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West Virginia: A History
John Alexander Williams's West Virginia: A History is widely considered one of the finest books ever written about the state. In his clear, eminently readable style, Williams organizes the tangled strands of West Virginia's past around a few dramatic events―the battle of Point Pleasant, John Brown's insurrection in Harper's Ferry, the Paint Creek labor movement, the Hawk's Nest and Buffalo Creek disasters, and more. Williams uses these pivotal events as introductions to the larger issues of statehood, Civil War, unionism, and industrialization. Along the way, Williams conveys a true feel for the lives of common West Virginians, the personalities of the state's memorable characters, and the powerful influence of the land itself on its own history.
240 pages, Paperback
First published August 17, 1984
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August 8, 2024
West Virginia is a beautiful state with an often difficult history. Born amidst the bloodshed and horror of civil war, West Virginia has often been the site of conflict since then; and frequently, those conflicts have involved questions of how money, political power, and the state’s estimable natural resources are to be distributed. John Alexander Williams explores all of these issues in a detailed and thorough manner in his 1976 book West Virginia: A History.
John Alexander Williams, a native of Greenbrier County in southern West Virginia, was a professor of history at Appalachian State University in western North Carolina, and a scholar specializing in Appalachian studies, when he published West Virginia: A History. Organizing the book around key places in the state’s history – e.g., Point Pleasant, where an early battle of the Revolutionary era was fought in 1774; Harpers Ferry, where John Brown launched his pre-Civil War raid against a Federal armory in 1859; and Buffalo Creek, where a 1972 coal-country flood killed 125 people and rendered thousands more homeless – Williams asks the reader to consider how each of these towns is emblematic of an important stage in the state’s history.
The "Point Pleasant" chapter discusses the significance this little-known battle of the Revolutionary era, an engagement that is remembered today in a park on that strategic point of land where the Kanawha River meets the Ohio:
What made Point Pleasant worth fighting for, in the territorial sense of the matter, and what also seemed to promise the spot an expansive future was this: The most attractive routes through the mountains were blocked in the eighteenth century. They were blocked by foreign powers – variously France, Britain, and Spain – and by the most powerful Indian nations: the Iroquois in the north, and the Cherokees, Creeks, and Choctaws in the south. (p. 20)
After U.S. independence had been achieved, residents of transmontane western Virginia often found that the General Assembly at Richmond paid little attention to their needs. Williams notes accurately that “Virginia’s failure to develop adequate east-west transportation would play a momentous role in western Virginia’s future” (p. 23); indeed, Virginia’s neglect would result in the severance from Virginia of a large chunk of western Virginia territory. Yet the influence of old Virginia would still affect the culture of the new state of West Virginia, as, “Along with land speculation, the oligarchical nature of Virginia institutions was a major formative influence in the political economy that emerged in western Virginia as the frontier era passed” (p. 29).
West Virginia, as mentioned above, was formed during the American Civil War, and is defined in large part by the war’s legacy. Unionists of western Virginia, disagreeing with the 1861 decision by eastern Virginia’s slaveholding planters to secede from the Union and join the Confederacy, seceded from Virginia in 1863, returned to the Union, and formed a new state that could have been called Kanawha but ended up as West Virginia. Looking at the political sectionalism that exists in other U.S. states – e.g., Tennessee, Illinois, California – Williams suggests that “What distinguishes Virginia from these states is that the Civil War threw a military line across the state” (p. 36).
The interesting bits of West Virginia’s Civil War history are here, such as the fact – mentioned, no doubt, in almost every West Virginia history class from Shepherdstown to Huntington – that during the war, “Romney became the most volatile post in all of West Virginia, changing hands more than fifty times in the course of the war” (p. 60). Yet in the process of relating interesting stories of Union and Confederate strategy and tactics, Williams never loses sight of the larger significance of the issues behind the Civil War in West Virginia. The establishment of this battle-born new state had momentous consequences for the people of that time, and particularly for African Americans: “Few of the 25,000 black people who found themselves living in West Virginia after the Civil War are likely to have wept for the loss of the Old Dominion. What was Virginia irridenta [‘lost Virginia’] for some of their masters became a haven of freedom for ex-slaves” (p. 52).
