Berkeley Springs Story Archives - West Virginia Public Broadcasting

Update: Public Hearing For Cacapon RV Campground Canceled

Monday, April 17, the public hearing has been canceled as a result of a lawsuit between Morgan County citizen Dale Kirchner and the West Virginia Division of Natural Resources.

Updated on Monday, April 17, 2023 at 4:30 p.m.

Monday, April 17, the public hearing has been canceled as a result of a lawsuit between Morgan County citizen Dale Kirchner and the West Virginia Division of Natural Resources. According to a Morgan County Circuit Court finding, the DNR was alleged to not have allowed sufficient lawful notice before the hearing was to take place. The DNR denies the claim, but agreed to cancel the meeting as a result of the suit.

“The Defendants maintain that the West Virginia Division of Natural Resources has provided lawful notice, pursuant to §§ 20-5-16 and 59-3-2 of the West Virginia Code, and would prevail on the merits, the filing said. “However, the Defendants do not wish to proceed if there is an appearance of impropriety, but instead desire to assure the public that it is in full compliance with any and all notice requirements. Accordingly, the Defendants find it fitting to cancel the meeting scheduled for April 18, 2023.”

There is as of yet no postponed date for the hearing.

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Original Post

A public hearing regarding a proposed private campground development is scheduled at Cacapon State Park next week.

The hearing concerns the construction of an RV park on Cacapon grounds.

Three development proposals submitted by Blue Water Development, River & Trail Outfitters and Scenic LLC are being reviewed by the state Division of Natural Resources (DNR) as responses to a request for proposal posted last December.

One bid submitted by Blue Water Development said as many as 350 spots could be constructed.

“At this time, no vendor selection has been made,” a March release from West Virginia State Parks said. “Furthermore, the West Virginia DNR is under no obligation to accept any of the proposals as submitted and may negotiate the scope and specifications of any final agreement. No specific sites within the park have been selected for this potential development.”

The release also said that any trails impacted by the construction would be relocated or reintegrated into the new facility.

The Morgan County Commission voiced concerns about the development in a letter written last week, saying it could cause traffic and safety issues, overwhelm the park’s sewer plant and cause excessive excavation and clear-cutting of trees.

Environmental groups like the West Virginia Rivers Coalition and Sierra Club have also voiced similar concerns.

“This massive RV park and these types of private amenities are not compatible with the unique conditions of Cacapon and what we expect at WV State Parks,” West Virginia Rivers said in a statement on the potential development.

Morgan County community members have also assembled on park grounds in protest of the development’s potential approval.

“For the past three weeks, there has been a growing group of citizens meeting at the upper lake at Cacapon State Park in Berkeley Springs,” Morgan County resident Russell Mokhiber said in an email to West Virginia Public Broadcasting. “Seventy people showed up. The next week, 90 people showed up. This past Monday, 120 people showed up.”

Another protest is also expected on park grounds Monday evening.

The development comes after House Bill 4408 was passed into law during the 2022 West Virginia Legislative session. It allows for contracts to be granted to private companies to build recreational and lodging facilities on state park grounds.

The hearing is scheduled for 5 p.m. on April 18 at the park’s conference center.

Editor’s Note: This story was updated to reflect the change in status of the public hearing and add the filings with the circuit court of Morgan County.

Berkeley Springs Film Festival Showcases Cinema

The Berkeley Springs Film Festival is showcasing both local projects and international movies in the Eastern Panhandle this weekend.

The festival will feature 28 films over three days, including narrative features, documentaries and foreign films that were submitted by independent filmmakers. Ten of the films being screened were made regionally.

Managing Director Brett Hammond says he and a friend started organizing the event after not being satisfied with other options.

“A lot of organizations, nonprofits, will run a film festival just as a fundraiser,” Hammond said. “They’re not really all that interested in helping the filmmakers. And so we wanted to do a festival by filmmakers, for filmmakers.”

This year’s festival also comes as the state’s film office tries to boost the film industry workforce. The state’s film tax credit went into effect in July, and the office is sponsoring a practical makeup workshop at the festival Saturday to help prepare for a boost in film productions.

That seminar, scheduled for 10 a.m. Saturday, is being hosted by John Caglione, Jr., who won an Academy Award for 1990’s Dick Tracy and is the personal makeup artist for Al Pacino.

