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In 1890 the town of Elkins was incorporated with the name of Senator Elkins, son-in-law of Senator Davis who brought the railroad from Maryland to help remove timber and coal from these mountains. In 1900 New York developers established the Cherry River Boom and Lumber Company in the town of Richwood. The lumber company also brought in train services to ship out the timber.
Elkins and Richwood are not great cities like London and Paris, but they have greater significance in my life than the two places Charles Dickens wrote about in his A Tale of Two Cities. Richwood boy, Don Roberts met Elkins girl, Peggy Kump at Jackson's Mill c. 1928. They were married by 1936, and all six Roberts children were born by 1949. I was the fourth child.
We happily visited our grandmother in Richwood 3 or 4 times each of the next 10 years. Our Grandmother Roberts lost her home after the Cherry River Boom & Lumber Company declined before they left Richwood. Then Grandmother moved to Elkins where she bought a house, joined the Garden Club, and shared meals with us each week. She helped Daddy with his holly trees and lived happily in Elkins for her last eight years.
Both Elkins and Richwood were created by the coming of the railroad during the American Industrial Revolution. This revolution was not as violent as the French Revolution of the Dickens novel, but vivid changes came about with the Great Depression and the two World Wars in the 20th Century.
When trains stopped serving parts of the United States, rural counties lost population, and whole towns in West Virginia became ghost towns. The business districts that I remember in Elkins and Richwood were bustling in the 1950s with active middle class shop owners and service providers in both towns.
Although extraction industries have been profitable for wealthy outsiders, hard-working local people rarely have had a big piece of that American Pie. The situation is more complicated now because automation has reduced the number of people needed to dig coal or cut trees. Huge amounts of coal may be trucked out of state; however, it only takes a few people in a mine to run machines that fill the air with silicon dust causing fatal lung cancer. Clear cutting timber can quickly remove more trees from the forest, but the relative value of lumber is less because Americans are not making fine furniture now.
Nevertheless, both Elkins and Richwood are beginning to benefit from tourism, and both are getting shops where creative young artists are working hard to bring businesses back to small towns in West Virginia. The Appalachian Forest National Heritage Area is helping to give wider recognition to nine towns in the Mon Forest Towns Partnership (MFTP). Partnership towns are Cowen, Davis, Durbin, Elkins, Franklin, Marlinton, Parsons, Petersburg, and Richwood. This week a grant of $402,000 was given for MFTP to improve hiking trails.
I sincerely hope the New River Gorge National Park and Appalachian Forest National Heritage Area will bring an environmental and economic revolution to our West Virginia part of the Rust Belt.