West Virginia

• 1. Introduction

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  West Virginia came into existence not through gradual settlement or territorial promotion, but through an act of wartime defiance. On the 20th of June 1863, in the middle of the American Civil War, it became only the second state admitted to the Union during that conflict. The question the rest of this documentary will try to answer is a simple one: how does a state break free from another state, and what happens to a place built on mountains and coal once it does?

  The man at the center of the separation was Francis H. Pierpont, a lawyer from Fairmont who had spent years chafing under the political dominance of Virginia's planter elite. When Virginia voted to secede from the Union in April 1861, Pierpont moved quickly. Within weeks, delegates from across the northwestern counties were gathering in Wheeling to build a rival government. By October of that year, a vote was held. Of the roughly 19,000 cast, nearly all favored the new state.

  The land those voters lived on was nothing like the flat tobacco country of eastern Virginia. West Virginia sits entirely within the Appalachian Mountains, with an average elevation of approximately 1,500 feet above sea level, the highest of any state east of the Mississippi River. Its highest point, Spruce Knob, reaches 4,863 feet. The mountains that made farming difficult and slavery unprofitable also made the state rich in coal, a resource that would define the next century and a half of its history.

• 2. A Land Before Statehood

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  A 2010 analysis of a stalagmite found inside a West Virginia cave revealed that Native Americans were burning forests to clear land as far back as 100 BCE. Long before European contact, the region supported a mosaic of cultures: the Siouan Monongahela to the north, the Fort Ancient people along the Ohio River, and the Tutelo and Moneton tribes in the southeast. The Susquehannock held territory east of the Monongahela River before being slowly pushed out by disease and warfare.

  The Beaver Wars of the 1670s reshaped everything. The Iroquois Confederacy, five nations based in what is now New York and Pennsylvania, drove rival tribes from the upper Ohio Valley to keep it as a hunting ground. This triggered a chain of displacements that brought the Shawnee into the region, where they remained until the United States drove them out during the Shawnee Wars of 1811-1813. They were West Virginia's last Native tribe.

  European presence came formally in 1671, when General Abraham Wood, acting on orders from Royal Governor William Berkeley of Virginia, sent Thomas Batts and Robert Fallam west from Fort Henry. They were the first Europeans recorded as reaching Kanawha Falls. German settlers from Pennsylvania founded what is now Shepherdstown on the Potomac in 1725, and George Washington surveyed much of the Northern Neck territory between 1748 and 1751, noting in his diary that German squatters had already spread along the South Branch Potomac River.

  By the 1750s, the French and Indian War brought violence to the scattered British settlements, with Native allies of the French nearly destroying them. It was not until 1774 that Crown Governor John Murray, 4th Earl of Dunmore, led a force over the mountains and Colonel Andrew Lewis dealt a decisive blow to the Shawnee at the Battle of Point Pleasant, where the Kanawha and Ohio rivers meet.

• 3. The Break from Virginia

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  On the 17th of April 1861, at the Virginia Secession Convention in Richmond, delegates voted to leave the Union. Of the 49 delegates from the northwestern counties, 30 voted against secession and only 17 voted for it. Within days, a mass meeting at Clarksburg called for those counties to send delegates to Wheeling.

  When the First Wheeling Convention opened on the 13th of May 1861, 425 delegates from 25 counties were present. A fault line quickly appeared. Pro-Union slaveowner John S. Carlile wanted immediate statehood. Waitman Willey urged caution, arguing that acting before Virginia's secession referendum had been ratified would amount to revolution. Willey's caution won the day.

  On May 23, Virginia ratified secession by a wide margin statewide, but in the western counties 34,677 voted against and only 19,121 voted for it. The Second Wheeling Convention met on June 11 and declared Virginia's Secession Convention void. It chose Pierpont as governor of the rival Restored Government of Virginia and sent Willey and Carlile to Washington as the new U.S. senators. The federal government recognized both of them.

  The constitutional convention that followed wrestled with slavery. Gordon Battelle of Ohio County proposed gradual abolition and wrote to President Lincoln urging it. The convention tabled the slavery question at first, finishing its work on the 18th of February 1862. On the 31st of December 1862, Lincoln approved an enabling act that conditioned statehood on inserting a gradual abolition clause. The revised constitution was adopted on the 26th of March 1863, and Lincoln's proclamation on April 20 set admission for 60 days later. The state legislature then abolished slavery entirely and ratified the 13th Amendment on the 3rd of February 1865. Maryland later challenged West Virginia's northern boundaries, claiming land north of the South Branch Potomac. The Supreme Court rejected those claims in two decisions in 1910.

• 4. Coal and the Railroads

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  After Reconstruction, the resource that transformed West Virginia was bituminous coal. The residents had long known it was there; artisanal mining had always been possible. What changed was the railroad.

  The Chesapeake and Ohio Railway reached the Ohio River at the new city of Huntington in 1872, opening the New River Coal Field. In 1881, the former Atlantic, Mississippi and Ohio Railroad was reorganized as the Norfolk and Western, with a new railroad city built at Roanoke. Its new president, Frederick J. Kimball, rode horseback through the southern coalfields and saw firsthand a rich bituminous seam, which Kimball's wife named Pocahontas. The N&W redirected its expansion to reach it, and by 1889 the coal center of Bluefield had been founded along those rail lines. It would remain the largest city in the southern part of the state for several decades.

  The most dramatic railroad story belonged to William Nelson Page, a civil engineer and mining manager in Fayette County, born in 1854 and described by former Governor William A. MacCorkle as a man who knew the land "as a farmer knows a field." Beginning in 1898, Page partnered with northern and European investors to develop the Winding Gulf Coalfield, later promoted as the "Billion Dollar Coalfield." He began a short-line railroad intended to give shippers competitive access to either the C&O or the N&W. Both railroads secretly agreed to refuse him favorable rates or purchase offers.

  Page's silent partner was Henry Huttleston Rogers, a principal in John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil Trust. Rather than surrender, Rogers financed the tracks all the way east across Virginia using his private fortune, at a cost of $40 million. When the renamed Virginian Railway was completed in 1909, three railroads were shipping coal to Hampton Roads. The VGN and the N&W eventually became parts of the Norfolk Southern system, and the Virginian's well-engineered route still offers a favorable gradient toward the coast.

• 5. Mountains, Climate, and Geography

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  West Virginia covers 24,229.76 square miles, of which 24,077.73 are land. About 75% of the state falls within the Cumberland Plateau and Allegheny Plateau regions, terrain so rugged that the relief resists simple description. Spruce Knob, at 4,863 feet, sits within the Monongahela National Forest and is covered in dense boreal spruce above 4,000 feet, an ecosystem more reminiscent of northern New England than the American South.

  The New River Gorge, carved 1,000 feet deep by the New River, lies just south of the forest and is now managed as a National Park and Preserve. The eastern panhandle, anchored by Martinsburg and Harpers Ferry, is considered part of the Washington metropolitan area, while the northern panhandle cities of Wheeling, Weirton, and Morgantown sit just across the border from Pittsburgh.

  The climate is generally humid subtropical at lower elevations, shifting to cooler mountain conditions at height. January temperatures range from around 26 degrees Fahrenheit near the Cheat River to 41 degrees along the Kentucky border. July averages run from 67 degrees near the North Branch Potomac to 76 degrees in the western lowlands. The highest recorded temperature, 112 degrees Fahrenheit, was set at Martinsburg on the 10th of July 1936. The coldest, negative 37 degrees Fahrenheit, was recorded at Lewisburg on the 30th of December 1917.

  The Allegheny ridges create a partial rain shadow over the eastern valleys, but the higher terrain captures enormous moisture. Snowshoe averages nearly 200 days a year with either rain or snow, and the Allegheny Highlands can receive up to 180 inches of snow annually. The cities of Elkins and Beckley rank 9th and 10th in the United States for cloudy days, each exceeding 210 per year. The official state fossil, named Megalonyx jeffersonii, was first described by Thomas Jefferson in 1799 from bones found in Haynes Cave in Monroe County.

• 6. Politics, Labor, and Identity

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  From the Great Depression to the 1990s, West Virginia voted heavily Democratic, a pattern rooted in union politics forged in the coalfields. The shift since then has been stark: the state is now considered a deep-red state at the federal level. That transformation tracks the decline of organized labor as coal employment contracted.

  The tensions were old ones. The 1829 constitutional convention in Richmond rejected western reforms, with eastern leaders clinging to political arrangements that gave slaveholding counties three-fifths of their slave population as a basis for legislative representation. Every county west of the Alleghenies except one voted against the resulting constitution. The Reform Convention of 1850-51 extended the vote to all white males 21 and older and reapportioned the House of Delegates based on the 1850 census, counting whites only. Even so, the Senate fixed the west at 20 seats versus 30 for the east.

  Modern West Virginia consistently ranks among the lowest states in health outcomes, life expectancy, and education levels. The proportion of adults with a bachelor's degree is the lowest in the country at 17.3%. In 2017, an estimated 19% of the population lived in poverty, exceeding the national average of 13%. The state is the only one in the country where death rates exceed birth rates, and population has been declining; West Virginia lost one of its three seats in the House of Representatives after the 2020 census.

  Yet the state also claims the highest average elevation east of the Mississippi, more than 200 incorporated municipalities, and a tourism sector that contributed $4.27 billion to the economy and employed 44,400 people in 2010. Over 9 million people visited a West Virginia State Park in 2021, the highest number on record, partly driven by a $151 million improvement project. The Greenbrier hotel, originally built in 1778, has hosted numerous world leaders and U.S. presidents over the years.