an important contribution to material culture methodology through 

careful listening to stories and commentary. Through these personal narratives, fifty 

informants explain the use and meanings of their dwellings. In her examination of the 

architectural tradition of an eleven county area, Williams compares the structure and 

spatial uses of three common house types to offer insights into social and cultural 

attitudes about family, privacy, community and change. 

— 

 1995 Great Smoky Mountain Folklife. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. 

 Williams uses a comprehensive approach that includes Cherokee history, white 

settlement and changes brought by national park designation. She finds continuity in 

certain traditions, such as annual family and church reunions within the park. In addition, 

she points to park management’s selective interpretations of what constituted the park’s 

human history. 
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Wissler, Clark, and Bella Weitzner 

 1922 The American Indian; an introduction to the anthropology of the New World. 

New York: Oxford University Press. 

Wolfram, Walt and Christian, Donna 

 1976 Appalachian Speech. Arlington, VA: Center for Applied Linguistics. 

 Detailed sociolinguistic analysis of rural Appalachian speech, presenting a sociolinguistic 

framework for study of Appalachian English, focusing on phonological aspects (final 

consonant clusters, contraction, pronunciation of initial segments, etc.) and grammatical 

features of verbs, adverbs, negation, nominals, prepositions, and indirect questions, and 

discussing educational implications of dialect diversity in region; includes interview 

questionnaire and sample interview. 

Local History 

Athey, Lou 

 1986 Kaymoor: A New River Community: Eastern National Park and Monument 

Association. 

— 

 1987 Mining Coal and Minding Cows: Garland Skaggs of Ansted. Goldenseal, West 

Virginia Traditional Life 13(2):47–52. 

 Interview with Garland Skaggs, who worked for the Gauley Mountan Coal Company for 

over 40 years, and became mine superintendent and town mayor of Ansted. Describes life 

and work in coal mines in early 1900’s, mining technology and electrification, work as 

electrician, mechanic and mayor in the 1940’s. 

Beanblossom, Robert 

 1987 Fire Towers: “Pop” Wriston Built the Big Ones. Goldenseal, West Virginia 

Traditional Life 13(1):49–57. 
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 Fire towers were necessary to detect forest fires that spread quickly through the debris 

left by logging. They played an important role in West Virginia for 70 years. Fayette 

County Forester Emory “Pop” Wilson’s account of his years as a forest fire towerman 

and builder of fire towers is edited and published here. 

Bone, William David 

 1994 The history of the headwaters of Big Coal River in southern West Virginia. 2 

vols. Elkview, WV: W.D. Bone. 

Bragg, Alyce Faye 

 1993 This Holler is My Home. Charleston, WV: Mountain State Press. 

 This book is based on a collection of columns the author wrote for the Charleston Gazett, 

The Clay Herald, and the Clay County Free Press during the 1980s. The vignettes are 

loosely organized according the seasons, and common topics include family, home and 

the land. Although written for popular rather than academic audiences, it includes some 

valuable personal perspectives and information about local traditions. 

— 

 2000 Homesick for the Hills. Charleston, WV: Mountain State Press. 

 This book is based on a collection of columns the author wrote for the Charleston 

Gazette and the Clay County Free Press during the 1980s and 1990s. The vignettes 

describe in nostalgic terms “how life used to be in the hills of Clay County.” Major topic 

areas discussed include winter, holidays, kinfolk and hillfolk, harvest time, spring, old 

days and old ways, and West Virginia’s “wild side.” Although written for popular rather 

than academic audiences, it includes some valuable personal perspectives and 

information about local traditions. 

Bragg, George A., ed. 

 1989 Dunloop Days: Glen Jean to Thurmond, Exciting Times and Precious Memories. 

Glen Jean: Glen Jean Historical Society, Ltd. 

 Intended as a collection of unconnected but interrelated facts about small communities 

along a seven-mile stretch of Dunloop Creek in Fayette County, West Virginia. The 
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publication of this collection was to commemorate the 1989 Glen Jean Reunion. The first 

half of the small book is a collection of memories written by members of these 

communities. The second half includes articles taken from Fayette Journal between 1900 

and 1938. 

Bragg, Melody E. 

 1988 Glen Jean: Echo of an Empire. Goldenseal, West Virginia Traditional Life 

14(4):9–16. 

 History of Glen Jean, Fayette County since the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway was 

completed through the New River Gorge in 1873, until 1939 when the began to decline. 

Thomas McKell founded and developed the town and built the Kanawha, Glen Jean & 

Eastern Railroad, as well as “Jenny Lind” type of coal company housing to attract white 

collar workers to the town. McKell constructed several buildings to attract business, 

including the Glen Jean Opera House, the Dunglen Hotel, local company baseball teams. 

Charts history of coal mining, conflicts between United Mine Workers and coal operators, 

and recent National Park Service presence in the town. 

— 

 1988 The Reliable Bill Trevey: Glen Jean’s Photographer. Goldenseal, West Virginia 

Traditional Life 14(4):17–21. 

 William Trevey photographed residents of Glen Jean and places along Dunloup Creek in 

historic coalfields of Fayette County. His photos were taken between 1890 and 1920 

using glass-plate negatives. About 400 scenes of towns, mines, businesses and people 

remain today in a collection of two of his friends. 

— 

 1990 Window to the Past. Glen Jean, WV: GEM Publications. 

Brown, Leona G. 

 1984 Round Bottom Home of the New River Gwinns. Goldenseal, West Virginia 

Traditional Life 10(1):16–21. 
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 Known as Round Bottom for 130 years, this abandoned farm is located between Prince 

and McKendree, now within National Park Service boundaries. It was home of 4 

generations of the Gwinn family. The family house was built by Loomis Gwinn in the 

early 1900’s, and is adjacent to a family cemetery. Description of the house by Loomis’s 

granddaughter, writer of the article, and by her aunt. 

Brown, William Griffee 

 1954 History of Nicholas County, West Virginia. Richmond: Dietz Press. 

 Noteworthy for attention to ecological detail and the recounting of foundation narratives 

throughout. 

Cavalier, John 

 1985 Panorama of Fayette County. Parsons, WV: McClain. 

 Noteworthy for attention to black settlements in the region, and the ebb and flow of 

ephemeral places. 

Cox, Ricky L. 

 1989 Used Parts and the Poetic Impulse: Machines as Alternate Means of Expression. 

In Mountains of Experience: Appalachian Consortium Press. 

 Cox describes a parallel relationship between machines and literature as tools to further 

the pursuits of mankind. Machines, as vehicles of change during the last century, have 

been used to tap natural resources but have also served as a means of self-expression and 

adventure. 

Cox, William E. 

 1981 “McKendree No. 2”: The Story of West Virginia’s Miners Hospitals. 

GOLDENSEAL: A Quarterly Forum for Documenting West Virginia’s Traditional Life 

7(3):36–40. 

 Research for New River Gorge National Park was conducted about three mining hospitals 

established in the first decade of 1900. Known as Miners Hospitals 1, 2, and 3, they 

provided free and preferential treatment to coal miners, railroad employees and other 

hazardously employed people. McKendree was Hospital no. 2, situated in McKendree, a 
NERI and GARI Ethnographic Overview and Assessment

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small village on the east side of the gorge and overlooking the New River, providing 

patients with a beautiful and relaxing view. Includes 1880 census information on 

McKendree residents’ occupations and countries of origin. 

Crockett, Maureen 

 1990 Doing Time in Style: The State Prison for Woman at Pence Springs. Goldenseal, 

West Virginia Traditional Life 16(2):49–56. 

 A women’s state prison was relocated to Pence Springs hotel in the 1940’s, which was 

formerly a resort in Summers County. Describes changing customs and tasks that women 

learned in this progressive state prison, and relates stories of inmates. Ashby Berkley, 

whose mother worked as a warden in the prison, acquired the building in 1985 after it no 

longer functioned as a prison, and restored it into a resort hotel again. It is now listed on 

the National Register of Historic Places. 

Donnelly, Shirley 

 1958 Historical Notes on Fayette County, WV. Oak Hill, WV. 

— 

 [n.d] Yesterday and Today: A Keepsake I, II, III. Fayetteville, WV: Fayette County 

Historical Society. 

Farley, Yvonne Snyder 

 1980 Lilly Reunion, 1979. GOLDENSEAL: A Quarterly Forum for Documenting 

West Virginia’s Traditional Life 6(1):31–43. 

 Author attends annual reunion of one of West Virginia’s largest and oldest families. Lilly 

Reunion grounds are on Flat Top Mountain grounds between Beckley and Princeton, on 

the 3rd Saturday in August. History and Lilly family lineage, and place names and 

reunion activities are mentioned. 

— 

 1981 Plain Cooking: Barbara Meadows of Raleigh County. GOLDENSEAL: A 

Quarterly Forum for Documenting West Virginia’s Traditional Life 7(3):46–50. 
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 Mountain cooking is the specialty of Barbara Meadows of Glen Morgan, Raleigh County. 

Traditions include gardening and growing of family’s own food; canning and storage of 

jams, pickles, vegetables, fruits and meat; use of seasonally optimal ingredients; 

homemade sweets, wines, wild game, soups, casseroles, as well as non-traditional foods. 

Three recipes are given from Barbara’s kitchen. History of Tams Coal Camp included in 

terms of its company store fare. Kitchen as a symbol of family unity. 

— 

 1982 One of the Faithful: Asaff Rahall, Church Founder. GOLDENSEAL: A Quarterly 

Forum for Documenting West Virginia’s Traditional Life 8(2):51–53. 

 This monograph of a founding member of the Orthodox Church in Raleigh County 

details the experience of an Arab immigrant to West Virginia. Asaff Rahall recalls early 

history of Beckley and working in the company coal towns as a pack peddler. Touches on 

the West Virginia Lebanese community and their contribution to businesses in Beckley. 

— 

 1982 “To Keep Their Faith Strong”: The Raleigh County Orthodox Community. 

GOLDENSEAL: A Quarterly Forum for Documenting West Virginia’s Traditional Life 

8(2):43–50. 

 St. Nicholas Orthodox Church was founded in the mid 1940’s by Lebanese-Syrian 

immigrants who came to WV in the early 1900’s. Background of the Orthodox Church 

and its history in the U.S. and WV is given along with the history of Reverend Zacharia 

Nassr, priest of the church. Food practices among its parishioners are included, and 

recipes are provided. Background of the worshipers includes Russian, Slavonic, Indian, 

Greek, Egyptian, Jordanian, and Lebanese. 

Frazier, Claude Albee, and F. K. Brown 

 1992 Miners and Medicine: West Virginia memories. Norman, OK: University of 

Oklahoma Press. 
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Lane, Ron, and Ted Schnepf 

 1985 Sewell: A New River community. [Oak Hill, WV?]: Eastern National Park & 

Monument Association. 

Massey, Tim R. 

 1982 Let ‘Em Hit It! Former Athletes Recall A Forgotten Sport. Goldenseal, West 

Virginia Traditional Life 8(3):15–22. 

 “Letemhitit”, a slow-pitch softball game invented by William McKell, was popular in the 

1920’s and 30’s in Glen Jean, Fayette County. McKell was a paternalistic coal operator 

who owned the town of Glen Jean, built by his father Thomas G. McKell and named after 

his mother Jean Dun McKell. Interviews with former players who played against other 

coal town teams. Description of games and other pastimes in the early 1900s, including 

bulldog-wildcat fights and gambling, which were later outlawed. Letemhitit was replaced 

with fast-pitch softball in the New River coalfields after the Depression. 

— 

 1984 Remembering Bill McKell. Goldenseal, West Virginia Traditional Life 8(3):20–

21. 

 Short bio of coal operator and owner of Glen Jean, Fayette County. His father, Thomas 

McKell owned property in Fayette and Raleigh counties, organized McKell Coal & Coke 

Company, developed mines and communities ad Kelsyth, Oswald, Graham,and Tamroy 

McCreesh, Carolyn 

 1983 A Family Tradition: The Foulke Meadow River Lands in the 19th Century. In

Proceedings New River Symposium April 14–16, Blacksburg, Virginia. Glen Jean, WV: 

National Park Service. 

Mooney, Fred, and J. W. Hess 

 1967 Struggle in the coal fields, the autobiography of Fred Mooney. Morgantown,: 

West Virginia University Library. 
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Peters, J. T., and H. B. Carden 

 1926 History of Fayette County, West Virginia. Charleston, WV: Jarrett Print. Co. 

Sanders, William 

 1991 A New River heritage. Parsons, WV: McClain. 

Shuff, Murray 

 n.d. Stone Cliff, West Virginia: Life Along New River 1930–1938. Beckley: Central 

Printing Company. 

Sullivan, Ken 

 1989 Thurmond: A New River Community: Eastern National Park and Monuments 

Association. 

Witschey, Walter, and Robert Thurmond 

 1983 Smokin’ Guns and Smokeless Coal: Thurmond, West Virginia: New River Boom 

Town. In Proceedings New River Symposium April 14–16, Blacksburg, Virginia. Glen 

Jean, WV: National Park Service. 

Wood, Jim, and Raleigh County Historical Society 

 1994 Raleigh County, West Virginia. [Beckley, WV]: J. Wood. 

Yale, Andy 

 1984 Charlton Cox: “People Call Me The Garbage Man”. Goldenseal, West Virginia 

Traditional Life 10(1):55–60. 

 Charles Cox lives in Hinton, Summers County. A sign that marks his property reads, 

“Hinton Area Garbologist.” It is filled with discarded objects which he finds or is given, 

which he keeps and sells to people or gives away. Cox created a river bank with bricks of 

local landmarks he helped tear down. A native of West Virginia, Cox describes Hinton 

and Beckley in the early 1900’s to the 1950’s. 
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— 

 1984 “Respect That River”: William Richmond and the Richmond Ferry. Goldenseal, 

West Virginia Traditional Life 10(4):52–57. 

 William’s Ferry has been running continuously since the early 1800’s. Englishman 

William Richmond settled in Summers County and started the ferry. His descendants still 

live on the estate and still charge 10 cents to ride each way. Description of daily life and 

work on the farm by Richmond’s great-great grandson. 

— 

 1988 Elmer Richmond: “Hard Work Was All We Knew”. Goldenseal, West Virginia 

Traditional Life 14(2):27–31. 

 Born in 1904, Elmer Richmond of Meadow Creek, Summers County describes life on hill 

farms in the early 1900’s. Richmond was born to a large farming family. He worked on 

the railroad for 43 years, then retired and started to make cedar baskets after the ones his 

father made. Talks about kinds of wood for making baskets. Photograph of Mr. 

Richmond with Native American artifacts he has gathered. 

— 

 1988 The Old-Timey Way: Lillian Mann of Talcot. Goldenseal, West Virginia 

Traditional Life 14(1):36–39. 

 Lillian Mann of Summers County tends chickens, grows and preserves her own food and 

sews quilts the old fashioned way. She describes how her parents weaved their own 

fabrics out of wool from their sheep, spin it and dye it using roots in the mountains. 

Description of churn making and soap making, medicinal roots and herbs. 

Maps 

Alexander, Andrew 

 1814 Survey of the headwaters of James River and the Greenbriar, Jackson’s River and 

the Great Kenawha of New River and the High road between them. Philadelphia 

Thadkara & Son.: s.l. : s.n. 
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Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad Company 

 1905 General and Regional Map of the New River and Kanawha Coal Fields: Library 

of Congress Geography and Map Division. 

Fry, Joshua, et al. 

 1775 A map of the most inhabited part of Virginia containing the whole province of 

Maryland with part of Pensilvania, New Jersey and North Carolina. London: Printed for 

Robt. Sayer. 

Hotchkiss, Jedediah 

 1886 Map of Great Kanawha coal field showing location of mines. [Staunton, Va.]. 

Hutchins, Thomas, Frederick Charles Hicks, and Patrick Kennedy 

 1904 A Topographical Description of Virginia, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and North 

Carolina; reprinted from the original ed. of 1778. Cleveland: The Burrows brothers 

company. 

