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Tradition has it that the West Virginia Bluefield earned its name from the fields of chicory that graced the area at its founding in 1882. On the Virginia side, Bluefield is the current name for the village that originally was known as Pin Hook, then Harman, then Graham. The penultimate name, Graham, probably arises out of deference to Col. Thomas Graham who surveyed the region for a railroad. Why rail lines in the mountains? The Bluefields sit near one of the richest deposits of bituminous coal on the planet. Although Thomas Jefferson knew of the massive resource and mentioned it in his writings, it was not mined until 1882. Bluefield, West Virginia, benefitted and boomed, ultimately serving as the rail, medical, commercial, and financial center for nearby coal towns like Pocahontas, Anawalt, and Gary. Relatively prosperous, the two Bluefields aren’t quite Appalachia, but you can see Appalachia from either. The West Virginia Bluefield, incorporated in 1889, hit its heyday—and peak population of 25,000—during World War II, when its huge rail yard gathered coal cars and assembled the Norfolk & Western Railway’s coal trains that steamed off laden with carbon energy to power the troop ships and warships amassed in Hampton Roads on the Atlantic Coast. Bluefield’s strategic importance during the war commanded Hitler’s attention as a potential, albeit distant, target. With the gradual demise of King Coal after the war, Bluefield, West Virginia, like much of rust-belt America, experienced a slow decline, its population now less than half that during its glory days. Still, the area has claims to fame. Nestled among mountains, the Bluefields are uncommonly beautiful and, at 2,400 feet in elevation, uncommonly cool. Because it rarely surpasses ninety degrees Fahrenheit there in summer, Bluefield, West Virginia, has adopted the motto “Nature’s Air-Conditioned City.” The city also boasts being the hometown of John Nash, the Nobel-Prize-winning mathematician and game-theorist, whose story is told in the feature-length hit, A Beautiful Mind. Close to the state line dividing the Bluefields, slightly on the West Virginia side, sits the 10,000-seat Mitchell Stadium, built by the WPA in 1935 and 2019 winner of USA Today’s contest for Best High School Football Stadiums. That the stadium completely fills for the annual Beaver-Graham game attests both to the local importance of high-school football and to the intense rivalry between the West Virginia Bluefield “Beavers” and Virginia Bluefield “G-Men,” the G for Graham High School. (Dad, who went to Graham High, served as the G-Men’s team doctor for a decade or so.) Despite their relatively small sizes, both high schools are long-time football powerhouses, many of whose winning coaches came from the dynasty of the legendary Merrill Gainer. With a biological foot in each Bluefield, I’m a mountain boy through and through. As the saying goes: “You can take the boy out of the mountains, but you can’t take the mountains out of the boy.” I survived for the ten years I lived in Tidewater, Virginia, but I did not thrive there. Still, living away from the mountains gave me a new perspective on the subtle influences of place on one’s psyche. Both states, Virginia and West Virginia, are mountainous, yet their topographies are altogether distinct. On the Virginia side of their shared border, the mountains align in parallel ridges, with valleys in-between: East River Mountain, Buckhorn Mountain, Brushy Mountain, Little Walker Mountain, Big Walker Mountain, and so on. On the West Virginia side, the mountains are amorphous, like convolutions of the brain. In lieu of valleys, there are hollows. (We call them “hollers.”) Hollows are dead ends, literally and figuratively. Topology influences outlook. Life in the hollows seems more circumscribed, less imbued with promise. When I revisit my hometown and its nearby coalfields, I sense a subtle shift in consciousness. Opportunities and options seem to evaporate. A body feels that one must make the best of the cards one has been dealt. Don’t expect a new deal. And don’t complain that the deck might be stacked. I grew up hiking, biking, and driving in mountains, and it’s there where I feel most at home. So hiking the Appalachian Trail (AT) of the Virginias in retirement was like coming home. As the crow flies, the AT passes within perhaps fifteen miles of the two Bluefields. How fitting then that my last major section hike, along Garden Mountain, should bring this mountain boy back to his origins. I’d saved that section for last, because I couldn’t figure out how to negotiate its challenges with my age-related physical limitations, the chief challenge being a ten-mile stretch with arduous climbs and no reliable water. Garden Mountain completely rings Tazewell County’s four-by-eight-mile oval-shaped valley known as Burke’s Garden. The allure of the verdant Garden is its unusual geology. On a map or from the air, the Garden looks like a volcanic caldera or meteor crater. It’s neither, geologists tell us. Rather, Burke’s Garden is a gigantic sinkhole. My ancestry traces to the Garden. When Dad retired from medicine, he bought a computer and took up genealogy as a hobby. Near the end of his life, he made us three kids swear on a stack of Holy Bibles we’d not let his genealogical records be lost. On the issue of this promise, my conscience is not entirely clear. I found it easier to reconstruct Dad’s research than to resurrect it from his archaic software. Still, here’s the relevant part of what I found. Both of Dad’s grandmothers—Roxie Lena Neal and Barbara Adeline Hager—were born in Burke’s Garden. Adeline (as we called her) married William Drury Davis, also from Burke’s Garden, and one of their children was Sheila Alice Davis, Grandma to me. On the next to last evening of my odyssey, in August 2019, I perched in a meadow atop 4,400-foot Chestnut Knob, the highest point on Garden Mountain. To my left and right, thickets of wildflowers buzzed with bees and fluttered with butterflies. It was a beautiful evening, so I pitched my tent sans rain fly, the full sweep of the Garden my vista through the inner netting. I was utterly alone, having seen not another soul for two days. Uncharacteristically, I was also utterly at peace. It was the peace of an aged “mountain boy” returning home, imbibing cool air on a high mountain, surrounded by natural wonders and perhaps—if you believe in such things—comforted by the kindly spirits of his hardscrabble forebears.
Copyright © 2024 Dave Pruett. All rights reserved.
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