West Virginia - Day 4 - Charleston

Fox Fire KOA
Thursday, 4 April 2019

today's route (mostly retracing my previous route)

I left the campground before 7:30 this morning because I wasn't sure what rush hour traffic is like in the capital city of Charleston and wanted to give myself time to deal with it.

I knew right away, though, that this was going to be a good day.  When I was trying to find a PBS station, I stumbled across Alabama's wonderful song "If You're Going to Play in Texas" (you gotta have a fiddle in the band).  If this little gem of Americana has passed you by, here's your chance.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6r4E514nJg  Fortunately, I'd already hit cruise control so I could tap my toes all I wanted - I think it's impossible not to, with that fiddle-playing.  Gave my whole day a lift.

My first stop was actually in South Charleston, which of course is west of Charleston.  I'd heard that there's a Native American burial mound there and wanted to try and track it down.  And it turned out to be easy, thanks to extensive online research ahead of time.

South Charleston or Criel (or Creel) Mound

This was a burial mound for the Adena tribe of Native Americans who lived in this area for thousands of years.  Scientists believe this mound was built between 500 BC and 150 AD.  In the late 1800s, the Smithsonian Institution did archaeological work here and found skeletons arranged carefully in the earth.  The mound, which was originally about 35' high, was created by people hauling individual baskets of dirt.  Which is a lot of basketfuls, when you think about it.  There's more information in these signs that are at the site and at this link.  https://wvexplorer.com/attractions/prehistoric/south-charleston-mound/

about the excavation

about the Adenas

about the Mound Building culture of which the Adena were a part

The mound is in the center of a developed area now, but at least the government has created a small park around it.  On one side is a car dealership; on another are businesses - including The Purple Leaf, a cannabis dispensary.

West Virginia Capitol and Culture Center
This was another instance of my day going well - I didn't get lost, didn't run into traffic problems, and was helped by some very nice and accommodating guards at the capitol gates.  The first one opened the gates to the parking area for elected officials to let me turn around, and he complimented Dexter several times.  The second one, at the parking area for the public, directed me to a free parking place.

West Virginia has the most elaborately decorated dome I've ever seen.  It's a stunning sight, especially in the sunshine.

closer view of the dome

better view of the building

This link gives more information about the building; for instance, the architect also designed the Woolworth Building in New York City and the US Supreme Court Building in Washington, DC.   http://www.wvculture.org/agency/capitol.html

The Culture Center is just across a plaza from the capitol, and the museum there was where I was headed.

In the lobby they had a display of quilts, made in WV of course, on the walls.

I hope you can blow up these photos because all the quilts are great, but the one in the top right of the center photo I thought was really special.  It's called "Sunday Dinner" and was made in 2009.

The museum is set up with individual rooms that are semi-interconnected; each room focuses on a different topic, like frontier life or John Brown's raid or boats and rivers.  The ones I especially wanted were about music and crafts and were at the end, so I started the tour backwards.

I first walked through a passageway with quotes from famous West Virginians, like environmentalist Pearl Buck and Sen. Joe Manchin.  The one I liked best was from Sen. Robert Byrd that begins, "God must have been in a very spendthrift mood when He created West Virginia."

The music room had lots of musical instruments, some as old as a piano brought by oxcart from Richmond in 1840, and some as new as a hammered dulcimer made in 1987.

music box, 1888

mountain dulcimer, 1850 & hammered dulcimer, 1987

Heart Rose dulcimer, 1983

fife made & played during the Civil War

There were also exhibits for singers and bands that, regretfully, I've never heard of.  The museum has some of their costumes, instruments and posters advertising concerts.  And of course there was great music being played in that room.

