WEST VIRGINIA RESTAURANT LINEN, MEDICAL LINEN, AND UNIFORM RENTALS

West Virginia: A Brief Overview

Our 35th state, West Virginia is one of the most mountainous states in the union. With nearly 75% of the land covered by the Appalachian Range and swaths of seemingly endless forests, the terrain is rugged, beautiful, and memorable. Incredibly, there’s an estimated 12 million acres of trees, 7 million more than is estimated the state had back in 1910. Currently, West Virginia is the third most forested state, after Maine and New Hampshire.

When looking back in time to the earliest days, there are murmurs about a mysterious native people called the Adena. Surmised to be hunter-gatherers, they left their mark on the area by building large conical mounds atop the graves of their chiefs, shamans, and other leaders. Little is known about them except through their grave goods found within the mounds themselves. There are more than 400 of these incredible structures and they’re surprisingly big. The largest one, located in Moundsville, is called Grave Creek Mound and measures more than 69 feet high and almost 300 feet wide at its base.

As time went by, Siouxian natives – like the Monongahela People – settled the area but, by the 1670s, they were either displaced or absorbed by the Iroquois as they attempted to control beaver hunting lands in the east. Eventually, the Iroquois become the dominant supplier of furs to a voracious European market. Competition between the Iroquois and rival natives mirrored that between the English and the French. The escalating tension led to a series of conflicts and skirmishes that culminated in the French and Indian War. England emerged victorious, but stresses from the war helped pave the way for the American Revolution.

The West Virginia region was also the location of a struggle between rival colonies Virginia and Pennsylvania, partially over furs, but mostly over land rights and trading opportunities along the rivers. Virginia eventually won and took the area for itself, at least temporarily. The pressure of western settlement caused the British to limit expansion, forbidding settlements west of the Appalachians. A very unpopular stance, this restriction was another root cause of the American Revolution. After the war, the state of Kentucky sprang forth from some of those annexed Virginian lands, and achieved statehood just two weeks before Vermont.

Due to the Civil War, West Virginia went from being a sub-section of Virginia to its very own state where residents, mostly free farmers and few slaveowners, refused to leave the Union when Virginia did. For years after the Civil War, the two states argued back and forth over the degree of West Virginia’s responsibility for Virginia’s pre-war debt. This was finally settled by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1915.

After the War Between the States, West Virginia’s economy boomed. The development of its mining industry was the catalyst for much of this country’s Industrial Revolution. Major sources of mineral wealth included saltpeter (an ingredient in dynamite and gunpowder), calcium nitrate (a farming fertilizer), limestone, salt, and bituminous coal. Mining is still important in the state, though it has been in decline for years. Tourism activities, especially those involving outdoor recreation like hunting, hiking, and rafting, have skyrocketed. Also notable in a state known for coal mining, West Virginia has a substantial and growing wind power industry.

West Virginia is the only state in the Union to have acquired sovereignty by proclamation of the President of the United States. The state gemstone, Lithostrotionella coral, is not actually a gem at all, but a fossilized coral from about 340 million years ago. The state motto is Montani Semper Liberi (mountaineers are always free). In Williamson, there is West Virginia’s first – and oddly not the last – structure built entirely from coal: the Coal House. Erected in 1933, it weighs a whopping 65 tons!

West Virginia also has some notable firsts. The very first Mother’s Day was celebrated in Grafton on May 10, 1908, by Anna Jarvis. The first brick street in the world was laid down in Charleston, where it was first tested on October 23, 1870. Minnie Buckingham Harper of Winfield was the first African-American woman legislator in the United States, nominated to the position in 1928 to replace her late husband. Berkeley Springs was the location of America’s first spa that opened to the public, back in 1756. In those days, the town was known as Bath, Virginia. The first industrial use of natural gas occurred in 1841, at the appropriately named Burning Springs. Cleverly, and in the finest tradition of American ingenuity, William Tompkins used the gas to evaporate salt brine so he could harvest and sell the salt.