On August 25, 2000, the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope was dedicated at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Pocahontas County. At 16-million pounds, it’s the world’s largest fully steerable radio telescope.
Its accuracy is so precise it’s like seeing the width of a human hair from six feet away. The telescope’s 2,004 panels are mounted on actuators, little motor-driven pistons that adjust the shape of the surface.
The telescope replaced an earlier 300-foot meridian transit telescope that operated from 1961 until collapsing in 1988.
Green Bank—located in a beautiful pastoral setting—was chosen to host the National Radio Astronomy Observatory because of its low population, lack of industrial development, and surrounding mountains, which shield it from radio interference. The observatory opened in 1959. The next year, noted astronomer Frank Drake launched the NASA Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, or SETI, at Green Bank.
In January 2016, a new project was started to search nearby stars for radio emissions that might indicate intelligent life. This 10-year, $100 million initiative is led by Russian billionaire Yuri Milner and cosmologist Stephen Hawking.
West Virginians who are out of work due to recent deadly floods are facing a deadline to apply for unemployment benefits.
The deadline to file a claim for employees or residents of Kanawha, Greenbrier and Nicholas counties is Wednesday.
Those in Clay, Fayette, Monroe, Roane, Summers, Pocahontas and Webster counties have until Friday.
People who live or work in Jackson and Lincoln counties have until Aug. 4.
The Disaster Unemployment Assistance offers benefits for people who are ineligible under the state’s regular unemployment insurance. Farmers, self-employed people and others may be eligible for the Disaster Unemployment Assistance.
A grapevine clipping from the home of Pearl S. Buck, a world renowned author with West Virginia roots, just arrived in Michigan and soon will be planted at a high school literary garden.
It began as an idea last summer. Jennifer McQuillan teaches literature at West Bloomfield High School in Michigan, and she wanted to give her students something that would get them off their phones- and become better connected to the writing in decades old books.
“There are gardens that are devoted to Emily Dickinson or to Shakespeare, but there’s not been a garden in a secondary school setting that brings together important plants from American authors like this anywhere, to our knowledge,” said McQuillan.
Since last August, the garden has grown. Thirty-four plants have been sent from the homesteads of American authors, including Kurt Vonnegut, Ernest Hemingway and Alice Walker.
McQuillan says she wasn’t quite sure if the students would connect the garden with the literature she was teaching them.
“The turning point came around December, when we were reading Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Buds and Bird Voices”. And he writes about a lilac bush out of his window. And we had that lilac bush growing in the literary garden. And that was the moment when the kids went, ‘oh my gosh, we have something really special here.’”
Fast forward to this summer. McQuillan’s garden will soon include a clipping from a 120-year-old grapevine that drapes across the front entrance to the birthplace of writer Pearl S. Buck
Kirk Judd, a board member for the Pearl S. Buck Birthplace Foundation, says Buck wrote about the grapevine. “She remembers being 9 years old, sitting on the upper level porch, reading her Charles Dickens, and eating grapes from the grapevine.”
Grapevine at Stulting House, Pearl S. Buck’s grandparents’ home where she was born,
Judd says that even though she spent most of her childhood abroad, Pearl S. Buck always thought of West Virginia as home.
Born at her grandparents’ home in Hillsboro, West Virginia, Buck was the first American woman awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, and her bestselling novel The Good Earth won the Pulitzer Prize.
She passed away in 1973. But the grapevine that she remembered so vividly from her West Virginia birthplace is very much still alive.
Jennifer McQuillan says it’s the first plant they’ve received from West Virginia. She teaches Pearl Buck’s writing in both her American and World Literature classes. McQuillan says she’s really happy to add Buck to the literary garden- both as an American and a world author who wrote extensively about China, her other home away from West Virginia.
“Because she’s sought both as a native author and as an author who is making her mark in another country as well. So I think that’s a really compelling story and I’m really excited to share that story with my students this fall.”
McQuillan will be working with her students to connect Buck’s writing to the grapevine they’ll be planting this summer, with the help of master gardeners in Michigan. She hopes both the grapevine, and a love for literature, will take root and grow.
The Pocahontas County school system is going to try to implement new school bus routes on days where classes might have previously been canceled because of snow.
The school system’s Director of Transportation Ruth Bland tells The Inter-Mountain that the move will preserve instructional days and prevent cancelations from cutting further into summer break.
Bland says the county averaged 11.85 snow days per calendar over the last 15 years.
On days where there are hazardous road conditions, Bland says buses would avoid unmarked pavement but could still be sent out onto marked pavement. Parents and students would have to travel to the bus at designated pick-up spots.
Bland says the routes would be implemented on a case-by-case basis.
The county runs 20 school buses over 942 square miles.
