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Join us Wednesday to hear Rob Whetsell talk on nature's New Deal in the Monongahela Forest.
At Kump Education Center we are delighted to welcome Rob on his return to the Historic Kump House. He visited with Miss Mary Gamble Kump before he completed his book, Elkins, West Virginia: The Metropolis Revisited published in 1994. His book includes five pages of Kump and Scott family history based on conversations with M.G. Kump and other research.
Rob Whetsell is a true historian who does research by reading what has been written on a topic and by seeking to find knowledgeable people who can shed light on historic circumstances.
The title of Whetsell's 1994 book is an allusion to a book published in 1906: "Elkins, West Virginia: The Coming Metropolis of the State." Whetsell tells the story of the "Coming Metropolis" almost 90 years later.
After he finished his book on Elkins, Whetsell was employed as an archeologist by the US Forest Service, and he pursued information about the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC). That is the body of knowledge that will be the central topic of the lecture on Wednesday, February 21st. In my mind the advent of the CCCs is one of the most phenomenal public works initiatives ever started by government.
It was the time of the Great Depression between World War I and World War II. Thousands of people were out of work, farms were ruined by the Dust Bowl, and families were homeless and starving. Not only was poverty sapping the life out of people, but agriculture, banking, and industry did not provide effective plans for improvement. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Governors like H. Guy Kump could see that people needed and deserved government help.
When the New Deal idea for employing an army of men to take care of public lands became a reality, it gave hope to the hopeless people, and it created an opportunity to make national forests and parks more accessible and more beautiful. It may represent the type of innovative thinking that could help to preserve human life as we face homelessness caused by illegal immigration from war-torn nations and lands devastated by floods and fires now.
As we face global warming, we can expect to see more human suffering unless we think about the negative role humanity has played in the process of natural history. We need to study the power of nature to heal itself and understand how human cooperation can support nature.
In 2011 Rob Whetsell and Gerry Milnes produced a DVD titled "The Resilient Forest" sponsored by Appalachian Forest Heritage Area. Watching this DVD is one way people can learn more about the marvelous Monongahela Forest that surrounds us in Elkins, and stretches all the way from Tucker to Greenbrier County in West Virginia.