WVWest Virginia History

West Virginia is the only state that seceded from a state that had itself seceded, and it did so through a legal manoeuvre that still makes constitutional scholars uneasy. The Constitution forbids carving a new state out of an existing one without the consent of that state's legislature. Virginia's legislature was in Richmond and in rebellion. So Unionists at Wheeling declared themselves the restored and lawful government of Virginia, and then, wearing that hat, granted permission for Virginia to be divided. Lincoln signed the bill on December 31, 1862, privately conceding the argument was strained, and the thirty-fifth state came into being on June 20, 1863.

Mounds, hunting grounds, and a contested cession

The oldest visible structure in the state predates every European claim by two thousand years. The Grave Creek Mound at Moundsville, roughly sixty-two feet high, was raised by Adena builders somewhere around 250 to 150 BC and required moving an estimated 60,000 tons of earth in baskets. By the time English traders crossed the mountains, the Ohio Valley had become contested ground rather than settled country: Shawnee towns lay across the river, the Lenape were pushing west under pressure from Pennsylvania, Cherokee hunters worked the southern valleys, and the Haudenosaunee asserted a claim of conquest over the whole region. That claim is what the British bought at the Treaty of Fort Stanwix in 1768, when Iroquois negotiators ceded land south of the Ohio that the Shawnee actually used and had not agreed to sell. The result was Lord Dunmore's War and the battle at Point Pleasant on October 10, 1774, where Virginia militia fought Cornstalk's Shawnee and Mingo warriors at the mouth of the Kanawha.

A western Virginia that never fit

For seventy years these were simply Virginia's western counties, and they resented it. Steep ground meant small farms rather than plantations, so slavery never took hold at tidewater scale, yet the state constitution counted enslaved property in apportioning the legislature and taxed western land more heavily than eastern slaves. Salt works at Kanawha and the arrival of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad at Wheeling in 1853 tied the region's commerce north and west rather than east. The federal armoury at Harpers Ferry, producing arms from 1801, made the town a target: John Brown seized it on the night of October 16, 1859, was captured by marines under Robert E. Lee, and was hanged at Charles Town on December 2. Eighteen months later the same mountains supplied the votes that broke Virginia in two. The Willey Amendment, forced on the statehood bill by Congress, required gradual emancipation as the price of admission.

Coal, company towns, and the mine wars

The Chesapeake and Ohio Railway pushed through the New River Gorge in 1873 and opened seams that had been worthless because nothing could carry them out. What followed was not so much settlement as extraction. Operators built entire towns, paid in scrip redeemable only at the company store, hired private detectives from the Baldwin-Felts agency, and recruited immigrants from Italy, Hungary and Poland alongside Black workers moving up from the Deep South. The safety record was the worst in the country. An explosion at Monongah on December 6, 1907 killed at least 362 men and boys and remains the deadliest mine disaster in American history. Between 1930 and 1931, contractors drilling the Hawks Nest Tunnel near Gauley Bridge sent crews through nearly pure silica without respirators; hundreds died of acute silicosis, most of them Black migrant labourers, in what is still the country's worst industrial health disaster.

Miners organising against this produced open warfare. The Paint Creek and Cabin Creek strike of 1912 and 1913 brought Mother Jones into the coalfields and martial law into the counties. On May 19, 1920, Baldwin-Felts agents evicting families at Matewan were confronted by police chief Sid Hatfield and the town's mayor; ten men died in the street. When Hatfield was shot on a courthouse portico in August 1921, thousands of armed miners began marching south. At Blair Mountain in Logan County that September, somewhere near 10,000 union men fought several thousand deputies and volunteers across a ten-mile front until federal troops arrived, the largest armed uprising on American soil since the Civil War.

Peak, decline, and what the cameras found

Employment in the mines peaked around 1948 and then fell off a cliff as continuous mining machines replaced men. The state's population peaked at the 1950 census, just above two million, and has trended down ever since, the rare American state smaller now than it was seventy years ago. Two more disasters changed federal law: the Farmington No. 9 explosion of November 20, 1968, which killed seventy-eight and produced the Coal Mine Health and Safety Act of 1969, and the Buffalo Creek flood of February 26, 1972, when a coal slurry impoundment failed above a hollow in Logan County and killed 125 people in a few minutes. Upper Big Branch, which killed twenty-nine on April 5, 2010, closed the circle. The 1960 Democratic presidential primary mattered for a different reason: John Kennedy campaigned through the southern coalfields, national reporters followed, and the poverty they filmed fed directly into the legislation that created the Appalachian Regional Commission in 1965.

Neighbouring states' history

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