A team of researchers at West Virginia University is creating a unique portrait of the Mountain State. The Historic Timbers Project is unveiling West Virginia’s human and environmental history one dusty old barn at a time.
On a cold November day, Kristen de Graauw and Shawn Cockrell are climbing around an old barn near Hillsboro in Pocahontas County. Kristen is a Ph.D. candidate in Geography at WVU and the project manager for the Historic Timbers Project. Shawn is the lab manager for the Montane Forest Dynamics Laboratory at WVU and the lead technician for the project.
The project has two, interrelated goals: to figure out what the pre-settlement forests of West Virginia were like and to date historic structures.
Since there aren’t many old trees left, the only way to figure out what the forests of West Virginia used to be like is to take core samples from old logs that settlers used to build barns, cabins, and houses.
Today, Kristen and Shawn are exploring a barn owned by the McNeel Family to determine if it’s a candidate for tree-ring dating. The barn is the size of a large two-story house and made of big faded brown logs.
They are searching the structure for tree bark so they can determine if there are enough logs to take samples from to accurately date the structure. A log is a good candidate sampling if it still has bark on it because that means they know the outermost layer of the log is intact.
Which is important because they use dendrochronology, or tree-ring dating, to determine the age of the structures. Kristen explains how it they use tree rings to date structures.
“If we having a living tree that’s a really old, maybe it’s a three hundred years old tree, but it’s living,” she said. “If we take a sample out of that, we know that the outer date on our sample is the year that we’re currently in. Then we are able to count back through time and figure out what the inner most date is on that tree is. We can then compare our log structure data we have with those tree rings and find the overlap between that living tree and that log structure were the patterns lock in.”
Credit Andrew Carroll / West Virginia Public Broadcasting
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West Virginia Public Broadcasting
Kristen and Shawn speak with Bill McNeel from the Pocahontas County Historical Society outside of a barn build by his ancestors.
Shawn adds that the process is exciting for the researchers and the building owners.
“We meet people just as enthusiastic as we are, but coming from a different angle,” he said. “We’re enthusiastic because we’re gaining access to this great storage of ecological data and the people who own these structures get us to come in and take the sample and tell them an inferred construction date. Everyone is just as excited as the next person.”
After their initial survey, the researchers will return in the summer and use drills to take core samples from the logs. From these samples, they can gather not only an inferred building date of the structure, but also a lot of data about the environment that the tree grew it.
Kristen says she can determine a lot from looking at tree rings.
“I can look at a tree ring and see the growing season and dormant season of that tree. So it’s not just annual data that we’re look at. We’re looking at seasonal differences,” she said.
Which is really important because there aren’t many other ways to gather this kind of data in West Virginia due to heavy logging during the turn of the 20th century.
Kristen is working on this project as part of her dissertation. However, she didn’t start with the idea of working with historic structures in West Virginia. Her initial research sent her to Mongolia to investigate ancient forests, but that wasn’t for her.
“It was great but my heart wasn’t in it,” she said. “But what I do know is that I like West Virginia. I like historic structures and I like the idea of knowing what our forests used to look like.”
And she couldn’t be happier with her decision to work in West Virginia.
“It was kind of amazing. Now I’m doing what I want to do. I’m enjoying it. I’m motivated. I’m excited.”
Credit Andrew Carroll / West Virginia Public Broadcasting
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West Virginia Public Broadcasting
Shawn and Kristen walk around the Kee Cabin on the grounds of the Pocahontas County Historical Society Museum in Marlinton later that afternoon as they work to determine if the property can be tree-ring dated.
They have already worked on dating five structures in Greenbrier, Pendleton, Pocahontas and Preston counties with more buildings set to be dated this summer. The inferred building data of the structure is then used by individuals and groups working to list the structures on the National Register of Historic Places or apply for grants to aid in preservation.
Kristen says this provides researchers with often-overlooked environmental data held in the logs.
“The people who go in and date historic structures, I don’t think that they’re even thinking about it. Not only can we date this barn, but this whole barn was a forest and it’s just sitting there. It’s archeology now.”
Historic Timbers Project will continue its work this summer with support of the West Virginia Humanities Council and the Montane Forest Dynamic Lab at WVU.
The West Virginia Humanities Council and West Virginia University say the first three-day “Living Gateway” conference will begin Sept. 11 at the Erickson Alumni Center at WVU.
The title of the conference refers to Buck’s Pocahontas County birthplace. In her book “My Mother’s House,” Buck called for the family home to live again and said it was her own “gateway to America.”
Buck was the first American woman to receive the Nobel Prize for literature in 1938. Her book “The Good Earth” won the 1932 Pulitzer Prize.
The West Virginia Humanities Council said in a statement that tours of Buck’s manuscript collection at WVU will be offered during the conference. There will also be panel discussions around her work.
