A View From the Top of the Adena Mound, Moundsville, West Virginia

Grave Creek Mound, in Moundsville, West Virginia, is a perfectly circular hill that is almost seven stories high.  The last time I was in town, I didn't take the time to stop in at the visitor's center or to climb the mound itself.  This time I did.

Actually, I had intended to go to the Archive of the Afterlife: the National Museum of the Paranormal, which is also here in Moundsville, but they were closed due to a mold issue in their building.

Nothing is known about the people who built this enormous mound 2,250 years ago.  It's thought that the mound was only one part of a much larger ceremonial sacred site.  Only a few bodies were found interred here.  The small museum that gives access to the mound also has artifacts from Moundsville's other minor claims to fame--the Marx Toy Factory (long since defunct) and some company that manufactured china.

And of course, the mound is directly across the street from Moundsville's other great tourist attraction, the West Virginia Penitentiary.  It really gives an otherwise typical Ohio Valley town a gothic and almost sinister appeal.

Meditations on the Northern Panhandle

The neglected country roads, barely wide enough for two vehicles to pass, and all in varying stages of disrepair--like this one, scarred, and re-tarred, and scabbed with potholes.  The vast green pastures that descend down from the rounded hillsides almost like elegant parkland.  The tall trees still just barely touched with the colors of the fall.  Summer is past, but not as far past down there as it is up here in Pittsburgh.  The cattle gathering by a stream in the golden autumn light.  The little white churches on hilltops surrounded by eroded memorials to the dead.  It's a charming place, and I've even looked at the price of land down there.  It's not my place, I know, and I'd never fit in with all the Trump chumps.  But I'm glad to know it's there.  I'm glad to know that I can always jump in the car and be there in less than an hour.  Besides, there's not much acreage for sale till you get as far south as Wetzel County, below the Mason Dixon.  I'd like to own some cheap, wooded land and try my hand at cob architecture.

There comes a time when you must grieve the lives you never got to live.  It's not that you're unhappy with the one you did get, only that you wonder what other things might have been.

The Mexico of Pittsburgh

Have you ever read a Cormac McCarthy novel?  His stuff is either maddeningly hard to understand, because he makes up words and never tells you what exactly he's talking about, or else it's brutally clear and written in sweet poetic prose.  It's got a dreamlike quality, but those dreams can become night terrors.  In his Border Trilogy, the main characters are always escaping across the border into the wild lands of Mexico, where they get chased by bandits, get into knife fights, shiver in the craggy mountain heights, and occasionally fall in love.  Mexico is nearby but so far away from the world they know.  I've decided that West Virginia is to Pittsburgh what Mexico is to a Cormac McCarthy novel: close-by but little-known, kind of foreign, a little dangerous, and adventurous, and romantic.  I mean, just look at this lonely farm sitting in its deep Appalachian valley.

Today I drove the back roads of Marshall County, the county at the base of the Northern Panhandle.  It was my destination of choice last week, too.  Actually, I do tend to obsess over things, and the question that's been holding my interest lately is whether someplace as close to Pittsburgh as Marshall County, West Virginia, can have a truly Southern feel to it.  Why?  Well, it's all because I visited a web site that treated that old 1955 film, The Night of the Hunter, as the quintessential "Southern Gothic Movie."  

The Night of the Hunter is set in Marshall County, West Virginia, and like a lot of Southern Gothic, it deals with religious hysteria and hypocrisy.  Another film from the 1970s that's based on a different novel by the same author, Davis Grubb, is Fools' Parade.  It was also set in Marshall County and filmed entirely on location.  I watched it for free on YouTube last night and decided to spend today wandering among the hollers of the place...again.

This is Graysville Calvary Methodist Church, a way out among the winding lanes and pastures of this place.  I have to say, it has a distinctly Southern appearance, doesn't it?  Even in far-flung places, most Northern country churches have a bit more decoration about the belfry, a bit more in the way of cornices, and capitals, and arches.  But more than that, there's an undefinable Appalachian quality to the scene.

The architecture is more Virginian than Pennsylvanian.

Fools' Parade  isn't a great movie, which is probably why you can watch it free and nobody cares.  It is Jimmy Stewart's last major motion picture (1971), and it also stars a 20-year old Kurt Russell.  It's mildly entertaining, especially after the first half hour or so, but it doesn't wrestle with any big issues or the questions of life.  It does, however, include a few glorious old farmhouses like this place--which sits just above the sensibly-named Fish Run.

Fracking?  Oh, there's fracking here aplenty.  Makes me CRAZY.

Another old Methodist church that has a Virginian air about it.

Fish Run is beautiful, shaded by sycamores, deep here, shallow there.  I wanted to sped a lot more time here than I had available to me. 

One of the stream's deeper pools.  In places it was just a rocky trickle.  In other place, like this, it looked deep enough to sink a car.  

What about Marshall County feels "Southern"?  The roads are narrow and without guardrails.  The roads have no shoulders, and in many, many places they're eroded away to almost nothing.  The buildings are mainly white clapboard with broad porches and a simpler kind of ornamentation than you see further north.  The barns are smaller and shaped differently from ours.  Whereas northern barns tend to have "mansard" style roofs, barns down here--and further south--are roughly shaped like chalets.  The churches, definitely the churches.  I have to say, the few folks I heard speaking did not sound like Southerners.  And I don't know whether they eat fried chicken livers.

Cooper's Rock, Barely West Virginia

Just across the Mason Dixon Line, on the southern side, you'll find Cooper's Rock State Forest.  We do have VIEWS as good as this, and better, on the northern side of the line.  But we do not have cliffs this high--none that I know of.  In fact, the state closed a 50 foot high cliff in northeastern Pennsylvania because someone fell off it.  If West Virginia had to close all its cliffs taller than 50 feet, the whole state would be on lockdown.

