West Virginia USA
Destination Guide & Hotel Reservations
The people of WEST VIRGINIA are only half joking when they call their state the
Ireland of the US. Generally poor and almost entirely rural, it shares a similar history
of exploitation by outside powers, with timber and coalmining companies
taking advantage of the rich natural resources while giving little in return. But, quite
apart from the almost Third World deprivation which endures in some areas, West Virginia
is also, in places at least, incredibly beautiful, and can boast the longest white-water
rivers and most extensive wilderness areas in the eastern US. The extreme topography,
which has historically isolated its inhabitants, now makes the state a popular destination
for hikers and outdoors enthusiasts, and the moonshiners of old have been replaced by ski
instructors and mountain-bike guides. Pioneer settlers started to cross the mountains of
western Virginia in significant numbers during the middle of the seventeenth century.
Farming small plots of land with their own labor, they came to have ever less in common
with the slave-holding plantation owners of old Virginia, and when the Civil War broke
out, the area declined to secede from the Union. The Supreme Court never ruled whether
West Virginia was legally entitled to declare itself a state, and Virginia itself has
still not officially recognized the split. West Virginia has, however, developed a
political and economic identity of its own. Around 1900, when railroads from the east
coast first reached into the mountainous interior, timber companies clear-cut stand after
stand of forest, setting up a succession of mill towns, each dismantled in its turn when
they moved on somewhere new. Cass , now preserved within the Allegheny National
Forest, is one of the few that was left intact. Later on, coal-mining conglomerates,
especially in the south, perfected the "company town" approach, wherein workers
were paid a little bit less each month than the amount they owed for their
company-provided food and lodging. Coal companies still exert immense power in West
Virginia, but the real key to the state's future prosperity is tourism, which in places
now accounts for over half its income.
The state's most popular destination, the restored 1850s town of Harpers Ferry ,
is barely in West Virginia at all, standing just across the broad rivers which form its
Maryland and Virginia borders. To the west, the Allegheny Mountains stretch for
over 150 miles; more than a million acres of hardwood forest rival New England for
brilliant autumnal color. West Virginia's oldest and most attractive town, Lewisburg
, sits just off I-64 at the mountains' southern foot, while the capital, Charleston
, lies in the comparatively flat Ohio River valley of the west.
Reserve a Hotel Room in West Virginia USA
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