World War I Story Archives - West Virginia Public Broadcasting

Southern W.Va. Tourism Highlights The Haves And Have-Nots

Tourism success in the coalfields seems to begin and end with a network of ATV trails, but it’s what’s in the middle that creates the challenges.

Tourism is a major component in southern West Virginia’s transition away from a coal based economy.

Tourism success in the coalfields seems to begin and end with a network of ATV trails, but it’s what’s in the middle that creates the challenges.

For $60 a head, Keith Gibson offers tourists visiting Matewan, West Virginia an airboat ride on the Tug River, a designated West Virginia flatwater trail.

“I worked at the coal mines,” Gibson said. “So I’ve had to relearn myself. Everything that I’m doing now is so different. Nothing like a coal mine.”

With headsets and microphones on to drown out the noise, Gibson tells his passengers tales of coal mine wars and the forbidden, feud-sparking love of Johnse Hatfield and Rosanna McCoy that began just over the Kentucky riverbank.

Hatfield Hideaway is among a growing number of new coalfield resorts.

Gibson said many come to his airboat tour for a respite from the choking dust of the region’s popular ATV trails. But he said getting to the remote border town may call for a feud with the state legislature.

“We have to work extra hard to attract people to drive that extra 100 miles on curvy roads to get here,” Gibson said. “Then, we have to work hard to accommodate them when they are here.”

Gibson said the legislature needs to consider the challenges border counties face, with prices often lower just a bridge ride away in neighboring Kentucky. He said he was getting close to economically recovering from the pandemic, when inflation hit.

“They have to have somewhere to stay, they have to have something to eat, but they don’t have to have an airboat ride,” Gibson said. “They don’t have to have a t-shirt.”

Jamie Cantrell knows about border battles. Her Matewan Trailhead Bar and Grill is just a half mile from the Hatfield Hideout Cabin and RV Camp in McCarr, Kentucky that she also has an interest in. She said the growing tourism industry here needs much more help from the state.

“Do some stuff with the roads to help people get here,” Cantrell said. “Finish the King Coal Highway. We always need more lodging. There’s people buying up homes and putting them on AirBnB left and right. We could use more food places. Politicians need to come into Matewan and see what we have to offer and try to get us some grant money to help restore a lot of these old buildings.”

With ATV’s whizzing through the middle of downtown Matewan, an old coal mining bank building has been converted into the Mine Wars Museum. Co-founder and museum board member Wilma Steele said the organization remains dedicated to correcting revisionist history.

“When I found out the United Mine Workers, in 1920, offered equal pay for blacks and whites and their members were not discriminating against their brothers because of culture or speech or any of that, that blew me away,” Steele said. “We don’t have that history. It’s not in the textbooks.”

About 1,500 African American men from McDowell County enlisted in World War I.

Steele said Matewan’s growing tourism industry stems from freshly voted in city leadership and a united community effort.

“The more that you work as a team and a town to do something, the stronger you get,” Steele said. ”The Mine Wars Museum, from the very first, has been that group that has been right here working and caring about development.”

A museum not too far from Matewan, the Kimball World War I Memorial in McDowell County, sits isolated and somewhat neglected. Curator Clara Thompson said this was the first and now the only remaining memorial to African American veterans of the Great War.

“Believe it or not, we had over 1,500 soldiers to go to World War I from McDowell County,” Thompson said. “When the soldiers came back from the war, they approached the county about constructing a memorial, because the white soldiers had also asked for a memorial and so they got it. They looked to place it in the county seat at Welch but there was none to be found. So that’s how we ended up here in Kimball.”

Replete with outstanding displays, open part time and struggling to maintain board members and infrastructure, the privately-funded museum works to make ends meet with a community center downstairs offering hall and kitchen rentals. Thompson said she gets national, even global visitors, yet the local population seems unaware of its own history.

Mine Wars Museum; the term “redneck” came from the red bandanas striking coal miners wore in solidarity.

“Why don’t the schools have the kids come here and visit this museum? That’s a part of their history,” Thompson said. “We could use funding so that we could advertise more, put out more brochures and things like that. But we don’t have funding and most grants, they ask for matching funds. Where are we going to get it from? It would be so nice if the legislature had that money already allotted to building these historic sites, so that they can do their job.”

The local representative in the legislature, Del. Ed Evans, D-McDowell, agreed the state needs to do more.

“You’re right, it is not open all the time. I don’t think there’s a full time employee,” Evans said. “We still have a large African American population here in Kimball on the hill behind us. Up the road here toward the North Fork and Keystone, you’ll find large African American populations.”

Evans said help with matching grant funds to enhance history-related tourism was an impetus for the legislature creating the Coalfield Communities Grant Facilitation Commission. Evans said the commission should be helping bolster declining coal communities like Kimball’s infrastructure and helping their memorial become a desired destination. But it hasn’t received the funding it needs to get started.

“It should have been underway immediately. The governor said he has to fund that off the back side of the budget,” Evans said. “We have plenty of backside but we haven’t funded it. I was always told it could be as much as $250 million put in there. That would be money that anybody that wants to write a grant could pull down from us for matching funds.”

The Kimball World War I Memorial is the last of its kind in America.

Secretary of Economic Development Mitch Carmichael is the chair of the Coalfield Grant Commission. He said with much of his efforts lately going to bring major corporations to West Virginia, he hasn’t formed a commission, hasn’t found out about funding and doesn’t have a timetable. But he said he’s committed to the process.

“We will be very active and make sure that we’re getting input from the local groups and facilitating growth in those areas,” Carmichael said.

