Although its popular image is hardly one of expansive, open farmlands, citizens in most of its fifty-five counties live outside urban areas, many in small, unincorporated settlements, where country roads take them home. Perhaps surprisingly, at least to outsiders, West Virginia consistently ranks as one of the nation's most rural states. Because of the panhandles, West Virginians can claim that they live in the most northern of the southern states (the Northern Panhandle extends farther north than Pittsburgh) and the most eastern of the western states (Harpers Ferry, at the tip of the Eastern Panhandle, is only fifty miles from Washington, D.C.). The boundaries of the Northern Panhandle were established by royal proclamations during the colonial era as well as by the course of the Ohio River those of the Eastern Panhandle were determined by Civil War exigencies and the passage of the Potomac. Its configuration includes two of those curious geographical/geopolitical appendages known as panhandles. Another saying-”it's in damn good shape for the shape it's in”-refers to West Virginia's phenomenally irregular outline. Will Rogers, in referring to its rugged mountain landscape, declared it to be the only state where, when you get tired, you can lean up against it and rest. It is, however, the highest state east of the Mississippi River, with an average elevation of 1,500 feet. Its topography encompasses some 24,231 square miles, ranking it forty-first in area. West Virginia is one of the smallest states in the Union. Far to the west, Kansas, admitted in 1861 as the thirty-fourth state, and Nevada, admitted in 1864 as the thirty-sixth, provide more accurate indicators of the nation's midnineteenth-century development. The thirty-fifth state, born on June 20, 1863, was a child of the Civil War, the youngest state east of the Mississippi by a long shot. Unlike most states, it did not enter the Union as the result of westward expansion or population increases. Mother Jones, saint to some, devil to others, invoked the hills and the deity in no uncertain terms during her attempts to unionize the state's coal industry in the early twentieth century: “Medieval West Virginia! With its tent colonies on the bleak hills! With its grim men and women! When I get to the other side, I shall tell God Almighty about West Virginia!”ġWest Virginia, both a state and a state of mind, conjures some of the most controversial images of any state in the Union. Images that arise when outsiders think about West Virginia are not always so reverential. These mottoes, fondly invoking images of nature, rural comfort, even the deity, provide inklings of how West Virginians feel about their state. Country Roads, Take Me Home-Home to West Virginia.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |