Encomium of West By God
Pillars of Salt, Post Thirteen
Let me tell you about West Virginia. They say that mountaineers are always free. This association between West Virginia and mountaineers, due in no small part to the terrain, seems appropriate. Fitting. At an average elevation of 1,500 feet, West Virginia is the highest state east of the Mississippi. It is the only state lying entirely within Appalachia. Its fate, whatever it may be, is tied to the mountains.
I like to think, in praise of West Virginia, that life in the mountains was a determining factor in the decision to reject Virginia’s secession from the Union in 1861, however contentious the path to abolition may have been. In 1863, West Virginia was admitted as a free state and the 35th state in the Union. The man who would design the Great Seal of the State of West Virginia was named Joseph H. Diss Debar, born in Strasbourg, France in 1820.
Diss Debar, so it goes, arrived in Boston, Massachusetts aboard the RMS Britannia in 1842 on the same voyage that carried Charles Dickens to visit the United States for the first time. Indeed, Diss Debar is alleged to have sketched Dickens, though the weather was bad and Dickens was sea-sick most of the trip. The ship was a wooden vessel with three masts, powered by a side-lever engine consuming 38 tons of coal a day and designed by Robert Napier. It was capable of making the crossing from Liverpool to Halifax in twelve days. From Halifax, the Britannia would go on to Boston. Diss Debar left France in order to pursue Clara Levassor, then just 13 years-old, whom he intended to marry.
Levassor’s parents had settled in what was then Parkersburg, Virginia. Originally called “Newport,” Parkersburg was at the terminus of the Northwestern Turnpike, which came west from Winchester. The Northwestern Turnpike would compete with the National Road as a way into the untrammeled and then unexploited regions home to Mekoche and other autonomous septs of the Algonquin-speaking Shawnee confederacy of tribes. The National Road, Route 40, had been completed through Cumberland, Maryland to Wheeling, West Virginia in 1818, and was one of the very few routes traversing the mountains. It has been speculated that the permanent population of indigenous peoples in West Virginia was thinner by the 1820s, in part because of the semi-nomadic culture of the Shawnee tribes, but also because of the inter-tribal tension between the Shawnee and the Iroquois Nation to the north, who fought to control the fur trade with the French.
The Northwestern Turnpike was, predominantly, a trade route. As the Britannia did across the Atlantic, the Turnpike too would carry raw materials out of former colonial holdings and finished consumer goods into them. New towns sprung up along the road, which met a segment of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad at Romney, West Virginia where shipments could be transferred to rail and sent on to Baltimore and other urban industrial centers along the coast.
The chief engineer of the Northwestern Turnpike, appointed sometime around 1831, was another French-born immigrant named Claudius Crozet. Born in Villefranche, Provenc-Alpes-Côte d’Azur, France in 1789, Crozet and his wife came to the United States in 1816, where the young graduate of the Parisian École Polytechnique took up a faculty position as professor of engineering at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. He developed a strong reputation, published a Treatise on Descriptive Geometry, and was hailed by Thomas Jefferson as the “best mathematician” in the country. While at West Point, Crozet became acquainted with Robert E. Lee who would recommend the Frenchman to the Virginia Board of Public Works as a candidate for Principle Engineer and Surveyor, a post accepted by Crozet in 1823.
The intertwining of military and business interests, personified in the life and work of Claudius Crozet, is typical of the development of Appalachia. The obvious reason being that the tribes living in the region had to be removed or pacified into assimilation while the developing infrastructure that would connect the mountains to shipping centers near the coast was protected. But there was also the symbolic battle with the land.
The mountains could forbid access to the Ohio Valley and points west, opened to settlers from the United States by the Louisiana Purchase and other, lesser known, agreements, such as the 1795 Treaty of Greenville, which was signed by both Lewis and Clark of the famous expedition. It was at the signing of the Treaty of Greenville that the two future explorers met one another for the first time. The natural resistance of the mountains elicited the most profound collaboration between military strategy and civil engineering. It was not only the indigenous population that needed to be pacified. It was the land itself. It was wild and needed to be tamed. In all that wildness, we had yet to discover the wonder.
I think of all these technologies. Bridges and railroads and canals. Dynamite, mine shafts, and roads. Also those civilizing technologies on paper. The treaties and agreements, shipping logs, ledgers, and incorporations that began to overlay the land with mineral rights and right of ways. Property lines, points of access, throughways, roundabouts, and borders. The mountains, and the people living in them, resist these tools. The ground can be hard, the land, unyielding.
There is resistance to these expansions. To encroachment. To civilizing forces. Once the Shawnee were pushed back, finally beyond the Mississippi, another group of incorrigible mountaineers would take their place.
“Take their place” — that phrase rings in many registers. The place was taken. But the commercial interests that drove roads and railways into the area were also in need of labor. It wasn’t enough to have access to these resources. Take coal, for instance, a resource almost wholly identified with West Virginia. It really didn’t start being exploited until the later part of the 19th century. Up until the American Civil War, so-called “artisanal” or personal mining was the primary activity surrounding coal. But as the Industrial Revolution surged, northwestern New Jersey and Pennsylvania proved what profits could be made from anthracite and the bituminous coal seam named “Pocahontas” by Helen Needles, the wife of Frederick Kimball of Philadelphia who had taken over the Atlantic, Mississippi and Ohio Railroad, renamed it the Norfolk and Western Railway, and consolidated it with the Shenandoah Valley Railroad. The village of Big Lick was selected to be the junction of the two merged rail lines. In 1882, Big Lick became Roanoke, developed to handle expansion west into the mountainous coal fields.
