Memorial Day Story Archives - West Virginia Public Broadcasting

Travelers Reminded To Buckle Up During Holiday Travel

As the Memorial Day holiday approaches, state officials are advising travelers on state roads to keep safety in mind.

Around 600,000 vehicles are expected to travel on the West Virginia Turnpike Thursday through Monday.

The West Virginia Governor’s Highway Safety Program reminds drivers and passengers to buckle their seat belt during the Click It or Ticket high visibility enforcement campaign and every day of the year.

The U.S. Department of Transportation’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s national seat belt enforcement mobilization runs through June 4.

In 2021, 280 people lost their lives on West Virginia roads. Passenger vehicle fatalities totaled 184 people, with 74 of them confirmed as being unbuckled/unrestrained.

West Virginia’s seat belt use rate climbed to 92.5 percent in 2022, the highest use rate recorded in West Virginia.

At the current seat belt use rate, preliminary data shows unbuckled West Virginians are 18.21 times more likely to die in a crash than those who are properly restrained.

W.Va. Turnpike Holiday Traffic Tops 884,000 Vehicles

The West Virginia Turnpike saw more than 884,000 vehicles pass through its toll booths in the week leading up to Memorial Day.

The West Virginia Department of Transportation says the total included heavier-than-expected traffic on Tuesday and Wednesday of last week.

West Virginia Parkways Authority Executive Director Jeff Miller says that could have been because travelers were trying to get out ahead of heavy rains forecast for that Thursday.

Miller said the Thursday and Friday were the “big days,” when more than 268,000 vehicles used the turnpike.

Miller said there were no significant delays for turnpike drivers over Memorial Day weekend.

Harpers Ferry Looks Back At African American Memorial Day Tradition

After the Civil War, families of fallen Union soldiers recognized Decoration Day by adorning the graves of their loved ones with flowers. That remembrance became what’s now known as Memorial Day and also became a unique holiday for African American tourists visiting West Virginia during the late 19th century.

One of the earliest known observations of Memorial Day in the state began in the 1870s when groups of people would picnic at Island Park, an amusement park outside Harpers Ferry. These annual celebrations carried into the early 20th century and attracted hundreds of African American tourists. Harpers Ferry National Park intern Cassie Chandler is researching the park’s tourist community as part of her studies.

“Island Park was a wonderful place, especially, of course, in the African American community,” Chandler said. “A lot of churches came to Island Park to score a day of fun. They’d picnic. They played games. And how they would get here was through the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad.”

In 1878, the B&O Railroad Company bought the park. Railroad companies were some of the largest employers of African Americans after the Civil War, though work conditions were still unfavorable compared to those of their white peers. Harpers Ferry park ranger Melinda Day says the destination became known as a safe public place for African Americans after its development, making it an annual vacation destination for both Black and white employees of the railroad.

African American community members crossing the Island Park bridge from the train station to the amusement park.

“They tended to be very hungry for leisurely destinations that were free from hostility, humiliation and exclusion that tended to mark their experiences at other white public spaces and commemorative sites,” Day said.

Island Park was also close to the historically Black Storer College. The Harpers Ferry school was built in 1867 to help educate the 30,000 African Americans in the region recently freed from enslavement. When school was out of session, the college would rent out the dorms to tourists in the area. This contributed to the notable amount of Black visitors to the island for holidays like Memorial Day.

“When the students broke for the summer, they would go home and those dorms were empty,” Day said. “And then the college started to put together that so many people, both white and Black, were coming here and needed a place to stay.”

Today, Island Park is just a memory. The facilities were wiped out by flooding in the 1920s. But the National Park Service has preserved the park’s only surviving structure, the Harpers Ferry Bandstand. The building is still in use today by community members and musicians.

Justice Cancels COVID-19 Briefing, Receiving Treatment For Possible Lyme Disease

In a statement, Gov. Jim Justice announced Wednesday evening he began feeling sick after events on Monday in Wheeling and Blacksville.

“I immediately got tested for COVID-19 and was negative, but I am still having symptoms and nowhere near 100 percent,” Justice said. “As of now, I am being treated for possible Lyme disease.”