The next room had a different kind of talent on display.  There were carvings and pottery and glass and weavings - all kinds of crafts.  Unfortunately, the lighting in this museum is so low it looks like they aren't just trying to preserve the items but also to keep them a secret.  I couldn't read many of the labels, or even see some of the items up high.  The photos I took of this quilt, below, and the glassware were so dark I had to pull out all the stops on the computer's photo editing program to get even some of the image.

rhododendron chair, 1989 & Log Cabin Sunrise and Shadow quilt, 2004

l-r claret glass, 1975-90; footed glass bowl, 1970s; Number 507 tumbler (barely visible in rear), 1903-23; sherbet glass, 1924-30  I think the tumbler was molded, the others look etched

Did you know Fiestaware originated in West Virginia?  I didn't.  Here are some of the early or unusual pieces.

l-r blue experimental tray, 1986; olive sugar bowl, 1970s; cup and saucer, 1936; aqua teapot, 1937; maroon experimental individual teapot, 1986; yellow mixing bowl, 1936 

And did you know the marbles we used to play with when we were kids likely came from WV?  They were developed to counter marble competition from the Japanese.  The case underneath this display is packed with marbles, but I couldn't fit it all into the photo.

There was much more in this room - carvings and all kinds of needlework and pottery and glassware.  I was just defeated from taking more photos by the lack of light, as I said.

From there, I skipped the room with painting and sculpture and moved into the transportation room.  Here they have small displays about several notable West Virginians:

• Chuck Yeager - 1st person to break the sound barrier 
• Pete Everest - the 1st to reach Mach 3 
• Paul Peck - one of the 1st airmail pilots and instructor at the 1st military aviation school that Orville Wright set up in College Park, MD - I remember hearing about him when I visited the aviation museum there (see my 2-19-19 post) but l see I didn't mention either him or the school in that post - a clear oversight
• Beulah McCown Stark - 1st WV woman with a pilot's license, she flew with an air circus, and headed the women's wing of the WV Civil Air Patrol during WWII; she continued with the CAP for decades after the war; the display includes the lap robe she used to keep her legs warm in those open cockpits (just think of flying in an open cockpit)

There is also a lot of information about West Virginia's roads in general and the turnpike in particular.

• Early roads were the responsibility of each county, so the only roads they worried about were those leading to the county seat - not exactly a coordinated system to get from one hub to another.  Throughout the first half of the 20th century, the state funded many road-building projects, adding many thousands of miles of roadways.  Then in the 1960s, apparently as part of LBJ's War on Poverty (though the museum didn't specifically say so), the Appalachian Regional Commission funded a network of roads to interconnect all of Appalachia - making an enormous difference in the prosperity of the region.
• In 1870, the state capital was moved from Wheeling to Charleston, but the roads there were so bad the capital moved back to Wheeling again in 1875.  While it was in Charleston, however, city leaders tried to improve the roads and one man had the bright idea to pave Summers St. with bricks.  It didn't keep the capital, but it's believed to be the first brick street in the US.
• In 1977, the New River Gorge Bridge was opened and considered one of the great technological marvels of the 20th century.  At 876' above the New River, it's one of the highest vehicular bridges in the world and now the 3rd highest in the US.  For many years it was the longest single-span arch in the world at 1,700', and is still fourth-longest.  The bridge itself is 3,030' long, and this is one bridge I am definitely not going to drive over.  I'm planning to visit it next week to see for myself.
• The West Virginia Turnpike was originally envisioned to connect the Great Lakes with the southern US.  But maybe the other states didn't think it could be done - at any rate they didn't commit to building the connecting roads and the project was scaled back to run only from Charleston to Princeton, inside WV.  The Saturday Evening Post called the WV Turnpike "a road to nowhere."  
• West Virginians used to spend all day getting from Charleston down to southern Virginia, and the new road took that time down to a few hours. It was replacing miles of 1-lane bridges, steep grades, and roads that switched from 2 lanes to 3 lanes to 4 lanes and back again, causing confusion.  The turnpike included 100 bridges and was somehow built in only 2 years, and completed in 1954.