To survey the land for mineral extraction and exploitation, Dr. David Ansted had been enlisted to identify coal seams throughout what would become the Midland Trail in Fayette County, West Virginia. Ansted was English and lectured on geology and its applications in manufacturing at the Military Seminary at Addiscombe from 1845 until it closed in 1861. Officially the East India Company Military Seminary until 1855 when it became the East India Company Military College, the institute was specially founded to train officers for the private army of the East India Company. In West Virginia, Ansted was succeeded by his student, William Nelson Page, whose legacy goes back to Virginia’s time as a colony and includes royal governors, Brigadier Generals, signers of the Declaration of Independence, and plantation owners who landed at Jamestown in 1650. Page enlisted Northern and European money to finance the short-line Virginia Railway, developing access to the Winding Gulf Coalfield in competition with the larger Chesapeake and Ohio, and Norfolk and Western Railways. Page was able to withstand the collusion of his larger competitors, who agreed to refuse any negotiations or buyouts, because of a silent partner in Henry Huttleson Rogers, a principle investor in the Standard Oil Trust founded by John D. Rockefeller and Henry Flagler.
It is worth noting that large swathes of West Virginia were still unsettled until as late as 1889 or 1892. At that time, unsatisfied with the number of local “American whites” (a term used in a 1911 report on immigration issued to the United States Senate by the Dillingham Commission) willing and able to work the mines, large mine operators began to import labor. The soft-coal region of southwestern Pennsylvania was a natural place to seek workers who could transfer their skills to the mines of West Virginia. But the major source of immigrant workers in the region ultimately became New York-based labor agencies. North Italian workers and Magyars from Hungary formed important but often overlooked ethnic groups within the so-called “Pocahontas” fields as well as the Fairmont and Elk Gardens coalfields. Polish, German, Austrian, Russian, Lithuanian, Slovak immigrants all contributed significant numbers to the growing labor pool being directed into Appalachia with Black workers making up between 18 and 28 percent of the workforce in a given coalfield from 1907 to 1909.
What became the labor stock of West Virginia was a creation of capitalists who, by and large, did not themselves live in the area. This much is acknowledged in the Congressional record by the Dillingham Commission. William Page is unique in his claim to some type of locality. Frederick Kimball, for instance, lived mostly in Philadelphia, where he was eventually buried. The assemblage of workers gathered for the purpose of material extraction should be understood granularly, against the grain of a mythologized Scots-Irish whiteness that is typically projected on the region. Elizabeth Catte has done a great service here, pushing back against the reductive image of an Appalachian monoculture in her magisterial What You’re Getting Wrong About Appalachia. Scots-Irish heritage is key to the construction of the “American white” discussed already in 1911. Both Scotch and Irish are still listed among the immigrants working in West Virginia coalfields as of June 1908, where they make up 0.19 and 0.437 percent of all mining employees who reported their nationality. American citizens identified themselves as “Negro” at a rate of 18.633 percent. Undifferentiated “American whites” were 39.645 percent of all reporting workers, about 23,797 people out of the 60,484 total employed in mining operations in 1908.
What I’m trying to say is that West Virginia is a place of resistance. It is resistent, like most places, to easy reduction. It is a complicated place, hiding itself in folds and hollers, gems covered over in anthracite, black dust along the roadside. It was these labor conditions, created by speculators and mine operators, that fomented the Battle of Blair Mountain in the late summer and early fall of 1921. Rednecks — union men and women with red bandanas. Socialists. The battle had been brewing since 1890 with the founding of the United Mine Workers union. In company towns, being fired meant eviction for the relocated workers and their families. A strange kind of settling.
Just like the private armies of the East India Trading Company whose officers trained at Addiscombe, in would come the Pinkertons, the private armies of the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency. The National Guard. All to protect the interests of mine owners over workers who sought a more autonomous relation to the means of production, who wanted work on equitable terms, who wanted to make a living. To try and crush resistance. Failing that, they would simply crush the mountains. Strip mining became another method of undercutting labor as the coal industry waned in the 20th century.
Is this in praise of West Virginia? I would like to think so. Resistance is freedom. It is a “no” echoing through the ranges, a “no” that rejects what has been imposed on it, that makes itself ungovernable like the mountains. To govern the mountain is to destroy it, ordering transformed into annihiliation. But it is not a “no” without a cause. Behind it, echoing silently within this rebellion, is an ecstatic “yes” to what is possible, to a world yet to come. Resistance to one situation is made only so that another situation might arise from it. That is what makes the wildness of West Virginia so wonderful. It is, hidden beneath conditions on the surface, the home of radical possibility.
It is a promise writ on the face of Blair Mountain, across Matewan, a promissory note for another world. There is a reminder rolling eternally in the holler, a refrain that comes back along the tracks and creek beds to rustle in the trees. Remember, redneck — another world is possible.
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