Ice, John R. 

 1933 County Maps of West Virginia. Clarksburg, WV: Clarksburg Publishing 

Company. 

Jefferson, Thomas 

 1787 Notes on the state of Virginia. Illustrated with a map, including the states of 

Virginia, Maryland, Delaware and Pennsylvania. London: John Stockdale. 

Mitchell, John 

 1755 A Map of the British Colonies in North America. London: Andrew Millar. 

Swann, John S., and G.W. & C.B. Colton & Co. 

 1867 Title map of the coal field of the great Kanawha Valley. New York: G.W. & C.B. 

Colton. 
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West Virginia Department of Transportation 

 2001 West Virginia Official State Highway Map. Charleston, WV. 

West Virginia Geological Survey 

 1913 Soil Map: West Virginia, Boone County Sheet: Library of Congress Geography 

and Map Division. 

West Virginia. Geological Survey., et al. 

 1917 Map of West Virginia showing coal, oil, gas, iron ore and limestone areas. 

Morgantown: West Virginia Geological Survey : State Semi-Centennial Commission,. 

Park Planning and Interpretation 

Brady, Erica 

 1994 The River’s Like Our Backyard: Tourism and Cultural Identity in the Ozark 

National Scenic Riverways. In Conserving Culture: A New Discourse on Heritage. M. 

Hufford, ed. Pp. 136–151. A publication of the American Folklore Society. New series. 

Urbana: University of Illinois Press. 

Brown, Sharon A., and United States. National Park Service. 

 1990 Historic Resource Study: Kay Moor, New River Gorge National River, West 

Virginia. [Washington, D.C.?]: National Park Service U.S. Dept. of the Interior. 

Camarena, Norma, Sharon A. Brown, and United States. National Park Service. 

 1990 Bank of Glen Jean : New River Gorge National River, West Virginia. [Denver, 

Colo.]: United States Department of the Interior National Park Service. 
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Caplinger, Michael, and Harpers Ferry Center (U.S.). Division of Historic Furnishings. 

 1993 Thurmond Passenger Depot and Offices: New River Gorge National River, 

Thurmond, West Virginia. [Harpers Ferry, W.Va.?]: National Park Service Harpers Ferry 

Center Division of Historic Furnishings. 

Cox, William E. 

 2003 Life on the New River: A Pictorial History of the New River Gorge: Eastern 

National. 

 A collection of black-and-white photographs and text descriptions of the New River 

Gorge National Park and the communities in and around it. The author is the former 

Chief of Interpretation and Visitor Services at New River Gorge National River. Major 

categories include mining, railroading, lumbering, other businesses, and people and 

places. 

DeNatale, Douglas 

 1994 Federal Neighborhood Notions of Place: Conflicts of Interest in Lowell, 

Massachusetts. In Conserving Culture: A New Discourse on Heritage. M. Hufford, ed. Pp. 

56–65. A publication of the American Folklore Society. New series. Urbana: University 

of Illinois Press. 

Dorst, John Darwin 

 1999 Looking West. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 

 In this study of the American West as a region, Dorst discusses a variety of “discourses 

of seeing.” He argues that the West, more so than any other American landscape, is 

appreciated and consumed in visual terms and looking helps define how many people 

experience it as a place. Of particular interest in the final essay, “Monumental Optics: 

The Visual Management of Devils Tower.” In this essay, Dorst identifies and explores 

three primary “narrative strands” of the Devils Tower monument that contribute to the 

management of it as a visual commodity. These strands are: the story of formation, the 

story of emergence, and the story of ascent. He describes how this is accomplished 

through the National Park Service visitor center exhibits, NPS brochures, tourist 

iconography, and NPS staff interpretive programs. 
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Downer, Alan S., Jr., et al. 

 1994 Traditional History and Alternative Conceptions of the Past. In Conserving 

Culture: A New Discourse on Heritage. M. Hufford, ed. Pp. 39–55. A publication of the 

American Folklore Society. New series. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. 

Eiler, Lyntha Scott; Eiler, Terry; Fleischhauer, Carl (Editors) 

 1981 Blue Ridge Harvest: A Region’s Folklife in Photographs. Washington, DC: 

Library of Congress. 

 This photographic essay, a product of an extensive field survey, examines the cultural 

landscape of the Blue Ridge Parkway, with emphasis on conveying the “presentness” of 

the region’s folklife and dispelling the impression that local culture is quaint, far away, or 

stuck in the past. Focus is on landscape, community, and religion, with intimate portraits 

of three local residents. 

Howell, Benita J. 

 National Recreation Areas in Appalachia: Citizen Participation in Planning and 

Management. In Culture: The Missing Element in Conservation and Development. Pp. 

51–64. 

 Compares the experience of conservation planning in two similar National Recreation 

Areas, Mount Rogers and Big South Fork, both on Tennessee borders. Differences in the 

management plans accounted for the success or lack thereof in the projects. The 

successful planning at Mount Rogers National Recreation Area resulted from long-term 

commitment to seeing through that the project adhere to plan; fair and open citizen 

involvement; standardized planning and coordination among the various administrative 

institutions involved; and making sure to orient the agency’s goals and values with 

outreach to local people. 

— 

 1993 Social Impact Assessment and Cultural Conservation: Implications for Local 

Public Involvement in Planning. In Environmental analysis : the NEPA experience. S.G. 

Hildebrand and J.B. Cannon, eds. Pp. 274–288. Boca Raton, Fla.: Lewis Publishers. 
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 Anthropologist offers ideas for incorporating cultural conservation into assessing effects 

of environmental planning on communities. Presents case studies where attention to 

locals’ heritage and cultural practices proved successful in reaching consensus between 

planners and locals. Suggests social impact assessment (SIA), scoping and risk 

assessment can be incorporated into more broadly defined Historic Preservation Act. 

— 

 1994 Folklife, Cultural Conservation, and Environmental Planning. In Putting Folklore 

to Use. M.O. Jones, ed. Pp. 94–114. Lexington, Ky.: University Press of Kentucky. 

 Howell cites folklorists’ contributions in gathering sources among local communities for 

park interpretation, stressing the importance of incorporating local knowledge and 

cultural traditions into park planning. Reviews the legislative history that addressed the 

need for cultural conservation along with historical and environmental conservation, as 

well as two case studies demonstrating the beneficial effects of including folklife research 

and community outreach into park management plans. Howell argues that park 

development and support of interpretive activities, exhibits and printed matter to promote 

cultural tourism could help perpetuate traditional lifeways rather than threatening their 

survival. 

— 

 1994 Linking Cultural and Natural Conservation in National Park Service Policies and 

Programs. In Conserving Culture: A new discourse on heritage. M. Hufford, ed. Pp. 122–

137. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. 

 Documents changing structures and practices in National Park management, tracing them 

to changing perceptions of Park’s role in managing lands. More recently, global issues of 

environmental crisis have been brought to the public’s attention, along with their cultural 

and economic ramifications. According to recent National Parks and Conservation 

Association (NPCA) recommendations, Parks need to move towards creating a plan that 

emphasizes the relationship among the natural and cultural resources of the system, and 

use cultural patterns to manage natural resources effectively. 
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Hufford, Mary 

 1993 Breaking the Time Barrier: Folklife and Heritage Planning in Southern West 

Virginia. Folklife Center News 15(3/4):3–23. 

 This article describes Mary Hufford’s experience working with the National Park Service 

and members of the communities in and around the New River Gorge National River, 

while working on planning for a cultural heritage center at the New River. A central 

theme of this article is how turning to tourism as the predominant new economic base 

continues an unfortunate economic trend of investment by outsiders and manipulation of 

cultural images. The hope seems to be that a cultural heritage center, which involves 

participation by residents, would help disrupt this pattern. Hufford traces the history of 

the region, the issue of place names, the emergence of fixed points in the landscape, 

reunions and reverse-migration, whitewater rafting, and fishing. The article is written 

from an ethnographic perspective, and much of the text comes directly from interviews 

conducted during Hufford’s fieldwork in the area. 