The Cheat River wends its lazy course amid the rocks so far below.  Cooper's Rock is a fun place to visit with lots of trails, and views, and a really nice and wooded primitive campground.  But it just wasn't quite wild enough for me.  Too many people there from Pittsburgh and nearby Morgantown. 

Wildly Eccentric Marshall County, West Virginia

 

When I think about the Northern Panhandle of West Virginia, at best I call to mind scenes like this: hilly, woodsy, bucolic, and scenic if not exactly beautiful.  At worst, I think of places like Chester, and Newell, and Weirton, all with their industrial decay and impoverished populations rolling around in 30-year old cars of American manufacture.  This shot was taken from the churchyard of Allen Grove Presbyterian Church.  I'd come here in part to see if it felt like "The South" and in part to scope out its tourist potential.

Allen Grove Church is situated in as lovely a spot as any church I know.  It sits atop a tall green hill and presides over the surrounding countryside with a benign sort of air.  This, too, is the kind of thing you would expect throughout West Virginia, even the Northern Panhandle--which I think is easily the least beautiful part of the state.  

How the elderly folks get in and out of the church or attend funerals in the churchyard is beyond me.  The grassy parking lot is all the way down near the bottom of the hill, and this place is all stair steps and headstones.

Pretty...and expected.  It's a conventionally serene and pleasant scene that is found throughout America and especially in the East and South, a little white church on a hill.

What you might not expect in the Northern Panhandle of West Virginia is an enormous Hindu temple on a rural backroad.  New Vrindaban is a large center for the Hare Krishnas--hidden deep among the hollers and forests and farms.

In fact, while driving on the rural road that runs past the temple, I had to stop and wait as two peacocks sauntered lazily across my path.

These are not signs you'd expect to see in the meadows and woods of early autumn.  "New Vrindaban," "Palace of God," "Krishna Temple."  I didn't have time to stop at the visitor's center, but this place is said to have an excellent, all-vegetarian restaurant and a lot of visitors from around the world.

Just down the hill and on the same road from this Hindu mission station to America, inhabited by missionaries from India, you've got this culturally-insensitive sign about a frontiersman who killed a lot of "Indians."  This is more what you'd expect to find around these parts--where nearly half the houses have Trump signs and Trump flags out front.  

It's an older cemetery but not ancient.  

I'm not sure what this is about, but this little statue, waving Old Glory, was stationed at the entrance to the cemetery.

I'd come to the Moundsville area because it looked like it was home to a lot of exceptionally interesting stuff.  First, you've got the largest and oldest burial mound in the country--foreground.  Then you've got the old West Virginia Penitentiary--background.  They face each other across the street, and both are open for tours.

Just for perspective, the tree growing on the side of the mound is a really big one.

The mound is incredibly tall for having been built entirely by hand.

The prison was decommissioned in 1995.  Squeezing three prisoners into a 5' by 7' cell was finally deemed cruel and unusual.  But this place is immense.  My little cell phone couldn't begin to capture the vastness of it.  This place is often visited by people interested in the paranormal.  Speaking of which...

In a creepy old school, there's the Archive of the Afterlife: the National Museum of the Paranormal.  I did not buy tickets to any of these attractions, but Ryerson Station State Park is 25 miles away, in the southwest corner of Pennsylvania.  We have friends who want to rent cabins side-by-side and do a vacation together.  Ryerson has the only cabins that are almost never booked, so I was just scoping out this possibility, and it looks like a fun and crazily eerie destination.  That was my main reason for coming to Marshall County and Moundsville.  I'd also seen the old black-and-white film "The Night of the Hunter," which is billed as "Southern Gothic."  It's set in Marshall County, and I wanted to see if the place--so close to Pittsburgh--actually had a Southern feel to it.  (I didn't think so, but who's gonna argue with Hollywood?)  Moundsville has its share of creepiness--an old neo-Gothic prison, a big Indian burial ground, and a museum full of supposedly demonic old dolls and toys.

I took a different road home and, still in Marshall County, I came across the abandoned Fork Ridge Universalist Church.  Now, you may not be a religious professional, so you may not be aware that the Universalists were a progressive denomination, based in Boston, that didn't believe in hell.  They merged with the Unitarians long ago.  But what the heck?  In rural West Virginia you wouldn't be surprised to stumble on a Fork Ridge BAPTIST Church, or a Fork Ridge METHODIST Church, or even a Fork Ridge PRESBYTERIAN Church (for the local elites)...but a Universalist church?

I could have gotten inside pretty easily, but something held me back.  Maybe it was remembering how locals in Moundsville and environs stared at me and knew right away that I was an outsider up to no good.  This is the social hall in the basement.  I found a record online claiming that this church closed in 1995--the same year as the prison--but that it was only conducting services once every two months by that time.

That makes some very diverse expressions of spirituality in Marshall County: a traditional Presbyterian church with a cemetery and a white clapboard building; a large missionary center for Hare Krishnas with an ornate temple and larger than life statues with skin painted blue; a native American sacred site for rituals and burials; supposedly one of the most haunted prisons in America; a museum of the paranormal; and the remnants of a liberal Christian congregation.

There was some splendid abandon along these backroads, too.  I didn't stop to photograph some of the most intriguing old empty farmhouses.  Far too much of the countryside was torn apart by frackers.  Certain once-lovely fields and pastures were now ugly industrial sites, and those big frack trucks come barreling down those narrow country lanes with no regard for anyone driving the roads.

But I have to admit...it was a lot more interesting than the Pennsylvania side of the line as well as the Ohio side of the river.  And I'm not sure if it's "The South" as such, but it sure has a Southern Gothic feel.