An earlier seminar is scheduled at 8 a.m. for aspiring filmmakers to learn cinematography and how to get their films selected for other small festivals.

“We get a lot of entries where the filmmakers make the same mistakes over and over again, like poor audio,” Hammond said. “And there’s certain things that don’t take a whole lot more work, but dramatically increase your chances of being accepted to a film festival.”

The festival is scheduled for Friday through Sunday at the Berkeley Springs Star Theater. Day and weekend passes are available online.

Funding Granted For Berkeley Springs Bypass Road Completion

The funding was officially awarded to A.L.L. Construction Dec. 21, totaling nearly $35 million.

More funding from the state is going towards the completion of the Berkeley Springs Bypass in Morgan County.

The funding was officially awarded to A.L.L. Construction Dec. 21, totaling nearly $35 million.

The road’s construction is part of Gov. Jim Justice’s Roads to Prosperity program. The bypass is designed to divert traffic congestion on U.S. Route 522, which goes through Berkeley Springs. An initial $60 million in funding for the project was granted in 2020.

A 2020 release from Justice’s office says Route 522 sees 13,400 vehicles per day, with approximately 30 percent of those vehicles being trucks. The other purpose of the bypass is to make downtown Berkeley Springs safer for other drivers and pedestrians.

The project will see three-and-a-half miles of a four-lane highway completed in Morgan County from Winchester Grade Road south of Berkeley Springs to state Route 9. This round of funding will connect the northern section of the bypass with Route 522 north of the town, adding two bridges and a connecting road to War Memorial Hospital along the way.

The completed project will include three bridges, three at-grade intersections and a diamond interchange on Route 9.

Water Aficionados Still Seek Healing At Berkeley Springs

In the years before indoors plumbing, many Appalachians got their fresh water from the natural springs created by our ancient mountain range. But in Berkeley Springs, West Virginia, people are still filling jugs with spring water to lug back home. Some do it for the taste, but others say the water has healing properties — a tradition that also goes back centuries.

This story originally aired in the Oct. 7, 2022 episode of Inside Appalachia.

Every couple weeks, Lauren Lee stuffs a few dozen gallon jugs into a big black laundry bag. She brings it to a covered pavilion right in the middle of Berkeley Springs State Park, which itself is right in the middle of downtown Berkeley Springs, West Virginia.

She chooses one of two brick water fountains and begins to fill her jugs, one by one, with water drawn from the seven underground springs.

“I like coming down here. I always meet new people. I’ve never been able to do this anywhere I’ve ever lived,” Lee said.

She doesn’t just come here to socialize though.

“We have well water where we live, so it’s a lot easier to use this in our machines, like for coffee,” Lee said. “And for the plants, because our water kills our plants.”

The water is free. But of course, it wouldn’t be much more expensive to just buy water at Kroger or Dollar General. It would certainly be more convenient. No empty jugs or laundry bags necessary.

But the water Lee draws from these springs has something store-bought water does not.

“I feel like this is part of the healing and just the nutrients I’m getting from the earth,” she said.

People have been coming to Berkeley Springs for centuries, looking for a healing. It was native people who apparently introduced Europeans to its medicinal properties. The springs were already such a popular destination by the mid-18th century that a young surveyor named George Washington made sure to stop when he visited the area.

Washington would return a few times — once to cure his rheumatic fever and later with his wife Martha and her daughter Patsy, hoping to treat the girl’s seizures.

In 1776 — when Washington was probably busy with other concerns — the Virginia General Assembly established a town around the springs. They called it “Bath,” after the spa town in England. That began a flurry of development in town, and some buildings from that time still survive.

There’s the two-story Roman Bathhouse, built in the 1780s. For a small fee you can still enjoy a half-hour soak in a 750-gallon tub filled with spring water. The Gentlemen’s Spring — where you find the drinking fountains — arrived in the 1800s. So did the Ladies’ Spring, today known as the main bathhouse.

The bathhouse also sells empty gallon jugs for anyone who wants to take some water home — provided they have them in stock.

Should you arrive without an empty jug, you can pick one up from the main bathhouse.

