CHARLESTON, W.Va. (AP) - The New Deal Federal Writers’ Project from the 1930s and early ’40s is long gone, but it inspired a West Virginia heritage tourism and history project that is going strong.
The Federal Writers’ Project aimed to tell history from “the ground up,” talking to ordinary people about their lives and the histories, tales and stories centered on their home communities.
Gibbs Kinderman wanted to do the same for the people and towns along U.S. Route 219, a sinuous road that traverses southeastern West Virginia, heads northward and takes in a bit of Maryland, for the project’s geographic scope.
That led to www.traveling219.com , a Web-based project that shares its written words, audio, photographs and video with local newspapers and West Virginia Public Radio.
“I thought it would be neat to replicate part of what was done in the ’30s and early ’40s along the 219 corridor in eastern West Virginia, which is where I live,” said Kinderman, who used to work with Allegheny Mountain Radio but is now retired.
The idea is to document the history of communities and average people, Kinderman said. “Not the history of battles and elections, just the living history of these communities.”
VISTA and AmeriCorps volunteers have fanned out along the length of the road and gathered up oral histories, historic and contemporary photographs, tales and more.
The website’s contents are divided geographically into four categories: Deep Creek Lake to Elkins; Elkins to Marlinton; Marlinton to Lewisburg; and Lewisburg to Rich Creek.
“We decided we were going to revisit some of the communities and some of the stories along 219 and tell some of the old stories and bring some new stories to bear, too, of what’s going on in people’s lives now,” Kinderman said.
Roxy Todd first came to the project in 2010 as a VISTA and AmeriCorps volunteer. She had help in gathering up stories from along the road from other VISTA and AmeriCorps volunteers Emily Newton, Jessie Wright Mendoza and Dan Schultz.
The project takes in about 200 miles of U.S. 219, mostly in West Virginia, but also includes a bit of where the road crosses into Maryland’s Garrett County in the north and also Rich Creek, Virginia, just across the river from Monroe County in the south.
The result is a treasure chest of Mountain State tales and history from Greenbrier, Monroe, Pocahontas, Randolph and Tucker counties, so long as they’re within hailing distance of the road.
“Our main objective is to promote extraordinary stories of ordinary people,” Todd said.
“Most of it includes things like music, food, history. But some of it’s just about everyday life that people remember people growing up. So, thematically, it’s just about the heritage.”
One recent story featured Ed and Agnes-Hannah Friel recalling their childhood spent growing up around the Mill Point Federal Prison Camp, where both had parents working as federal prison officers.
The Mill Point camp was opened in 1938 for low-level federal prisoners. It was located high in the mountains in what is now part of the Cranberry Wilderness of the Monongahela National Forest in Pocahontas County.
Several tales of cougar hunting and sightings are included on the site, such as this recent addition:
“We recently came across mention of Francis McCoy - known as ’the strongman of the mountains’ in the 19th century - who supposedly killed the last panther in West Virginia in 1887. The story relates that McCoy and his friend, Col. Cecil Clay of New York, who had lost one of his arms in the Civil War, treed and shot the panther on a hunting trip up the Williams River.
“After falling from the tree, the panther began to maul their hunting dogs, before McCoy killed the cat with his hands! While researching this story, we found the following Pocahontas Times article from April 1976 when a cougar was shot and killed in the southern part of the county.”
Another entry quotes from former Charleston Gazette and Gazette-Mail outdoors writer Skip Johnson’s book “West Virginia Mountain Lions: The Past, Present, and Future of the Long-Tailed Cat,” published posthumously this year by the West Virginia Book Co. Johnson is quoted from the book as stating: “Romantics among us can dream the scream of a panther on a dark night will echo once again over rolling hills and hollows.”
Turkeys may be a lot less enigmatic than panthers, but one of Todd’s oral histories from 2013 features a photo and recollection of a little-known practice these days: turkey drives. The entry features a most curious photograph dated 1900 of a huge batch of turkeys being herded down Route 219.
Quoting from the site:
“You don’t see people raising turkeys now. When I grew up, everyone had turkeys,” recalls Layuna Rapp, who grew up on a family dairy farm outside of Frankford.
The turkeys (in the photo) were probably being driven down the road from a farm in Greenbrier or Monroe County to be sold at the stockyards or to be shipped by train from Ronceverte.
Layuna Rapp remembers the turkey drives down U.S. 219:
“They’d clip the wings of the turkeys so they couldn’t fly away. And then they could just drive them on the road, and they’d take them down, put them on a train. Cause they didn’t have any trucks to truck them out of here. Some drove them to Ronceverte.
“We had a train station in Renick. It would take your animals to Hinton or to Ronceverte. We had a stockyard in Ronceverte. It took all day to go 30 miles, with cows, because you had to stop every little bit and let them rest. Turkeys the same way. People on their farms were trying to get their turkeys down to the railroad station. And they had to let the turkeys eat and play along the road awhile, so they wouldn’t get too tired getting to the train.”
The Traveling 219 project won a 2014 award from the American Association of State and Local History as one of the outstanding state and local history projects in the country.
The project initially got off the ground with grants from the West Virginia Humanities Council and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. They’ve gone on to do some successful Kickstarter campaigns to keep it going.
Todd recently joined West Virginia Public Radio as a freelance contributor. So, while she will help produce some new stories, a fresh Kickstarter campaign will start up in late October to fund new additions to the 219 project by prominent West Virginia folklorists Michael and Carrie Kline.
The project has also experienced an influx of new material through its active Facebook page, www.facebook.com/traveling219 , which has more than 2,500 likes.
Between the website, the stories in area papers and on West Virginia Public Radio and daily Facebook posts, Todd estimates that the Traveling 219 content has reached millions of eyeballs and ears.
“It is for the general public, especially heritage tourists, but it includes people who are from West Virginia and who know the area,” Todd said. “It’s also to encourage people who live along 219 to realize that great opportunities of travel are right within their back door. Instead of going to Florida for spring break, we’d love it if people took a week in Monroe County or Tucker County.
“So that’s part of our goal, is local tourism and heritage tourism.”
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Information from: The Charleston Gazette, https://www.wvgazette.com
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