Wild and Wonderful

West Virginia. This is an impoundment on the New River just outside Hinton. The Bluestone Dam is just out of sight, around the bend to the left. The Bluestone River joins the New just behind the camera. The line on the left hillside is West Virginia Route 20, which offers great views of the river and surrounding hills, with many pull offs for taking pictures. The photo is from mid-October last year; wish I were there to see this year's colors.

Sunday Morning

Sunday Morning

Railroad Town

Hinton, West Virginia, is a small town (~ 3,000 population) with a big history. Hinton owes its very existence to the C&O Railroad, which in about 1870 decided to follow the New River in laying track that would become an integral part of the transcontinental railroad. The town was founded in 1871 and subsequently became a C&O division headquarters, where both east and west bound crews would be made up, which also made it the logical spot for these crews and their families to live. It was subsequently incorporated  in 1880.

Hinton sits on the slopes overlooking the New River, the oldest river in North America and the third oldest in the world (behind the Meuse in Europe and the Yangtze in China). The New River arises in North Carolina and flows north to the Ohio. At Hinton it flows through the New River Gorge and is managed by the National Park Service.

Here the river is wide and shallow, as can be seen by the men fishing from the middle of the river. That, and the naming of the New River Gorge National River, have made the Hinton area a recreation and tourism destination.

But initially and through WWII, Hinton was a railroad town. The C&O Railroad served Hinton with freight, passenger service, coal, and timber. Although thrice weekly passenger service survives, coal is the main commodity hauled today by the CSX Railroad, the successor to the C&O.

Here unit trains pass each other in Hinton, one carrying coal to a power plant, the other returning empties to the mines.

These unit trains, trains of dedicated composition that shuttle between the coal mines and coal-burning power plants, no longer contain hoppers that empty through doors on the bottom. The modern hoppers have rounded bottoms that do not open. Rather, the cars are emptied by turning them upside down at the power plant, all without the cars having to be uncoupled from the engine

There's a lot to see and do in Hinton, including a railroad museum and the city's National Register architecture, much of which dates from the time of its great growth in the 1890s and shortly thereafter. Perched on a hillside, there are obvious comparisons to San Francisco, minus the size, cost, and cable cars.

Sunday Morning

William Anderson Hatfield, revisited

I am forever amazed by this medium. More than a year ago I posted a blog about William Anderson "Devil Anse" Hatfield, my great-grandfather's first cousin. It got the usual, few visits to which I have become accustomed. We're not doing this to become rich and famous, right? I was happy. But then last week a cable television channel ran a three-part miniseries on the Hatfield-McCoy feud and suddenly a year-old blog becomes popular.

Devil Anse, better known as Kevin Costner these days, became an item of interest. Very quickly that year-old blog had registered more than 1,500 visits! That may not be a lot for some of you bloggers out there, but for me the numbers were astronomical!

Now if each of those who visited my blog in search of Devil Anse had contributed only one dollar, we would have more than enough money to really fix up his family's cemetery that is so in need of attention.

Disclaimer: I have not seen the miniseries. We watch almost no television to begin with, plus I have very little respect for Hollywood's portrayals of historic events and characters. The Hatfield-McCoy feud is the most famous of the many post-civil-war family vendettas simply because accounts of it sold newspapers in New York City. While there were a very few events of extreme violence scattered through the period, twelve people died after all, there also were long stretches of time, years, in which nothing happened. That did not deter the reporters who filed their stories anyway, making up atrocities perpetrated by ignorant, bare-foot hillbillies to titillate their audience. That fiction persists in accounts being written today. And since "hillbillies" are the last ethnic group that is socially acceptable to ridicule, there apparently is an audience still.

Silent Saturday

Sunday Morning