— 

 1994 Conserving Culture: A New Discourse on Heritage. Urbana: University of 

Illinois Press. 

 This collection of 16 essays considers the issue of heritage protection in the United States, 

including numerous specific case studies that address environmental impact assessments, 

riverways, urban parks, folk arts, and tourism. Taken collectively, the contributors to this 

volume critique the standard prescriptive approach to heritage that divides this domain 

into nature (natural species and ecosystems), the built environment (historic and 

prehistoric artifacts, buildings, sites, and districts), and folklife/culture. Instead, they 

discuss cultural conservation as an integrated process for resource planning that is 

responsive to grass-roots cultural concerns. Hufford’s introduction to this collection 

outlines problems with the existing federal heritage policies and the tension between 

national and local interests. She also traces the history and implication of the term 

cultural conservation for both policy and scholarship. 
NERI and GARI Ethnographic Overview and Assessment 

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King, Thomas F. 

 1998 How the Archeologists Stole Culture: A Gap in American Environmental Impact 

Assessment Practice and How to Fill It. Environmental Impact Assessment Review 

18:117–133. 

 King identifies a gap in how American environmental impact assessments (EIA) are 

performed that allows many aspects of culture to “fall through the cracks.” He argues that 

the way that in these assessments cultural resources are implicitly or explicitly considered 

to be historic properties (as defined by the National Historic Preservation Act) or as 

“archeological resources.” (A third option includes tangible Native American artifacts, as 

defined by the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act.) He traces the 

history of these developments, and explains that there are many “cultural parts of the 

affected environment” that do not fall cleanly into one of these categories. King suggests 

a refinement of EIA practices that incorporate interdisciplinary social scientific study and 

would explicitly address the entire sociocultural environment. 

Low, Setha M. 

 1994 Cultural Conservation of Place. In Conserving Culture: A New Discourse on 

Heritage. M. Hufford, ed. Pp. 66–77. A publication of the American Folklore Society. 

New series. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. 

 Low argues in this essay that it is impossible to separate cultural conservation from the 

conservation of place. Reasons given for this inseparability include that place is space 

that is made culturally meaningful, that place links local identity and its 

place/interdependence in a global world. The planning and design that place necessitates 

introduces additional problems (including political, pluralistic, and changeable qualities 

of cultures) that must be taken into consideration in any cultural conservation effort. Low 

offers examples of possible solutions to these issues that are being explored by groups 

such as the Cultural Aspects of Design Network. 

Lynch, Kathryn A., Eric T. Jones, and Rebecca J. McLain 

 2004 Nontimber Forest Product Inventorying and Monitoring in the United States: 

Rationale and Recommendations for a Participatory Approach: Institute for Culture 

Ecology. 
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323 

 This book grew out of a study of how people who harvest non-timber forest products 

across North America monitor the health of their resource and maintain access. Lynch, 

Jones, and McLain engaged harvesters in the study and offer insights into the prospects 

for resource management through ongoing participatory monitoring. 

Mahan, Carolyn 

 2004 A Natural Resource Assessment for New River Gorge National River. Technical 

Report NPS/NER/NRTR. Philadelphia: U.S. Department of the Interior. 

 Citing the mixed mesophytic forest as a key resource related to the Park’s identity and 

mission, Mahan’s report complements the Ethnographic Overview and Assessment. 

Marshall, Caroline 

 2004 Envisioning Convergence: Cultural Conservation, Environmental Stewardship, 

and Sustainable Livelihoods. Santa Fe: Fund for Folk Culture. 

Marshall, Payl D. 

 1981 A Cultural Research Project: The New River Gorge National River, West 

Virginia. Charleston, WV: Paul D. Marshall and Associates. 

Perdue, Charles L., and Nancy J. Martin-Perdue 

 2003 Ethnographic Needs Assessment: New River Gorge National Park. Pp. 105: 

Department of Anthropology, University of Virginia, under the supervision of Dr. David 

Orr, National Park Service. 

 This report offers an assessment of regional ethnographic needs of the New River Gorge 

National River. In addition to identifying gaps in existing data and offering the team’s 

findings and recommendations, the report also provides a complete bibliography (through 

September 1994) from NPS Archives and published sources related to the parks 

discussed in the report and the people traditionally associated with them, as well as 

interviews with NPS staff about ethnographic resources and needs. 
NERI and GARI Ethnographic Overview and Assessment 

324 

Sellars, Richard West 

 1997 Preserving Nature in the National Parks: A History. New Haven, CT: Yale 

University Press. 

 National Park Service historian Sellars traces the changing concepts of natural resource 

management in the national parks. Sellars’ thesis is that a persistent tension has existed 

within the National Park Service between development of parks for tourism (recreational 

and scenery management) and preservation of natural resources and conditions 

(ecological management) within them. Sellars challenges the prevailing myth that the 

early national parks were set aside principally as nature preserves. Instead, he 

demonstrates that recreational tourism as envisioned by corporate interests formed the 

chief intent behind the national park concept. 

Squillace, Mark 

 1990 The Strip Mining Handbook: A Coalfield Citizens’ Guide to Using the Law To 

Fight Back Against the Ravages of Strip Mining and Underground Mining. Washington, 

D.C.: Environmental Policy Institute and Friends of the Earth. 

 This handbook was drafted to enforce public safety regulations and environmental 

protection standards that coal companies must abide by. It was written to provide people 

and communities living in mining areas with the tools to understand the law and use the 

Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act to their advantage. Provides descriptions of 

different mining strategies, their environmental effects, step-by-step procedures in 

monitoring mining operations, and appendices of useful forms and addresses of agencies, 

as well as a glossary of terms. 

United States Steel Corporation. 

 1978 New River Gorge Bridge, Fayette County, West Virginia : world’s longest steel 

arch span bridge carries Appalachian Highway 876 ft. above river. Pittsburgh, Pa.: United 

States Steel. 
NERI and GARI Ethnographic Overview and Assessment

325 

Unrau, Harlan D. 

 1996 New River Gorge National River, West Virginia, Fayette, Raleigh, Summers 

Counties: Special history study/historic context study. [Denver, Colo.]: U.S. Dept. of the 

Interior, National Park Service. 

Regional History and Culture 

Adair, James 

 1775 The history of the American Indians ... containing an account of their origin, 

language, manners, religious and civil customs, laws, form of government, punishments, 

conduct in war and domestic life, their habits, diet, agriculture, manufactures, diseases 

and method of cure, and other particulars, sufficient to render it a complete Indian system. 

London: printed for Edward and Charles Dilly. 

Adams, James Truslow 

 1963 Atlas of American History. New York: Scribner’s. 

Adams, Noah 

 2001 Far Appalachia: Following the New River North. New York: Delacorte Press. 

Ambler, Charles Henry, and Festus P. Summers 

 1958 West Virginia, the mountain state. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall. 

Anderson-Green, Paula Hathaway 

 1978 The New River Frontier Settlement on the Virginia-North Carolina Border. The 

Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 86:413–431. 

Ansted, D. T. 

 1885 Coal and Coke: The Cabin Creek Coal Co. Lands. The Virginias: A Mining, 

Industrial and Scientific Journal 6(9):129. 
NERI and GARI Ethnographic Overview and Assessment 

326 

Appalachian Land Ownership Task Force 

 1983 Who Owns Appalachia? Landownership and Its Impact: University Press of 

Kentucky. 

 The Appalachian Land Ownership Task Force, a neo-populist Appalachian citizens group, 

coordinated this 2-year study to survey land and mineral holdings in 80 Appalachian 

counties and 6 states. Driven by the 1970’s “Who Owns America?” question and 

American land reform movements, it provides history and statistics of absentee land 

ownership and examines its effects on livelihood in the region. It analyses the association 

between landownership and community using 100 socioeconomic indicators gathered 

(available housing, median income, etc.) Findings demonstrate that over time, ownership 

of land and minerals is increasingly removed from, and indifferent to, the region and 

local interests. Study funded by the Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC). 