A consistent theme of West Virginia: A History is the conflict between the state’s rich folklore and the often difficult realities of life for West Virginia’s people. When considering the Hatfield-McCoy feud of the 1880’s, for example, Williams dutifully recounts some of the feud’s highlights, including the (dubious) Romeo and Juliet-style love story of Johnse Hatfield and Rose Anne McCoy. But then Williams points out that stories of the feud contributed to the formation of negative stereotypes of Appalachian people – stereotypes that, unfortunately, persist to this day. Williams also suggests that a large part of “[t]he irony of the Hatfield-McCoy feud is that it dramatized the traditional life of backwoods West Virginia at precisely that time in history when the mountaineer’s life was beginning to disappear. It was giving way before the forces of modernization – forces that may be difficult for tellers of feud tales to dramatize in an amusing way, but which were nevertheless powerful” (p. 101).
As West Virginia: A History moves into the 20th century, Williams engages a particularly important theme regarding the people and the life of this state. It is a troubling theme that a number of other scholars of West Virginia history have also engaged – the idea that the state exists in a de facto colonial relationship with wealthier and more powerful states of the U.S.A.:
The term “colonial economy” had not been invented in 1900, but the characteristic features were already present in West Virginia by this time. These included a high degree of absentee ownership, which took on a new and increasingly controversial form as large corporations displaced the smaller firms and individuals who pioneered in industrial development; heavy dependence upon extractive industries oriented to distant markets; and a relative lack of those manufacturing industries that provided the greatest stimuli to material growth and welfare in the nation at large. (p. 150)
Williams notes, with evident sadness, that this “colonial economy” was “not the economy that the founders of West Virginia had dreamed of, nor was it what most citizens wanted” (p. 150), but adds that “West Virginia…remained the way it was because the most powerful West Virginians liked it that way” (p. 156).
Late in the book, Williams focuses specifically on the coal industry as an example of that sort of economic colonialism, suggesting that “In its repetitive cycle of boom and bust, its savage exploitation of men and nature, in its seemingly endless series of disasters, the coal industry has brought grief and hardship to all but a small proportion of the people whose lives it touched”, and noting that “the position of the state is like that of an addict. West Virginia is ‘hooked’ on coal, for better or for worse. In the past, it has generally been for the worse” (p. 200). Nowadays, coal has become more difficult to extract, with even more devastating health consequences for coal miners than used to be the case; coal mining meanwhile becomes a less profitable industry, in competition with other energy sources like natural gas. What will the future look like – for coal, and for the people who mine it?
I read West Virginia: A History on a trip to the Stonewall Resort in central West Virginia – a lovely place, and one that I found embodied many of the intriguing contradictions of life in the Mountain State. For one thing, there is its name. Once, it was the Stonewall Jackson Resort, located adjacent to the Stonewall Jackson Lake State Park. The real-life Stonewall Jackson might not have wanted West Virginia to "honor" him in this fashion; Jackson, who was born in Clarksburg when it was still part of Virginia, always considered himself a Virginian, and would have been unalterably opposed to the division of his native state (he died of his Chancellorsville battle wounds one month before the new state of West Virginia was proclaimed). Nowadays - "for marketing purposes," as the Wikipedia article puts it - it is simply called the Stonewall Resort. Meanwhile, the state park - in what bears the hallmarks of an awkward political compromise between modernizers and traditionalists - still officially bears Stonewall Jackson's name. Identity in West Virginia, as anywhere else in the United States, can be a complicated thing.
It is an elegant resort, set amidst green hills, with a golf course and swimming pools and hiking trails and a beautiful lake on which one can go canoeing or kayaking or motorboating. It draws a well-heeled clientele; there was a cardiologists’ convention in attendance when I was there. Yet one does not have to travel far up or down Interstate 79 from the resort to see the poverty of much of West Virginia. Nowadays, the addiction treatment centers that one seems to see at almost every exit off I-77 or I-79 remind the visitor of the opioid epidemic that, arguably, has struck Appalachia harder than it has hit any other region of the country.
