West Virginia, The Mountain State

The geology of the Mid-Atlantic states of the North American continent reflects ancient mountains, formed when the continent collided with Africa in times aeons past. The contemporary Ridge and Valley Appalachian Mountains are the evidence of this movement of the earth, with the hardest rocks forming mountains and the more erodible formations creating the valleys.

The Appalachians now top out at about 7,000 feet but they once towered higher than the Himalayas and the rock formations remaining show evidence of great geologic violence. The Cumberland Gap was the entry to the west and the Cumberland Plateau and the Allegheny Plateau comprise about seventy-five percent of the state of West Virginia. The state lies entirely within these mountain ranges and is the highest in elevation of any state east of the Mississippi River.

In the mid- seventeen fifties, at the conclusion of the French and Indian War, England and the American colonists began the dismantling of the French possessions in North America. In forming the United States, the original settlers inherited thirteen colonies from England following the Revolutionary War. Many of the states’ boundaries were once set by Britain and then by American custom and practise as the wealth of the land beyond the Eastern seaboard was recognized.

To establish a value of land numbers of values were required to be assigned, and the method of ownership and transfer set out. As Americans changed from subjects to citizens, determinations of shapes, sizes, and values as well as from whom land would be acquired and the nature of the vested interest as a matter of record became the subject of broad discussion and decision reaching.

In the Articles of Confederation, the Congress was a feeble instrument. The thirteen colonies acted like independent countries. The nation couldn’t tax, raise an army nor suppress internal insurrections.

With the fashioning of the Constitution and the concomitant Bill of Rights, Americans began slowly to establish order. Against all odds the new Americans went on to establish institutions and habits of self-government which still lie at the core of the American political system.

As Americans pushed westward, a dawning concept that land might be owned like a horse or a cottage, caused state borders to be established uniting people in the desire for laws and the government which would protect them and their land. The thirteen original states, with vast colonial boundaries, were urged to relinquish claims to their extended regions to the United States. Virginia released claim to the area which is now Kentucky in addition to all lands beyond the Ohio River.

The area now known as West Virginia was separated from Virginia as a result of the secession of residents of the mountainous part of the state which had not prospered as had the eastern Piedmont and Tidewater regions, when Virginia, a slave-holding state seceded from the Union during the Civil War. In October, 1861, the western Virginians voted to join the union as a separate state. The border between West Virginia and Virginia thus was established when federal troops were present in the counties of Virginia which were non-slave holding. The Shenandoah Valley, a significant region of today’s West Virginia, changed hands many times during the civil war, but was finally annexed to West Virginia in a decision by the U.S. Supreme Court. The federal government had included those counties to provide West Virginia with the resources needed to sustain the state’s development.

The western border of West Virginia was established after the U.S. Congress following the Revolution, urged those states with vast colonial boundaries such as Virginia, to release their extended regions to the United States. Thus three rivers became the western boundary: The Tug, the Big Sandy and the Ohio, make up the state boundaries between West Virginia, Kentucky and Ohio.

Virginia’s development investments along the Ohio River profoundly affected the line which would become the northern edge of the state of West Virginia. As in numerous boundary disputes, the French and Indian War cast a far reach into the settlement patterns and the political boundaries of the emerging United States beyond the eastern seacoast. Overlapping land claims between Pennsylvania and Virginia resulted in the boundary being located at the upper reaches of the Ohio River, allowing West Virginia today a long extension north on the Pennsylvania line between the river and the Pennsylvania boundary.

West Virginia became a state during the Civil War, breaking away from Virginia, and admitted to the Union on June 20, 1863. It was the only state which seceded from a Confederate state, and is still considered as a part of the south.