When I drove from Virginia earlier this week, I expected to find the same ghastly steep grades I'd encountered in southern Pennsylvania - after all, it's the same mountain range.  But that's not what I found at all.  The worst grade I came to here was 5% - and sweet little West Virginia had flagged this as dangerous and told truckers to use a lower gear.  I did because they told me to, but I don't think any of the truckers did - they all passed me.  And after those 9% & 10% & 11% grades I'd sweated over in PA, this was nothing.  I don't know what the relative elevations are, but I know my ears popped more than once going up and down these hills.

The museum's exhibit didn't say how the builders managed to make the WV road so much easier to drive than PA, but I've been thinking about it a lot.  The road in PA was built in the '40s, 10 years before the WV Turnpike.  I'm sure engineering techniques had improved during that time.  But also it seems to me that WV used a lot more s-curves than PA did.  Anyone who's been downhill skiing knows that if you take a descent gradually, with great sweeping curves, you can go slower with more control; take it straight down and you become a victim of gravity.  That's what I found here, anyway - lots and lots of gradual s-curves and none of them was particularly scary.

I ended up visiting only 3 of the museum's 26 rooms, afraid to stay longer because of the dogs.  On my way back to the parking lot I stopped at the statue on the capitol grounds in honor of West Virginia coal miners.

The sun was really bright and I had a hard time getting an angle that would show the statue without being blinded by the sun.  I made a close-up of the inscription - maybe you can blow it up to read it.

Aren't those tulips wonderful?  There are beds of them all over the grounds.  And you can see some of the other trees are starting to bloom.

I saw several black squirrels on the grounds.  I'm sure seeing a lot of them, considering they're supposed to be rare.

Turns out it was a good thing I went back to the RV when I did.  The guard that had helped me park told me two different people had told her they were worried about the dogs they'd seen in the RV, but she assured them that I'd only been gone a short time and that the dogs almost certainly had beds, and anyway it wasn't even 75° outside.  But apparently one of them talked to capitol security because they came around and checked too, and she assured security too.  Lucky for me or I could have been in trouble with animal welfare.  Remind me not to come back here in July.

Blenko Glass Co.
Even after doing some errands, I ended up back in Milton earlier than I expected.  I used the extra time to stop for a tour at the Blenko Glass Co.  There'd been an exhibit about their work at the culture center and I'd seen signs near Milton about the tour.

It turned out to be self-guided, but since it also included direct access to the glassblowers, I got some extra information.

This sign explains the beginning of the process, where glass is gathered on the end of the blowpipe, and worked and heated to the desired size.  The worker then puts the glass on the pipe into a mold and blows until the glass has expanded to fit the mold.

the furnace heated every inch of the workshop, more than double the area we could see, as hot as the 4th of July

the wooden box is the mold

Grey Shirt's been blowing on the glass in the mold

shaping

steps after the mold

In the left photo, the man behind the steps is blowing on some glass to get it as large as the mold.  The right photo shows the glass right after it's come out of the mold.  It's a little fuzzy because he was spinning it.

The workers in these photos were in the front area of the shop where a flock of us tourists were watching.  There were many more workers in the shop area on the other side of the furnace doing the same things.

Sometimes it looked like some of these workers were just sitting around, until I realized they were all performing different functions, and sometimes seemed to be spotting for the person doing the glassblowing - as a person in a gym will spot for someone doing heavy weight lifts.

To us, all this was upstairs, but the factory is built on a hillside, so the workers came in on the ground floor of the shop, which was the 2nd floor to us tourists.

This photo shows a part of the display room - a riot of color and form.  I wished I could buy one of each, just to enjoy the colors.

Next to the parking lot is a small pond with several Muscovy Ducks.  I had to look them up, but with their faces they're easy to recognize.  The one I saw the best (this isn't my photo) was mostly black with a white neck, but his face was just like this.  Odd looking guy, huh?

Muscovy Duck

I was pretty pooped by the time we got back to the campground, but I felt like I'd seen some of the variety West Virginia has to offer.