Atkin, Edmond, and Wilbur R. Jacobs 

 1954 Indians of the Southern Colonial frontier. The Edmond Atkin report and plan of 

1755. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. 

 Includes a map showing territories inhabited by various Indian nations. 

Batteau, Allen 

 1983 Appalachia and America: Autonomy and Regional Dependence. [Lexington, 

Ky.]: University Press of Kentucky. 

Bolgiano, Chris 

 1998 The Appalachian Forest: A search for roots and renewal. Mechanicsburg, PA: 

Stackpole Books. 

Brinton, Daniel 

 1866 The Shawnees and Their Migration. The Historical Magazine 10(1):1–4. 

Brisbin, Richard A. 

 2002 A Strike like no Other Strike: Law and Resistance During the Pittston Coal Strike 

of 1989–1990. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 
NERI and GARI Ethnographic Overview and Assessment

327 

Brown, Ralph M. 

 1937 A Sketch of the Early History of South-Western Virginia. William and Mary 

College Quarterly Historical Magazine 17(4):501–513. 

Campbell, John C. 

 1969 (orig. 1921) The Southern Highlander and His Homeland. Lexington: 

University Press of Kentucky. 

 This early documentary account of the region helped to create an enduring image of 

Appalachia as a region apart, contributing to highly selective interpretations of 

preindustrial Appalachian life. 

Cometti, Elizabeth 

 1941 Excerpts from Swann’s ‘Prison Life at Fort Delaware’. West Virginia History 

2:120–141. 

Corbin, David 

 1981 Life, Work, and Rebellion in the Coal Fields: The southern West Virginia miners, 

1880–1922. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. 

Corbin, David Alan, ed. 

 1990 The West Virginia Mine Wars: An Anthology. Charleston, WV: Appalachian 

Editions. 

 This is an anthology of materials related to the 1912 and 1921 “mine wars” in West 

Virginia, a part of the state’s history that is often left out of official historical discourse. 

Materials include articles, speeches, and personal testimony given to two U.S. Senate 

committees that investigated the labor issues. Corbin includes brief introductory 

headnotes to each item in the anthology. 

Davis, Donald Edward 

 2000 Where there are Mountains: An environmental history of the southern 

Appalachians. Athens: University of Georgia Press. 
NERI and GARI Ethnographic Overview and Assessment 

328 

Doddridge, Joseph, et al. 

 1912 Notes on the settlement and Indian wars of the western parts of Virginia and 

Pennsylvania from 1763 to 1783, inclusive, together with a review of the state of society 

and manners of the first settlers of the western country. Pittsburgh: J.S. Ritenour and W.T. 

Lindsey. 

Dodge, J. R. 

 1865 West Virginia: Its farms and forests, mines and oilwells; with a glimpse of its 

scenery, a photograph of its population, and an exhibit of its industrial statistics. 

Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott & co. 

Donnelly, Shirley 

 1993 Hatfields and McCoys: The Feud. A True Story of Murder, Mayhem and 

Mountain Family Pride: Fayette County Historical Society. 

 This short book is based on a series of stories and newspaper articles from The Beckley 

Post-Herald about the feud between the Hatfield and McCoy families. The infamous feud 

took place along the Tug River in Mingo County, West Virginia, and Pike County, 

Kentucky. Although it does not take place along the New or Gauley rivers, this feud is of 

historical significance to people across West Virginia. 

Dunaway, Wilma 

 1995 Speculators and Settler Capitalists: Unthinking the Mythology About 

Appalachian Landholding, 1790–1860. In Appalachia in the Making: The Mountain 

South in the Nineteenth Century. M.B. Pudup, D.B. Billings, and A.L. Waller, eds. Pp. 

50–75. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 

Dunaway, Wilma A. 

 1996 The First American Frontier: Tansition to capitalism in southern Appalachia, 

1700–1860. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 
NERI and GARI Ethnographic Overview and Assessment

329 

— 

 2003 Slavery in the American Mountain South. Cambridge: Cambridge University 

Press. 

Dunaway, Wayland F. 

 1944 The Scotch-Irish of colonial Pennsylvania. Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina 

Press. 

Eller, Ronald D. 

 1982 Miners, Millhands, and Mountaineers: Industrialization of the Appalachian South, 

1880–1930. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. 

Engelhardt, Elizabeth Sanders Delwiche 

 2003 The Tangled Roots of Feminism, Environmentalism, and Appalachian Literature. 

Athens: Ohio University Press. 

Ergood, Bruce and Kuhre, Bruce E. 

 1991 Appalachia: Social Context Past and Present. Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt 

Publishing Company. 

 This textbook provides an overview of Appalachian geography, history, and culture with 

focus on the question of whether it is possible to form a meaningful characterization of an 

Appalachian culture or subculture. Ergood and Kuhre emphasize a critical analysis of the 

region’s economy, both historically and in the present, and on the economy’s impact on 

social institutions. 

Evans, E. Estyn 

 1992 The Scotch-Irish: Their Cultural Adaptation and Heritage in the American Old 

West. In Essays in Scotch-Irish history. E.R.R. Green, Queen’s University of Belfast., 

and Ulster-Scot Historical Foundation., eds. Belfast: Ulster Historical Foundation. 
NERI and GARI Ethnographic Overview and Assessment 

330 

Fagge, Roger 

 1996 Power, Culture, and Conflict in the Coalfields: West Virginia and South Wales, 

1900–1922. Manchester; New York: Manchester University Press. 

Finger, John R. 

 1995 Cherokee Accomodation and Persistance. In Appalachia in the Making: The 

Mountain South in the Nineteenth Century. M.B. Pudup, D.B. Billings, and A.L. Waller, 

eds. Pp. 25–49. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 

Fischer, David Hackett 

 1989 Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America. New York: Oxford University 

Press. 

Fisher, Stephen L., ed. 

 1993 Fighting Back in Appalachia: Traditions of Resistance and Change. Philadelphia: 

Temple University Press. 

 This collection of 16 essays documents collective resistance in Appalachia since 1960. 

Organizing strategies are tied to theoretical discussions among activists and scholars, 

situating this collection within a larger national discourse of resistance and change. It 

counters false stereotypes of quiescence and rebellion in Appalachia and explains how 

they came about. Examines issues of class, race, and gender within labor movements and 

citizen action groups. 

Fishwick, Marshall William 

 1959 Virginia: A new look at the Old Dominion. New York: Harper. 

Fiske, John 

 1900 Old Virginia and Her Neighbours. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Co. 

Fones-Wolf, Ken, and Ronald L. Lewis, eds. 

 2002 Transnational West Virginia: Ethnic Communities and Economic Change, 1840–

1940. Morgantown: West Virginia University Press. 
NERI and GARI Ethnographic Overview and Assessment

331 

 A collection of twelve essays that explore the ways that various ethnic groups in West 

Virginia drew on networks, ideas, and cultures beyond both West Virginia’s and the 

United States’ borders. These articles are written primarily by economic historians, and 

the overall theme of the collection is that the economic forces and relationships at work 

in West Virginia extend beyond its political borders. The collection is divided into the 

following parts: Antebellum Roots, Niche Communities (Swiss, European Jews, and 

Belgian Glassworkers), Immigrant Coal Miners, and Representatives of Ethnic Work 

Communities. Individual essays represent a variety of specific perspectives from across 

Europe, as well as African Americans who migrated to West Virginia to work in coal 

mines. Geographically, these articles cover several counties in West Virginia; 

chronologically, these scholars explore from the middle of the 19th century through the 

early- to mid-20th century. 

Gersmehl, Phil 

 1970 Factors Leading to Mountaintop Grazing in the Southern Appalachians. 

Southeastern Geographer 10:67–72. 

Giesen, Carol A. B. 

 1995 Coal Miners’ Wives: Portraits of endurance. Lexington, Ky.: University Press of 

Kentucky. 

Hale, John Peter 

 1931 Trans-Allegheny Pioneers. Charleston, WV: The Kanawha Valley Publishing Co. 

Hamilton, J., and Virginia. General Assembly. 

