Mysteries of Williamson

Deep into the coalfields, we first head for South Williamson, where a strip of run-down retail and fast-food joints on par with any aging suburb await. The Wendy’s is usually a solid choice and, given how busy it was, we clearly weren’t the only ones who felt that way.

The Coalfields have been a source of regional turmoil forever. Recently, it has been this resurgence in nostalgia over coal mining jobs versus the fact the land just doesn’t have much more to give and increasingly tough environmental regulations and, yes, competition. But this is land that has seen bloodshed over all sorts of things, most notably the right to organize labor at the Hatfield and McCoy Feud (which is now a tourism thing).

At any rate, it is an interesting place culturally because it has always been a region of misfits, and there is a lot of literature about that and there is a lot of music about the more fit members of this society leaving for more industrial jobs in the big, urban centers of the north from the 1930s through the 1970s (Dwight Yoakam’s Readin’, Rightin’, Route 23 comes to my mind first). I like reading about it, I recently finished reading Kathleen Stewart’s A Space on the Side of the Road, which covers her experience with the dialects a few counties over in area like Odd, Rhodell, and Winding Gulf (it’s jargon-heavy, but gives a very good sense of how it is truly an “other” America).

After lunch, we turned back around and found ourselves in the middle of a street festival closing off all the streets in downtown Williamson. Everyone was out, and we skirted around the periphery toward the old high school because wanted to check the Hatfield-McCoy House, a bed and breakfast run by a fellow geocacher to serve the newly developing tourism trade in Mingo County. But once we stopped, there were so many things to stop and look at.

The first thing that caught our eye was the old high school. With a dwindling population, many of the county school districts in West Virginia have taken to consolidating their schools, Mingo is no exception. So while the old Williamson High School, which closed in June 2011, was surrounded by a high density of homes (something we would call excellent planning and walkability), the new consolidated high school is the only thing out on a deserted ridge on a brand new highway that’s already beginning to fail… but I’ll get to that later. In the place of the old high school is a Christian academy. Though despite being closed for three years, we found artifacts from and evidence of the building’s prior life visible from the perimeter of the school yard.

The front entrance of Williamson High School, closed June 2011

From here, we also spotted a pair of grand, but abandoned, old buildings overlooking the town from atop a hill. We took some guesses as to what they were. Hotel? Boarding house? School (because the high school in front of us probably wasn’t the original Williamson High School!)? Hospital? After driving around and noticing the hospital nearby, we kind of figured hospital and nursing school, and were able to confirm this suspicion after locating the application for admitting the Williamson Historical District to the National Register of Historic Places and finding older photographs of these buildings in a slightly better condition. The disappointing news is that at the time of application, numerous dwellings were already abandoned and it is clear that the down is emptying out.

The yellowish building on the left is the former nursing school/nurse's home the the building on the right is the former hospital and, until very recently, was a professional building with physician's offices in it

It is clear that Williamson and South Williamson are the major service hubs for the region, given the presence of major chain retail and restaurants, in addition to a community hospital (with a helipad area in the parking lot!), but the empire is crumbling. Buildings large and small, historic and recent are being left fallow for nature to reclaim and there is nothing to intervene. Williamson may never complete evaporate like some of the smaller communities in regions like the New River Gorge, but may find that it is shrinking.

We carried on toward Matewan, seeking geocaching in the mosquito-heavy, seemingly tropical hot weather. En route we discovered remnants of old curves that the DOT straightened out, cemeteries so old they lacked real roads to get up to the burial plots (even though they had some recent burials!), and even a pair of railroad tunnels.