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.