 1818 To the Honorable speaker and gentlemen of the House of Delegates of the 

commonwealth of Virginia the memorial of the underwritten inhabitants of the country 

bordering on the James River and its branches, the Greenbrier, the New River, the 

Kanawha, and the Ohio. [Petersburg, Va.?: s.n. 

Hart, John Fraser 

 1977 Land Rotation in Appalachia. The Geographical Review 67:148–166. 
NERI and GARI Ethnographic Overview and Assessment 

332 

Harvey, Curtis E. 

 1986 Coal in Appalachia: An economic analysis. Lexington, Ky.: University Press of 

Kentucky. 

Hatley, Thomas 

 1991 Cherokee Women Farmers Hold Their Ground. In Appalachian Frontiers: 

Settlement, society, and development in the preindustrial era. R.D. Mitchell, Shenandoah 

Valley Historical Institute, and American Frontier Culture Foundation, eds. Lexington: 

University Press of Kentucky. 

Haynes, Ada F. 

 1997 Poverty in Central Appalachia: Underdevelopment and Exploitation. New York: 

Garland Pub. 

Inscoe, John C. 

 1995 Race and Racism in Nineteenth-Century Southern Appalachia: Myths, Realities, 

and Ambiguities. In Appalachia in the Making: The Mountain South in the Nineteenth 

Century. M.B. Pudup, D.B. Billings, and A.L. Waller, eds. Chapel Hill: University of 

North Carolina Press. 

— 

 2001 Appalachians and Race in the Mountains: From slavery to segregation. 

Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. 

Jacobs, Wilbur R. 

 1950 Diplomacy and Indian gifts; Anglo-French rivalry along the Ohio and Northwest 

frontiers, 1748–1763. Thesis, Stanford University Press, University of California. 

Johnston, David Emmons 

 1906 A History of Middle New River Settlements and Contiguous Territory. 

Huntington, WV: Standard. 
NERI and GARI Ethnographic Overview and Assessment

333 

Jones, Eric T., Rebecca J. McLain, and James F. Weigand 

 2002 Nontimber forest products in the United States. Lawrence: University Press of 

Kansas. 

Kegley, F. B., and Southwest Virginia Historical Society. 

 1938 Kegley’s Virginia frontier; the beginning of the Southwest; the Roanoke of 

colonial days, 1740–1783. Roanoke, VA: The Southwest Virginia historical society. 

Lalone, Mary B. 

 1996 Economic Survival Strategies in Appalachia’s Coal Camps. Journal of 

Appalachian Studies 2(1):53–68. 

 Lalone describes the various ways that families in Appalachia’s coal mining communities 

were able to support their households between the 1930s and 1960s. Her data comes from 

a 3-year anthropological study of 18 coal camps in the area near Appalachia, VA. Most 

families relied on more than the coal mining company paycheck for household 

subsistence. Common strategies included: pooling multiple incomes, raising animals, and 

gathering environmental resources. Inter-household exchange strategies included 

swapping, cooperative labor and gift-giving, and wheeling and dealing. Lalone also 

discusses community support structures, including helping each other out and relief 

activities. 

Lee, Howard B. 

 1969 Bloodletting in Appalachia: The Story of West Virginia’s Four Major Mine Wars 

and Other Thrilling Incidents of Its Coal Fields. Morgantown, WV: West Virginia 

University. 

 This book covers the four major coal wars in West Virginia, and the events that took 

place following unionization in 1933. This work is written from a participant-observer 

(not in the anthropological sense) perspective. The author was the former Attorney 

General of West Virginia, from 1925–1933, making him an observer of the first three 

mine wars and an important participant of the fourth. 
NERI and GARI Ethnographic Overview and Assessment 

334 

Lewis, Ronald L. 

 1998 Transforming the Appalachian Countryside: Railroads, deforestation, and social 

change in West Virginia, 1880–1920. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 

Leyburn, James Graham 

 1962 The Scotch-Irish: a social history. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina 

Press. 

Little, Charles E. 

 1997 The Dying of the Trees: The pandemic in America’s forests. New York, N.Y.: 

Penguin. 

 Ecologist Charles E. Little looks at the recent spate of tree infestations affecting forests 

across North America. In Chapter 8, “Lucy’s Woods,” Little investigates forest health the 

woods of in the hills and hollows of the Coal River Valley, where E. Lucy Braum 

gathered data for her definitive book, The Deciduous Forests of Eastern North America. 

Little learns that the woods in the Coal River Valley comprise the oldest, most diverse 

hardwood forest in North America, with around 80 species of trees. The mixed 

mesophytic forest is harmed by acid rain and ozone, causing a dramatic decline in the 

seed stock of the forest and tree death. 

Lunt, Richard D. 

 1979 Law and order vs. the miners, West Virginia, 1907–1933. Hamden, Conn.: 

Archon Books. 

Marsh, William A. 

 1979 1880 Census of West Virginia: compiled alphabetically by counties. Parsons, 

WV: McClain. 

Maury, Matthew Fontaine, William Morris Fontaine, and West Virginia. State Board of 

Centennial Managers. 

 1876 Resources of West Virginia. Wheeling: The Register Company. 
NERI and GARI Ethnographic Overview and Assessment

335 

McCann, Eugene J. 

 1998 Mapping Appalachia: Toward a Critical Understanding. Journal of Appalachian 

Studies 4(1):87–113. 

 McCann argues that policymakers and academics studying Appalachia who rely on maps 

need to understand the social implications of mapmaking and recognize the medium’s 

possibilities and limitations. He also argues for a more general understanding that all 

maps are arbitrary and socially constructed. 

McCreath, Andrew S., and Edward Vincent D’Invilliers 

 1887 The New River-Cripple Creek mineral region of Virginia. Harrisburg, Pa.,: 

Harrisburg Pub. Co. 

McLeRoy, Sherrie, and William McLeRoy 

 1995 More Passages: A new history of Amherst County, Virginia. Bowie, MD: 

Heritage Books. 

McNeil, W. K., ed. 

 1995 Appalachian Images in Folk and Popular Culture. Knoxville: University of 

Tennessee Press. 

 An anthology of twenty essays on various aspect of Appalachian culture. The essays span 

a wide timeframe, from 1860 to 1987, and present the variety of popular images of 

Appalachian people. Topics include moonshining, Kentucky feuds, mountain handcrafts, 

changes in dietary habits, images of Appalachia on television, the Great Smoky 

Mountains, and architecture. The editor is a folklorist, and folklore as a discipline is well 

represented in the anthology. Major section divisions include: A Strange Land and a 

Peculiar People; Our Contemporary Ancestors; Change Comes to the Appalachian 

Mountaineer; and Rethinking Usages: The Age of Functional Studies. 

Miller, Tom D. 

 n.d. Who Owns West Virginia? Series of articles reprinted by Huntington Advertiser 

and Herald Dispatch. Huntington, WV. 
NERI and GARI Ethnographic Overview and Assessment 

336 

Mitchell, Robert D., ed. 

 1991 Appalachian Frontiers: Settlement, society, and development in the preindustrial 

era. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. 

Montrie, Chad 

 2003 To Save the Land and People: A history of opposition to surface coal mining in 

Appalachia. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 

Mooney, James 

 1894 The Siouan tribes of the East. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office. 

Moore, George Ellis 

 1963 A Banner in the Hills: West Virginia’s Statehood. New York: Appleton-CenturyCrofts. 

 Written from an historical perspective, this book covers the history of secession and Civil 

War in western Virginia from 1860–1863, and the events and forces that led to the 

formation of the state of West Virginia. The author discussions military and political 

activities at the state level in close correlation with national developments. 

Nader, Ralph 

 1978 Ralph Nader Letter. H.J. Lewis, Linda; and Askins, Donald, Eds., ed. 

Colonialism in Modern America. 

 In 1973, Ralph Nader wrote this letter to the Chairman of the Board of the American 

Association, Ltd., a British-based landholding and development company that controlled 

65,000 acres of coal-rich land in the Appalachian Mountains of Kentucky and Tennessee. 