The governor postponed his regular COVID-19 briefing for the week and said he will hold one as soon as possible after the Memorial Day holiday.

Justice tested positive for coronavirus in January. He recovered from moderate symptoms after receiving monoclonal antibody treatment .

Motorcycle Riders Cross West Virginia Headed For Vietnam Memorial

Approximately 50 motorcycle riders crossed West Virginia Thursday on their way to a candlelight vigil at the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, D.C. for Memorial Day.

The cross-country motorcycle trek is called the Remember Our Fallen ride. The official Ride For The Wall was canceled for the second straight year due to COVID-19 concerns.

About 50 riders were determined to take the ride anyway. The sounds of their motorcycles could be heard by those at the state capitol as the bikers journeyed on a leg through Charleston.

This 10-day ride began in California and ends at the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington.

For Jarrod Gerbitz from Jennings, Kansas said he has always “had a deep down feeling that we need some accountability for all of our prisoners of war and everyone who has not made it home.”

Riders leave the state capitol on their way to the Vietnam Memorial.

Michael Mulligan began his ride in Crested Butte, Colorado, but rode to Los Angeles to join up with other riders. He estimates by the time he gets home, it will be a 7,000 mile ride. He has been making this journey since 2014.

The ride continues this year, he said, even though the official ride has been canceled, because of the efforts of “a group of like minded people who continue the mission.” He noted that many of his fellow riders said they have made the trip a number of times and, like him, their mission is to ride for those who can’t.

“I ride for my dad. He’s a Vietnam vet,” Mulligan said.

He is not a veteran himself, but this is how Mulligan serves now. He will meet his father at the Vietnam Memorial, and together pay tribute.

“I will get to go to the candlelight vigil and to the Vietnam Memorial,” he said. “And it’s all about supporting my dad.”

W.Va. Governor Warns Of Virus Ahead of Memorial Day Weekend

West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice is warning of disastrous consequences if coronavirus cases spike as he sets up the most aggressive phase of his reopening plan around Memorial Day weekend.

The Republican governor on Tuesday said the state must continue lifting restrictions on businesses but offered grim predictions if the state saw a second wave of virus cases.

“West Virginia, the most vulnerable of all states — the most elderly, the most chronic diseases — the most vulnerable of all states has pitched a perfect game so far. But yet when this thing snaps back, if it does, it can really, really hurt us,” he said.

Justice has earmarked May 21 as a reopening day for restaurants, big-box stores, outdoor recreational rental businesses and the state’s famous Hatfield-McCoy Trails. Campgrounds and lodges will also reopen the same day but only for West Virginia residents.

Restaurants, which have been allowed to seat customers outdoors, will operate at half-capacity and are required to follow social distancing guidelines as part of the plan to continue reopening next week, just before the start of Memorial Day weekend.

The governor, who had previously slowed his reopening strategy so officials could observe the state’s caseload, said West Virginia had its lowest number of new positives since the virus began with six recorded cases on Monday.

“Everything tells us we can move more and more towards giving you more freedoms back and more of a normalcy, but I would only ask and plead with you to know that this thing can whiplash back on us and if it does in West Virginia it will be bad,” he said.

The governor has already let hospitals resume elective procedures and allowed the reopening of drive-in theaters, physical therapy centers, small businesses and barbershops.

His reopening plan hinges on having the state’s positive test rate remain under 3% for three days, reversing a previous goal of having cases decline for two weeks. The two-week criteria was previously endorsed by the White House and Clay Marsh, a West Virginia University official leading the state’s virus response.

Marsh now says the state has enough downward trend lines to allow for restrictions to be lifted. He has acknowledged that it would take a severe outbreak for the state’s positive case rate to rise high enough to pause the reopening.

The Justice administration has never explained why it switched from the two-week benchmark to the three-day standard. State officials have not given clear figures on what kinds of testing capacity and safety equipment inventory they want to have as part of the reopening strategy.

At least 57 people in the state have died from the virus and around 1,400 have tested positive, according to state health data.