In developing southern West Virginia tourism, the ‘haves and have nots’ seem separated right now by varying degrees of private business investment, community teamwork, infrastructure development, government assistance – and the continuing transition from a coal based economy.

September 20, 1879: Artist Patty Willis Born in Jefferson County

Artist Patty Willis was born in Jefferson County on September 20, 1879. A painter, printmaker, designer, sculptor, and art historian, Willis studied at the Corcoran Gallery School of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Pratt Institute.

After World War I, she traveled throughout Europe and the Middle East and studied in Paris. Returning to the U.S. in the early 1920s, Willis exhibited her work at the Corcoran Gallery and later at the Carnegie Institute, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and elsewhere. During the late ‘20s and ‘30s, she was part of the art colony at Provincetown, Massachusetts, and exhibited at the 1939 World’s Fair.

Willis lived primarily in Charles Town. She was a member of the Allied Artists of West Virginia, a statewide nonprofit organization of painters, sculptors, and printmakers founded in 1930. She frequently lectured on the history of religious art and was a pioneer in the study of West Virginia art history, particularly her research on Jefferson County portraits and portrait painters. Patty Willis died in Jefferson County in 1953 at age 74.

What’s in a Name: The Definition of a ‘Boom’ Town

There’s a town in Kanawha County, West Virginia where some locals say living there is a “blast.”

As part of our occasional series, “What’s in a Name,” we take a look at the history and folklore of the names of Appalachian places. The town in question, Nitro, West Virginia, grew out of the explosives industry and was home to a factory that helped supply the U.S. Army with gun powder during World War I. Ken Thompson volunteers at the World War I museum in the city of Nitro.

According to Thompson, Nitro was established in 1917 by the federal government to manufacture nitrocellulose, a highly flammable compound formed by bringing cellulose from trees or plants into contact with it to nitric acid. It is also known as “guncotton,” because of its explosive characteristics.

“It was to support the war effort for WWI,” he explained. “A lot of people were under the impression it was nitroglycerin. It was not. It was nitrocellulose. That was added to the other components to make the gunpowder smokeless.”

Area S Bungalow Section. August 19, 1918.

It took the federal government about 11 months to build the town from 1917 to 1918, and approximately 100,000 people representing 41 nations participated.

Nitro’s construction coincided with one of the coldest winters in recorded history, Thompson said.

One of the town’s builders would go on to become famous: Clark Gable.

“His dad told him ‘son go get a job,'” Thompson said. “Well, he was one of those 100,000 came through Nitro. He worked as an electrician helping to build some of the Nitro bungalows.”

You can learn more about the town and the former manufacturing facilities there — as well as see artifacts from WWI on display at the museum.

July 26, 1917: West Virginia Flying Corps Commissioned

On July 26, 1917, Governor John Cornwell commissioned and provided funding for the West Virginia Flying Corps, headquartered at Beech Bottom in Brooke County.

The corps was the brainchild of 22-year-old Weston native Louis Bennett Jr., who’d become a pilot while attending Yale University. Bennett believed that airplanes—a relatively new invention at the time—could support the U.S. military effort in World War I. The U.S. Army, though, refused to accept the West Virginia Flying Corps as a unit, so Bennett entered flight school with the British Royal Air Force in Canada.

With the RAF, Bennett went on to become West Virginia’s only World War I ace. His 12 combat kills, including three aircraft and nine observation balloons, ranks Bennett among the top American-born aces of the war. He accomplished all of this in just 10 days in August 1918. On August 24, Louis Bennett died in France after being shot down by German anti-aircraft fire.

He was initially buried in France. After the war, Bennett’s body was returned to West Virginia, and his body was reburied in a cemetery in Weston.

Immigrant ‘Concentration Camps’ on the Southern Border?

U.S. immigration policies are very much in the spotlight recently with reports on conditions at some of the southern border detention camps and fresh…

U.S. immigration policies are very much in the spotlight recently with reports on conditions at some of the southern border detention camps and fresh concerns about children being held apart from their parents.

Recently, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called these facilities “concentration camps” and was swiftly rebuked by people on the right and left. To be clear, the U.S. government holds immigrants — who have entered the country illegally — while they’re being processed. The question is: what do we call these places? Are they Detention centers — as the government refers to them? Detainment camps? Is Ocasio-Cortez misinformed and perhaps, hyperbolic when she injects a loaded term like “concentration camp” into the discussion?

To get a better perspective on this, Trey thought it’d be a good time to check in with author Andrea Pitzer about her book, One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps.

Listen to an extended version of Trey’s interview with Andrea Pitzer:

May 2, 1919: The W.Va. Department of the American Legion Meets in Charleston

On May 2, 1919, the West Virginia department of the American Legion first convened at a meeting in Charleston. At the time, the Legion was only about six weeks old, having been founded in Paris by members of the American Expeditionary Force after World War I.

A state women’s Auxiliary of the American Legion was organized at Grafton in 1922 for wives, mothers, sisters, daughters, granddaughters, great-granddaughters, grandmothers, and steprelatives of Legion members or deceased veterans. The women’s Auxiliary’s work is dedicated to the welfare of veterans in hospitals, veteran homes, or for other veterans and veterans’ families with special needs. Women veterans may join both the Legion and the Auxiliary.

During the 20^th century, the American Legion was opened up to veterans of any major American conflict from World War I on. By the end of the century, the American Legion had 114 posts in West Virginia, with more than 27,000 members. Both the Legion and Auxiliary sponsor programs for youth, including Boys’ State, Rhododendron Girls State, King-for-a-Day, scholarship programs, and American flag programs. They also promote legislation that encourages respect for the flag.