I have family and friends in and from West Virginia; I know the beauty of the state’s landscape, and the courage and grace of the state’s people in the face of decades of difficult circumstances. In my travels across the state, I have encountered – more often than those who don’t know the state might expect – small towns with thriving central business districts, with nice little shops and restaurants, and a population of young and multicultural townspeople enjoying each other’s company on a pleasant spring or autumn afternoon. I find myself hoping that what I have seen in these towns represents the future of West Virginia, in contrast with the state’s often difficult past.
Originally published in 1976, as part of the bicentennial “States and the Nation” book series, and more recently republished by the West Virginia University Press at Morgantown, West Virginia: A History provides a valuable look at the life of this important American state.
John Alexander Williams, a native of Greenbrier County in southern West Virginia, was a professor of history at Appalachian State University in western North Carolina, and a scholar specializing in Appalachian studies, when he published West Virginia: A History. Organizing the book around key places in the state’s history – e.g., Point Pleasant, where an early battle of the Revolutionary era was fought in 1774; Harpers Ferry, where John Brown launched his pre-Civil War raid against a Federal armory in 1859; and Buffalo Creek, where a 1972 coal-country flood killed 125 people and rendered thousands more homeless – Williams asks the reader to consider how each of these towns is emblematic of an important stage in the state’s history.
The "Point Pleasant" chapter discusses the significance this little-known battle of the Revolutionary era, an engagement that is remembered today in a park on that strategic point of land where the Kanawha River meets the Ohio:
What made Point Pleasant worth fighting for, in the territorial sense of the matter, and what also seemed to promise the spot an expansive future was this: The most attractive routes through the mountains were blocked in the eighteenth century. They were blocked by foreign powers – variously France, Britain, and Spain – and by the most powerful Indian nations: the Iroquois in the north, and the Cherokees, Creeks, and Choctaws in the south. (p. 20)
After U.S. independence had been achieved, residents of transmontane western Virginia often found that the General Assembly at Richmond paid little attention to their needs. Williams notes accurately that “Virginia’s failure to develop adequate east-west transportation would play a momentous role in western Virginia’s future” (p. 23); indeed, Virginia’s neglect would result in the severance from Virginia of a large chunk of western Virginia territory. Yet the influence of old Virginia would still affect the culture of the new state of West Virginia, as, “Along with land speculation, the oligarchical nature of Virginia institutions was a major formative influence in the political economy that emerged in western Virginia as the frontier era passed” (p. 29).
West Virginia, as mentioned above, was formed during the American Civil War, and is defined in large part by the war’s legacy. Unionists of western Virginia, disagreeing with the 1861 decision by eastern Virginia’s slaveholding planters to secede from the Union and join the Confederacy, seceded from Virginia in 1863, returned to the Union, and formed a new state that could have been called Kanawha but ended up as West Virginia. Looking at the political sectionalism that exists in other U.S. states – e.g., Tennessee, Illinois, California – Williams suggests that “What distinguishes Virginia from these states is that the Civil War threw a military line across the state” (p. 36).
The interesting bits of West Virginia’s Civil War history are here, such as the fact – mentioned, no doubt, in almost every West Virginia history class from Shepherdstown to Huntington – that during the war, “Romney became the most volatile post in all of West Virginia, changing hands more than fifty times in the course of the war” (p. 60). Yet in the process of relating interesting stories of Union and Confederate strategy and tactics, Williams never loses sight of the larger significance of the issues behind the Civil War in West Virginia. The establishment of this battle-born new state had momentous consequences for the people of that time, and particularly for African Americans: “Few of the 25,000 black people who found themselves living in West Virginia after the Civil War are likely to have wept for the loss of the Old Dominion. What was Virginia irridenta [‘lost Virginia’] for some of their masters became a haven of freedom for ex-slaves” (p. 52).