Nader argues that strip mining in Clear Fork Valley has ravaged the environment and 

made economic victims of local residents. He compares Appalachia to a colony and the 

coal and land companies to political tyrants, and sets forth steps that would make 

American Association “a more responsible constructive citizen.” 
NERI and GARI Ethnographic Overview and Assessment

337 

Nash, George Valentine, and Maurice Grenville Kains 

 1898 American Ginseng: Its commercial history, protection and cultivation. 

Washington, D.C.: Govt. Print. Off. 

New River Association 

 1817 Minutes of two sessions of the New River Association, begun and held at 

Bartlett’s Meeting-House, in Patrick County, Virginia ... June 1816. Richmond [Va.]: 

Printed by John Warrock. 

Obermiller, Phillip J., and William W. Philliber 

 1994 Appalachia in an International Context: Cross-national comparisons of 

developing regions. Westport, Conn.: Praeger. 

Otto, John Solomon 

 1983 The Decline of Forest Farming in Souther Appalachia. Journal of Forest History 

27(1):18–27. 

Percy, Alfred 

 1961 The Amherst County story; a Virginia saga. Madison Heights, VA: Percy Press. 

Peterson, Bill 

 1972 Coaltown revisited; an Appalachian notebook. Chicago,: Regnery. 

Pudup, Mary Beth, Dwight B. Billings, and Altina L. Waller 

 1995 Appalachia in the Making: The Mountain South in the Nineteenth Century. 

Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 

Raitz, Karl B., Richard Ulack, and Thomas R. Leinbach 

 1984 Appalachia, a Regional Geography: Land, People, and Development. Boulder, 

Colo.: Westview Press. 
NERI and GARI Ethnographic Overview and Assessment 

338 

Rakes, Paul H. 

 1999 Technology in Transition: The Dilemmas of Early Twentieth-Century Coal 

Mining. Journal of Appalachian Studies 5(1):27–60. 

 Rakes uses an historical approach to discuss changes in coal-mining technology in the 

early 20th century. His text and notes include clear explanations for terminology related 

to coal-mining. Further, he worked in the coal industry for 20 years, so he offers both 

emic and etic perspectives. 

Rasmussen, Barbara 

 1994 Absentee Landowning and Exploitation in West Virginia, 1760–1920. Lexington: 

University Press of Kentucky. 

 Examines the nature of land ownership in five counties of West Virginia and its effects 

on the counties’ economic and social development. Traces ownership and exploitation of 

the region since the American Revolution, and discusses farming, mining, and logging in 

the region, conservation and reforestation 

Rice, Otis K. 

 1970 The Allegheny Frontier: West Virginia beginnings, 1730–1830. Lexington: 

University Press of Kentucky. 

Rudden, Bernard 

 1985 The New River: A Legal History. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 

Salstrom, Paul 

 1994 Appalachia’s Path to Dependency: Rethinking a Region’s Economic History, 

1730–1940. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. 

 This economic history of the Appalachian Plateau shows that the region was not always 

dependent on outside development and federal subsidies for labor and subsistence. It 

emphasizes the economic, rather than social or psychological, reasons for falling into 

dependency, situating Appalachia in a larger global phenomenon of local dependency on 

foreign control. Traces the region’s history from initial European settlement and 

subsistence-barter-and borrow system, to industrialization, unionization and foreign 
NERI and GARI Ethnographic Overview and Assessment

339 

capitalist investment. Describes how mountain dwellers’ values of labor investment and 

family unity interacted with capital investment to their detriment. The book documents 

increase in poverty caused by industrialization, land depletion, federal homesteading 

legislation and banking legislation. 

— 

 1995 Newer Appalachia as One of America’s Last Frontiers. In Appalachia in the 

Making: The Mountain South in the Nineteenth Century. M.B. Pudup, D.B. Billings, and 

A.L. Waller, eds. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 

— 

 1997 Appalachia’s Informal Economy and the Transition to Capitalism. Journal of 

Appalachian Studies 2(2):213–233. 

 An investigation of informal sector work within the Appalachian economy. Informal 

work, or work that is not paid, is also referred to as “home work” or “neighborly work.” 

Takes an historical approach to this economic issue. 

Seaman, Catherine H. C. 

 1992 Tuckahoes and Cohees: the settlers and cultures of Amherst and Nelson Counties, 

1607–1807. Sweet Briar, VA: Sweet Briar College Printing Press. 

Shapiro, Henry David 

 1978 Appalachia on Our Minds: the Southern Mountaineers in the American 

Consciousness, 1870–1920. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. 

 Shapiro’s book is one of the first to recognize the religious diversity of the Appalachian 

region. Shapiro dispels the myth that Appalachia is a homogenous society, a strange land 

and peculiar people unified by geographic, social, and economic isolation. 

Shifflett, Crandall A. 

 1991 Coal Towns: Life, Work, and Culture in Company Towns of Southern 

Appalachia, 1880–1960. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. 
NERI and GARI Ethnographic Overview and Assessment 

340 

 Shifflett focuses on white working culture in the coal towns. He provides a social and 

cultural history coal-mining towns in southern Appalachia, including towns in Virginia, 

West Virginia, and Kentucky. This work is organized chronologically and topically. Part 

and chapter divisions address topics such as town-building and labor recruitment; work, 

culture, and society, including mining coal and the union; and aspects of mining 

communities, including the company town, store, and church. 

Smith, Barbara Ellen 

 1998 Walk-ons in the Third Act: The Role of Women in Appalachian Historiography. 

Journal of Appalachian Studies 4(1):5–28. 

 Smith argues that in Appalachia class is constituted in “dynamic, gendered relationships 

and identities” (8). She attempts to bring women’s experience to light by shifting the 

theoretical focus to include women; she considers the nature of work done, class 

formation, and class conflict. 

Smith, J. Lawrence 

 1988 New River Batteaus. Proceedings New River Symposium, April 7–9, 1988, Oak 

Hill, West Virginia, 1988. National Park Service. 

Smith, J. Russell 

 1950 Tree Crops; a permanent agriculture. New York: Devin-Adair. 

Smith, M. W. 

 2002 Fishing the New River Valley: an angler’s guide. Charlottesville: University 

Press of Virginia. 

 A guide for catching fish from a proprietor of Greasy Creek Outfitters with over 25 years 

experience fishing the New River Valley. Lists fish species common to the New River, 

seasonal advice for catching trout listed by county, tips on fishing at different areas on the 

river and some tributaries, appendix of local guide services, supply and repair shops, and 

other useful information. 
NERI and GARI Ethnographic Overview and Assessment

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Stevenson, Mary 

 2003 Coal Towns of West Virginia Volume 2. Charleston, WV: Quarrier Press. 

 Stevenson provides an historical overview of West Virginia coal towns using 

photographs. This book includes more than one hundred rare, unpublished photographs 

of Beckley and surrounding communities. This work is organized geographically, by both 

county and town. Although it includes towns from Raleigh, Fayette, and Wyoming 

counties, the primary focus is on Beckley. Mary Stevenson was president of the Raleigh 

County Historical Society for seven years and lived in Beckley for most of her life. 

Summers, Lewis Preston 

 1903 History of southwest Virginia, 1746–1786, Washington County, 1777–1870. 

Richmond, VA: J. L. Hill. 

Summers, Lewis Preston, George W. L. Bickley, and Charles B. Coale 

 1970 Annals of southwest Virginia, 1769–1800. Baltimore: Genealogical Pub. Co. 

Tams, W. P. 

 1963 The smokeless coal fields of West Virginia; a brief history. Morgantown, WV: 

West Virginia University Library. 

Tessiatore, Mary F., and West Virginia. Auditor’s Office. 

 2003 Sims index to land grants in West Virginia. Baltimore: Genealogical Pub. Co. 

Thom, James Alexander 

 1981 Follow the River. New York: Ballantine Books. 

 A fictionalized account of Mary Draper Ingles’ escape from the Shawnee indians in 1755. 

She walked 1,000 miles along the Ohio, Kanawha, and New rivers to return home. 

Thomas, Jerry B. 

 1976 Jedediah Hotchkiss, Gilded-Age Propagandist of Industrialism. The Virginia 

Magazine of History and Biography 84:189–219. 
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Toothman, Fred R. 

 1988 Great coal leaders of West Virginia. Huntington, WV: Vandalia Book Co. 

Trotter, Joe William 

 1990 Coal, Class, and Color: Blacks in Southern West Virginia, 1915–32. Urbana: 

University of Illinois Press. 

 Trotter looks at the process of black industrial working class formation in the southern 

Appalachian coalfields, between 1915 and 1932. He argues that proleterianization was 

the key factor in transforming southern blacks from rural agricultural works into an 

industrial working class. He takes a primarily historical approach and extensively uses 

primary source materials from state and national archives, as well as records from the 

United Mine Workers of America. He also conducted interviews with 29 miners and 

family members of miners. 

Trout, W. E. III 

 2003 The New River Atlas: Rediscovering the History of the New and Greenbriar 

Rivers. 

Walker, Thomas, and William Cabell Rives 

 1888 Journal of an exploration in the spring of the year 1750. Boston: Little, Brown, 

and Company. 

Waller, Altina 

 1995 Feuding in Appalachia: Evolution of a Cultural Stereotype. In Appalachia in the 

Making: The Mountain South in the Nineteenth Century. M.B. Pudup, D.B. Billings, and 

A.L. Waller, eds. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 

Washington, George, and John Clement Fitzpatrick 

 1925 The Diaries of George Washington, 1748–1799. 4 vols. Boston, New York,: 

Houghton Mifflin company. 
NERI and GARI Ethnographic Overview and Assessment

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— 

 1925 The Diaries of George Washington, 1748–1799. 4 vols. Boston: Houghton 

Mifflin. 

Weiler, Stephan 

 1997 The Economics of the Struggling Structurally Unemployed. Journal of 

Appalachian Studies 3(1):71–97. 

 Weiler presents his fieldwork for a study of industrial restructuring within the United 

States. In particular, he examines the effect on unemployment and local markets within 

West Virginia. His fieldwork included personal and telephone interviews conducted over 

a five-month period. 

Weiner, Deborah R 

 1998 Middlemen of the Coalfields: The Role of Jews in the Economy of Sourthern 

West Virginia Coal Towns, 1890–1950. Journal of Appalachian Studies 4(1):29–56. 

 Weiner discuses the economic history of Jewish immigrants in coal towns of West 

Virginia. Her approach is historical, and she covers Logan, Pocahontus, Williamson, and 

New River coalfields. 

Weller, Jack E. 

 1965 Yesterday’s People: Life in Contemporary Appalachia. Lexington, KY: 

University of Kentucky Press. 

 Jack Weller came to West Virginia in 1952 as director (1952–1965) of the Presbyterian 

Church’s West Virginia Mountain Project. Yesterday’s People: Life in Contemporary 

Appalachia, based on his experiences in West Virginia, is an examination of the character 

and development of the people of the southern mountains. When Appalachian poverty 

was rediscovered in the 1960s, it was a short leap from viewing Appalachia as a 

traditional folk culture to viewing Appalachia as a region-wide culture of poverty. 

Considered vicious and discriminatory by many Appalachian writers and scholars, 

Yesterday’s People explicitly created a link between folk society and the culture of 

poverty in Appalachia. 
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West Virginia History Film Project 

 1992 Transcript of Interview with Ron Eller: West Virginia Division of Culture and 

History. 

Whipkey, Bob 

 2006 Ginseng. In The West Virginia Encyclopedia. K. Sullivan, ed. Charleston, WV: 

West Virginia Humanities Council. 

Whisnant, David E. 

 1973 The Folk Hero in Appalachian Struggle History. New South 1973:30–47. 

 Whisant describes Appalachian struggles as public faces of the more profound struggle 

for an acceptable personal and collective self-image. From the struggle with historical 

content and meaning emerge regional heroes, which provide an accessible index to the 

growth of regional consciousness. 

— 

 1981 Modernizing the Mountaineer: People, power, and planning in Appalachia. 

Boone, NC: Appalachian Consortium Press. 

— 

 1983 All that is Native and Fine: The politics of culture in an American region. Chapel 

Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 

White, Israel Charles 

 1917 Map of West Virginia, Showing Coal, Oil, Gas, and Limestone Areas. 

Morgantown, WV: West Virginia Geological Survey. 

Whittaker, Otto, ed. 

 1968 Best of ‘Hill-Billy’: A prize collection of 100-proof writing from Jim 

Comstock’s West Virginia Hillbilly. New York: Droke House Publishers. 

 A collection of short vignettes reprinted from Jim Comstock’s The West Virginia Hillbilly. 

Topics vary widely, and include stories about both real and legendary figures. Although 
NERI and GARI Ethnographic Overview and Assessment

345 

the materials in the collection were not compiled from scholarly sources, it should not be 

too quickly dismissed because they present an insider’s perspective of “West Virginia 

hillbillies.” 

Wigginton, Eliot, ed. 

 1972 The Foxfire Book: Hog dressing; log cabin building; mountain crafts and foods; 

planting by the signs; snake lore, hunting tales, faith healing; moonshining; and other 

affairs of plain living. Garden City, NY: Anchor Press, Doubleday. 

 This collection of Appalachian folklore was done primarily by high school students with 

no formal training in folkloristics. Many items in this collection are reprinted from 

Foxfire magazine. The ninth and tenth graders who contributed to this collection were 

from Rabun Gap-Nacoochee School in George, the classroom from which Foxfire

emerged. Because the collectors were not professionals and the faculty supervisor lacked 

folklore training, the items in this collection lack scholarly accoutrements such as the 

name of the informant, date and location it was collected, annotations, etc. 

Williams, John 

 1995 Class, Section, and Culture in Nineteenth-Century West Virginia Politics. In

Appalachia in the Making: The Mountain South in the Nineteenth Century. M.B. Pudup, 

D.B. Billings, and A.L. Waller, eds. Pp. 210–232. Chapel Hill: University of North 

Carolina Press. 

Williams, John Alexander 

 2001 West Virginia: A history. Morgantown: West Virginia University Press. 

 This work offers a history of West Virginia, including discussions of statehood, the Civil 

War, unionism, and industrialization. There are extended discussions of the state’s 

railroad and coal mining history. The chapters are organized geographically (Point 

Pleasant, Harpers Ferry, Droop Mountain, Tug Fork, Paint Creek, Hawks Nest, Buffalo 

Creek, and Montani semper.... Unfortunately, the Index is not particular detailed and 

includes mostly names of people, which can make it difficult to find specific information. 
NERI and GARI Ethnographic Overview and Assessment 

346 

— 

 2002 Appalachia: A history. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 

Wills, Ken, et al. 

 1997 Patterns of Forest Health: A Report on Citizen Monitoring in the Eastern 

Mountains 1994–97. Washington, D.C.: Lucy Braun Association and Trees for the Planet. 

Wilson, Darlene 

 1998 Multicultural Mayhem and Murder in Virginia’s Backcountry: The Case of 

Pierre-Francois Tubeuf, 1792 to 1795. Journal of Appalachian Studies 4(1):5–28. 

 Wilson looks at historical accounts about and records related to the death of French 

entrepreneur Pierre Francois Tubeuf, who had a land claim to 55,000 mountainous acres 

(for coal mining purposes) in western Virginia. He was murdered on Election Day, 1795. 

Wilson, Rick 

 1988 “More Than Butterfly Words”: Don West Comes Home to Pipestem. Goldenseal, 

West Virginia Traditional Life 14(4):67–69. 

 Don West, poet and essayist, was a union activist who partook in social justice causes 

and wrote about mountain labor’s tradition. A cofounder of the Highlander Folk School 

in Tennessee, he is featured here as founder of the Appalachian South Folk Life Center in 

Pipestem, Summers County in 1965. The Center celebrates grass roots mountain music 

and traditions. It offers free summer camps for disadvantaged youth, community outreach 

services, and group conference facilities. It also features a library.