“I sold 15 to one person on Saturday,” said Leslie Smith, who runs the front desk at the spa. “People swear by that water. They take a bath in it. They wash their hair in it. They cook with it. There’s a woman that comes from China, they come in here and all day long [they fill] five-gallon jugs. Like 50 of them.”

Inside Appalachia didn’t encounter anyone from China when we visited — but we did find someone from Lebanon.

“My friend told me about it a long time ago,” said Fadi Talj. “Then when I moved closer, I realized I’m only 30 minutes away. And that’s when I started coming to get it.”

Talj is from Lebanon originally, and then lived in Frederick, Maryland before moving closer to Berkeley Springs and its water.

“You don’t find many of these places around, so if you find one close, you take advantage of it,” he said.

Dorothy Vesper, a geology professor at West Virginia University, is a fan of Berkeley Springs water, too.

“Every time I go by, I fill my water bottle,” she said via Zoom call. “It’s good stuff.”

Vesper is not sold on the health claims, though. A few of her graduate students have studied Berkeley Springs water. They found there are minerals present: magnesium, as well as potassium, sodium, calcium and other members of the periodic table. But all the chemicals exist in vanishingly small amounts.

“You’d have to drink a lot of it to get enough of anything that was nutrient-helpful,” she said.

The research has yielded some good news. Not all natural springs are created equal. Some are not safe to drink from. Some have been contaminated by their surroundings, while others are really just discharge from old, abandoned coal mines.

Berkeley Springs, on the other hand, is pristine.

“It doesn’t have a metallic [taste]. It’s sort of a soft spring water. I just think it tastes nice,” Vesper said. “I have no qualms whatsoever, I would drink it right out of the spring.”

Aside from the taste, though, Vesper said the spring water is no better for you than what comes out of the tap at home.

So what about those who feel like they’ve been helped by this water? What about those who believe they have been healed by it? Is this all just the placebo effect?

Vesper made clear, she is not a physician, but she has a theory.

“Personally, if you let me go and spend two weeks hanging out at some springs — I’d feel better,” she said.

There might be something to that.

There is a peacefulness at the park among the spring-fed pools and the cherry blossoms. Maybe the benefit Lee and Talj ascribe to the water actually comes from the ritual of returning week after week and bringing water up from the earth, just as our forebears have done for centuries.

If the healing isn’t in the magnesium — maybe it’s in the memories that are mixed in there.

——

This story contains music by Joseph Haydn and the Staples Singers.

This story is part of the Inside Appalachia Folkways Reporting Project, a partnership with West Virginia Public Broadcasting’s Inside Appalachia and the Folklife Program of the West Virginia Humanities Council.

The Folkways Reporting Project is made possible in part with support from Margaret A. Cargill Philanthropies to the West Virginia Public Broadcasting Foundation. Subscribe to the podcast to hear more stories of Appalachianfolklife, arts, and culture.

Berkeley Springs Furniture Company To Add Rural Jobs With Factory Expansion

Furniture manufacturer Gat Creek is undergoing an expansion of its Berkeley Springs factory that will see more jobs for local workers.

The factory ships around $25 million worth of products across the country annually and employs 150 workers. The expansion is expected to bring 65 more to the facility and double its production capacity.

Owner Gat Caperton says producing domestically in an era where most furniture companies contract to foreign manufacturers is a point of pride for him.

“I think it’s important to produce things locally. And in our case, in particular, we’re really sustainable at the time that sustainability has become more and more important,” Caperton said.

The Morgan County-based factory was founded in the 1950s as Tom Seely Furniture before it was bought and renamed by Caperton in 1996. Each piece of furniture is handmade there.

“It’s like a reproduction of antique furniture. Everything’s built by hand,” said shop lead Michael Snow. “It’s just very interesting how it all comes together from start to finish. We take a (wood) panel down and we make a shape out of a square panel, and then it ends up turning into a bed or a table.”

Last week, workers celebrated the expansion by signing a steel beam that will be part of the new wing’s foundation. Caperton says it’s part of a factory tradition where each piece of furniture is signed by the craftsperson who built it.

“It’s kind of a nice way to celebrate the expansion,” Caperton said. “We have to build so much furniture inside, and we couldn’t build a building and not put our signatures upon the face.”

Gat Creek factory workers sign a steel beam that will be part of the foundation of the factory’s new expansion.