A consistent theme of West Virginia: A History is the conflict between the state’s rich folklore and the often difficult realities of life for West Virginia’s people. When considering the Hatfield-McCoy feud of the 1880’s, for example, Williams dutifully recounts some of the feud’s highlights, including the (dubious) Romeo and Juliet-style love story of Johnse Hatfield and Rose Anne McCoy. But then Williams points out that stories of the feud contributed to the formation of negative stereotypes of Appalachian people – stereotypes that, unfortunately, persist to this day. Williams also suggests that a large part of “[t]he irony of the Hatfield-McCoy feud is that it dramatized the traditional life of backwoods West Virginia at precisely that time in history when the mountaineer’s life was beginning to disappear. It was giving way before the forces of modernization – forces that may be difficult for tellers of feud tales to dramatize in an amusing way, but which were nevertheless powerful” (p. 101).
As West Virginia: A History moves into the 20th century, Williams engages a particularly important theme regarding the people and the life of this state. It is a troubling theme that a number of other scholars of West Virginia history have also engaged – the idea that the state exists in a de facto colonial relationship with wealthier and more powerful states of the U.S.A.:
The term “colonial economy” had not been invented in 1900, but the characteristic features were already present in West Virginia by this time. These included a high degree of absentee ownership, which took on a new and increasingly controversial form as large corporations displaced the smaller firms and individuals who pioneered in industrial development; heavy dependence upon extractive industries oriented to distant markets; and a relative lack of those manufacturing industries that provided the greatest stimuli to material growth and welfare in the nation at large. (p. 150)
Williams notes, with evident sadness, that this “colonial economy” was “not the economy that the founders of West Virginia had dreamed of, nor was it what most citizens wanted” (p. 150), but adds that “West Virginia…remained the way it was because the most powerful West Virginians liked it that way” (p. 156).
Late in the book, Williams focuses specifically on the coal industry as an example of that sort of economic colonialism, suggesting that “In its repetitive cycle of boom and bust, its savage exploitation of men and nature, in its seemingly endless series of disasters, the coal industry has brought grief and hardship to all but a small proportion of the people whose lives it touched”, and noting that “the position of the state is like that of an addict. West Virginia is ‘hooked’ on coal, for better or for worse. In the past, it has generally been for the worse” (p. 200). Nowadays, coal has become more difficult to extract, with even more devastating health consequences for coal miners than used to be the case; coal mining meanwhile becomes a less profitable industry, in competition with other energy sources like natural gas. What will the future look like – for coal, and for the people who mine it?
I read West Virginia: A History on a trip to the Stonewall Resort in central West Virginia – a lovely place, and one that I found embodied many of the intriguing contradictions of life in the Mountain State. For one thing, there is its name. Once, it was the Stonewall Jackson Resort, located adjacent to the Stonewall Jackson Lake State Park. The real-life Stonewall Jackson might not have wanted West Virginia to "honor" him in this fashion; Jackson, who was born in Clarksburg when it was still part of Virginia, always considered himself a Virginian, and would have been unalterably opposed to the division of his native state (he died of his Chancellorsville battle wounds one month before the new state of West Virginia was proclaimed). Nowadays - "for marketing purposes," as the Wikipedia article puts it - it is simply called the Stonewall Resort. Meanwhile, the state park - in what bears the hallmarks of an awkward political compromise between modernizers and traditionalists - still officially bears Stonewall Jackson's name. Identity in West Virginia, as anywhere else in the United States, can be a complicated thing.
It is an elegant resort, set amidst green hills, with a golf course and swimming pools and hiking trails and a beautiful lake on which one can go canoeing or kayaking or motorboating. It draws a well-heeled clientele; there was a cardiologists’ convention in attendance when I was there. Yet one does not have to travel far up or down Interstate 79 from the resort to see the poverty of much of West Virginia. Nowadays, the addiction treatment centers that one seems to see at almost every exit off I-77 or I-79 remind the visitor of the opioid epidemic that, arguably, has struck Appalachia harder than it has hit any other region of the country.
I have family and friends in and from West Virginia; I know the beauty of the state’s landscape, and the courage and grace of the state’s people in the face of decades of difficult circumstances. In my travels across the state, I have encountered – more often than those who don’t know the state might expect – small towns with thriving central business districts, with nice little shops and restaurants, and a population of young and multicultural townspeople enjoying each other’s company on a pleasant spring or autumn afternoon. I find myself hoping that what I have seen in these towns represents the future of West Virginia, in contrast with the state’s often difficult past.
