Hills and Heritage

Pausing from studying for my candidacy exam on Saturday, I had the opportunity to play tour guide in Randolph and Pocahontas counties in West Virginia. Without even consciously thinking about it, transportation was a central theme to our activities.

We kicked off the trip with some geocaching, taking us out Kingwood Pike from Morgantown to West Virginia Route 92 in Reedsville, then down Route 92 into Durbin.

Our first stop beyond Morgantown was along the Decker’s Creek Rail Trail in Reedsville. Reedsville is the end of the trail and seemingly a world away from the trail’s other end on the waterfront in Morgantown. The trail is quieter and rather than hemmed into narrow valleys with roads and the creek, it is between a farm and a sprawling industrial operation. The trail is, almost uncharacteristically, in a broad open valley.

After Reedsville, the next community is Arthurdale. Arthurdale was one of the planned communities of the New Deal intended to move impoverished miners and farmers and place them into a contemporary rural community where they could be self-sufficient. The idea lost support by World War II and less than a decade after its beginning the project officially ended. The entire town is now a National Historic District.

We continued on through the towns of Newburg and Belington, with a stop in the graveyard of the oldest church in Barbour County. We met up with Corridor H, which is possibly the greatest political quagmire in highway history, and followed it to Crystal Springs Road to follow Route 92 through central Elkins and even witnessed part of a Civil War reenactment in Beverly. After following some slow moving tree removal equipment over Cheat Mountain we arrived in Durbin.

West Virginia is home to a number of excellent scenic tourist trains, the Durbin and Greenbrier Valley Railroad’s Durbin Rocket is no exception! The two-hour trip follows the Greenbrier River south toward Cass. After about 45 minutes the train takes a stop along the river where passengers can get out and, in my case, wade in the river. On such a hot day the cool water felt great, I could have stood in that river all day. On the trip back to Durbin the train stopped at a creek to take on water. Here they demonstrated how the steam engine is able to pump water up from the creek. The train took on about 1000 gallons and took about 10 minutes. The minutes seemed to drag on, but a rate of 100 gallons per minute actually seemed pretty impressive.

The Greenbrier River from the Durbin Rocket

Just before returning to Durbin a rain began to set in. We grabbed two quick geocaches on Cheat Mountain, one at an overlook and one at the summit, and hurried on to find a place for dinner. We lucked out and found some excellent homecooking at the Dailey Grille, seemingly the only place to grab a bite in Dailey. That country fried steak will not soon be forgotten.

The finishing touch of the day was visiting the American Mountain Theater in Elkins. The Branson-style show was non-stop entertainment, whether it was the contemporary country songs, comedic dialogue, or deeply moving gospel selections. Most impressive, the incredible talents performing also perform the less glamorous tasks of operating a theater, from scooping popcorn to ticket sales. Of course, the highlight of the show was a crack at Corridor H, the road that’ll be completed in the lifetime of the host’s grandchildren!

Easter Lillies and Railroad Grades

No matter where you venture throughout the entire state of West Virginia, you are never far from evidence that people have been there before you. One is hard pressed to find a hollow or a mountain without an old rail grade or Easter lilies. What isn’t a result of mining is the result of the booming logging business in West Virginia during the nineteenth century. Of course, back then there was no regard for ensuring there would be trees to log in five, ten, or fifteen years and by 1920 the virgin forest was entirely gone. It is difficult to imagine the scale and the methods required to log an entire state during the late nineteenth and earlier twentieth century, but there is still once place in West Virginia where people can learn: Cass Scenic Railroad State Park.

Cass Depot, July 2009

Cass is a remote town in Pocahontas County, WV, virtually impossible to accidentally come across due to its remote location. Chris and I, with my mother in tow, set out from Elkins, WV on a July morning to find Cass and a piece of West Virginia heritage. A fine mist hovered in the air as we traveled through mountains, farmland, and quaint little towns down US-250 and over to WV-92, passing through Durbin and by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory.

While founded as a company town for the West Virginia Pulp and Paper Company (now Mead Westvaco), Cass is now a state park, featuring a fully operational logging railroad as the cornerstone of the park. Prior to logging trucks, railroads were built to move logs down the mountain to the mill. The locomotive most capable of handling the steeper tracks and switchbacks was (and probably still is) the Shay, which are geared locomotives. Cass is home to the largest collection of surviving Shays, including the #5 which has been traveling up and down the mountain at Cass since 1905.

On this day we were going to take the train up to Bald Knob, the third highest point in West Virginia. As we waited on the platform at Cass, the train approached, filling the narrow valley along the Greenbrier River with the scent of burning coal. We boarded one of the rustic cars, a flat car with a canopy and wooden benches installed, and the journey began.

For the bulk of the excursion all you see are trees and sweeping vistas of the remote Pocahontas County. The guides on the train point out all of the places where there used to be life, but nature has seemingly reclaimed all of it, everywhere you look. Imagining that this place was ever devoid of trees is asking the impossible.

Once at Bald Knob the view of the state was stunningly beautiful, but there was a twist. For all of the history in the woods we climbed through, the most noticeable feature in the valley below are the telescopes for the National Radio Astronomy Observatory. Where once there was a rowdy logging operation, science has come to find peace and serenity.

View from Bald Knob, July 2009

Back at the Cass town site, the rusted skeleton of a paper mill is being overtaken by vegetation and the houses and town only still stand because the state stepped in to preserve them before all that remained was a patch of Easter lilies and a railroad grade along the Greenbrier River.