Rural Eastern Panhandle communities like Berkeley Springs have to compete with larger towns like Martinsburg, which continue to see rapid increases in population and job growth. However, Gat Creek workers like Erin Lancaster say they’d rather work closer to home, preferring the more rural lifestyle.

“I love that this place is expanding and it means a lot for people as a place for people to come and work and be part of the community, but I also don’t want too much growth in Morgan County to where we’re just packed and overwhelmed,” Lancaster said. “I like low key, you know, not clogged.”

The expansion is expected to be finished within a year and will add 40,000 square feet to the factory.

Concept of ‘Cat Cafes’ May Be Helping More Felines Find Forever Homes

Every year for Christmas, cats are often given as gifts. But many end up in animal shelters. In fact, 3.2 million cats enter animal shelters every year in the United States, according to the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA).

And every year, about 860,000 are euthanized in shelters. But places like “cat cafes” may be helping more cats find forever homes.

Give Purrs A Chance

At a two-story, Victorian-style housein downtown Berkeley Springs, Morgan County, about 50 cats and kittens are roaming freely. All have been spayed or neutered, defleaed, dewormed, socialized and are up to date on their shots.

Give Purrs A Chance opened in May 2017. For an $8 admission fee, visitors have access to Purrs and its feline residents for an entire day. They can come cuddle kitties for an hour or two, walk down the street for a bite to eat or a cup of coffee, and then return for more cuddles.

If you want to take one home, it’s a $100 adoption fee.

Purrs is a nonprofit cat adoption agency that was created by local resident George Farnham. He got the idea from cat cafes that have been popping up in the U.S. since 2014.

“I’ve just been an animal lover all my life,” Farnham said. “When I first heard about the concept of cat cafes in the United States, it just seemed to be the way of the future — how adoptions are handled — and so, I just wanted to be a part of that.”

Farnham calls Purrs a cat cafe, but it doesn’t serve food or drink. Farnham said to do that, the West Virginia Health Department required a closed off area for food prep and a separate entrance, so he opted not to serve food. But the nonprofit does offer free-ranging cuddle buddies, which is a staple of cat cafes, so he hung onto the term.

“Give Purrs A Chance” has found homes for more than 700 cats since opening in 2017, according to founder George Farnham.

The house has hardwood floors, colorful walls, cat-themed artwork, bean bag chairs, and plenty of toys.There are places for cats to lounge, hide or climb. There’s a room just for kittens, and there’s a space just for cats on the shy side.

There’s also a little shop inside the house called the Catique Boutique that features local artists’ work for sale and accounts for about 10 percent of the overall income of the nonprofit.

The cats mainly come from four nearby rescues and shelters in the Eastern Panhandle and from across the border in Hagerstown, Maryland.

Farnham is a volunteer at Purrs, but there are eight part-time employees who keep the place running, including Brianne VanScoy. VanScoy said what she loves about the concept of a cat café is it can help someone better connect with a potential pet.

A photo of every cat that’s ever been adopted from “Purrs” is posted on the walls in the house.

“I think it’s easier for people to adopt a cat here because there’s less pressure, and they can spend more time getting to know an animal,” VanScoy said. “And that gives them a lot of opportunities to get to know an older cat as opposed to a kitten.”

According to the ASPCA, more than 1.6 million cats are adopted every year from shelters. Since 2014, cat cafes have popped up around the country, and most are adoption focused. But some animal welfare organizations are concerned cat cafes may not be the best environments for the felines – that they create stressful environments that are constantly changing as people come and go.

But for Farnham, Purrs has been successful. Since they opened two-and-half-years ago, they’ve had more than 15,000 visitors, some international, from places like Ireland and France, and more than 700 adoptions.

Two kitties hanging out on a table by a window in “Give Purrs A Chance.”

“We think we have a tremendously positive image for West Virginia, that we’ve attracted so many people from so many states that come specifically just to play with some of the cats here,” Farnham said.

In an emailed statement from the ASPCA, the organization said places like cat cafes and kitten pop-ups “increase the visibility of cats in need” and “generally help to reduce the time it takes for an animal to find a loving home.”

And for the cats themselves, Farnham said he believes having a free range environment gives cats the ability to live freely and happily until they find their forever home.