Originally published in 1976, as part of the bicentennial “States and the Nation” book series, and more recently republished by the West Virginia University Press at Morgantown, West Virginia: A History provides a valuable look at the life of this important American state.
June 4, 2023
A comprehensive and interesting history of West Virginia. It's been described as neither Northern or Southern. But the heart of Appalachia. It's the only state totally within a mountain range. Most of the early settlers were Anglo-Celtic. The coal industry of the 19th Century brought Eastern Europeans, African American and Italians. The Civil War tore the state apart and ended up in secession from Virginia in 1863. Williams does an admirable job of describing the Hatfield-McCoy feud, which had its roots in the War between the states. The Hatfield clans was from WV, the McCoy family from KY. The press played up the feud and helped give rise to the image of the violent, ignorant Hillbilly. Williams covered the labor strife in the coal fields. At Paint Creek and Matewan, which led to the Battle of Blair Mt. The activist Mother Jones figured in the struggle to unionize the industry. In the 1960s, there was a good deal of corruption in the state government. Governor Wally Barron went to prison. The Buffalo Creek Disaster is described.
September 14, 2017
Interesting book on the history of the State of West Virginia starting from when it was the west part of the Colony of Virginia when the colony was part of England. Many forget that England and France, not the United States ruled the region as the US was not created yet. The first chapter was about the battles with the Shawnee and the French establishing the western boundary. The next section dealt with the difference between western and eastern Virginia, including the economy, slavery and representation.
The most fascinating piece was the creation of West Virginia out of Virginia. How to create a state out of state? What are the legal steps to do so? How to get Virginia to agree to give up part of the land for a new state when Virginia has seceded? Interesting maneuverings by the Republicans to make this happen.
The most fascinating piece was the creation of West Virginia out of Virginia. How to create a state out of state? What are the legal steps to do so? How to get Virginia to agree to give up part of the land for a new state when Virginia has seceded? Interesting maneuverings by the Republicans to make this happen.
September 30, 2022
Williams is still alive and active, well into his 80s. His approach is to present a series of pivotal events that he uses to explore particular eras. So there's fascinating detail about the Hatfield-McCoy Feud, the unionization of coal mines (featuring colorful figures like John Lewis and Mother Jones), to name just two. He accomplishes, nonetheless, a plausible account of the state's sometimes troubled history, and helps us understand how West Virginia turned out the way it has.
December 11, 2018
Mainly a history of the rich and famous of West Virginia. Expected since this book was prepared for the Nation's bicentennial. I prefer histories that delve into the common man's adversities. He did some of this but not enough. He could have gone into more detail about the mine wars. I just felt that he missed an opportunity. I was part of the great migration. He left many unanswered questions.
June 19, 2019
Read this on Chuck Kinder's recommendation (Last Mountain Dancer). A New River, an old Virginia this "rather short book" compresses some of the best tales into a well-researched history. If reprinted I would only beg for more maps.
June 28, 2021
This was an excellent classical historic read from the WVU Press! Williams breaks down the history of West Virginia into 8 defining moments and reflects on the impact of these moments in forming and developing West Virginia.
December 15, 2021
A terrific written history of my beloved home state. Williams is equally charming, gripping in his narrative, and also scornful when West Virginia deserves it. A read that comes highly recommended for WV or Appalachia enthusiasts alike.
Read
November 17, 2023Gave me a better understanding of WV. Solid start, though the Civil War section is the most lavish and detailed part of the book while just about every other part of the history is dealt with somewhat cursorily.
November 20, 2025
This book really helped lay out a broad-strokes view of West Virginia for me, and the epilogue in the updated edition brought the history closer to my time. It's remarkable how many of the state's problems still exist—some have even gotten worse.
March 24, 2021
A little strange on the narrative side, a little all over the place, but still worth the read.
June 24, 2008
Again, a bit of a slow read, but also very informative.
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews