By Stephen Smoot
Last week, a group of members of the West Virginia House of Delegates submitted a proposed resolution to rename Spruce Knob, the Mountain State’s highest point, after President Donald Trump.
Both the state and Pendleton County reacted in a fashion that almost any, outside of those who came up with and backed the idea, could easily predict. Those who originally signed the proposal included Elias Coop-Gonzalez, and 12 other members of the House.
The specific proposal reads that consideration for renaming take place “five years after the passing of President Donald J. Trump.” Based on reactions from other legislators in both parties, as well as the overall reaction of people across the Mountain State, the likelihood of its passage hovers around zero percent.
Both news media and social media reactions ranged between bewilderment and hostility, most outlets focusing on that.
But the more interesting questions to answer lie in why? Why the initial proposal and why the impassioned response?
The urge to rename did not come from nowhere. Revolutions have a tendency to try to change place names and establish their own symbols on the landscape.
Revolutions come in all shapes and sizes and can have greater or lesser long-term impact. Currently, the Trump administration’s attempt to refashion the relationship between the federal government vis-à-vis the states and the people has many hallmarks of a revolution. So did the movements spawned by the death of George Floyd that led to the removal of historical statues and the changing of school and other names.
In the Potomac Highlands, the political revolution that created West Virginia is written boldly on the map. The western sections of Confederate leaning Hardy and Hampshire counties broke away. Western Hardy took the name of Union commander Ulysses S. Grant, while the expected future prosperity of the state was reflected in the name “Mineral.”
The Industrial Revolution had a similar impact, with the Randolph County town of Leadville receiving both the county seat designation and also the name Elkins – after Stephen B. Elkins, future United States Senator and industrial titan.
Name and symbol changes reflect a conscious, or sometimes perhaps even subconscious, desire to ground a revolution, to make it permanent by establishing it in the land itself.
But there, the revolutionary impulse confronted an aspect of West Virginia and Appalachia with much deeper establishment and roots – the primacy and reverence for the land.
Katherine Ledford, professor of Appalachian Studies at Appalachian State University, described the evolution of the perception of the Appalachian Mountains in her essay “A Landscape and a People Set Apart” included in a book that she co-edited called “Back Talk From Appalachia – Confronting Stereotypes.”
She wrote that “during the first colonial explorations, men persistently characterized the mountains as adversarial, unnatural, and out of control.” Early explorers, such as John Lederer in 1669 and 1670, Ledford writes found “a difficult landscape that he characterizes as dangerous and uninviting.”
Over time, however, those dreaming of a new life for themselves, their families, or their economic opportunities, percolated through the gaps in the fortress wall-like ridges, and found abodes in the valleys of the Alleghenies, then the winding hollows and bottom lands of the Plateau section west of what is now Elkins.
The most important aspect of this controversy lies in the West Virginian’s relationship with the mountains. As Professor Emeritus Ronald Lewis of West Virginia University notes in the essay “Beyond Isolation and Homogenity,” then again in his book “Transforming the Appalachian Countryside,” the culture has been regulated and has developed from a “culture (that) was regulated by traditional values they associated with the frontier.”
Mountains shaped the men and women who live there, but so did the outside. Lewis explains that the ideal of “Appalachia” formed more from the fanciful and false perceptions from outsiders’ writings and actions after the Civil War than from anything inherently different about the area until then.
“This fictional representation became accepted, and then reified, as ‘history’ by twentieth-century reporters, scholars, and policy-makers into what Henry Shapiro has called ‘the myth of Appalachia,’” wrote Lewis.
From this time forward, every human institution imaginable, political, religious, social, economic, business, and, the worst offender of all, government, has failed people in the region by from time to time imposing its vision – based on misunderstandings and fictions – on plans to “help” or “improve” the people who live there and the places they inhabit.
Outsiders’ visions almost always come with a cost that is usually higher than the people wish to bear.
People in West Virginia and Appalachia take solace in the mountains, the valleys, and the hills that surround them. For many, the landforms create an almost subconscious perception of safety, of protection from the outside world.
In Pendleton County especially, many here now can trace their bloodlines and their connections to the land back for centuries. Ancestors carved a life from the wilderness, shed sweat to work it and blood to defend it. That makes the land itself for many a very sacred gift from God kept not just as property, but also as a trust.
The land, of which the mountains are obviously a part, has served as a rough, but generally reliable, partner to the people. When people understand the ways of the land well enough, it has never lied to the people, it has never tricked the people, it has never stolen from the people, it has never made promises, then failed to deliver.
When treated with respect and intelligence, the land produces, it provides, and it protects.
For many West Virginians, traveling into a realm with no mountains or similar landforms will leave them vaguely uncomfortable until they return to what feels familiar and comforting. There is a reason why the lyric “mountain mama” hits the West Virginian’s musical ear so pleasantly.
And many will fight hard to keep their piece of it. When the Tennessee Valley Authority endeavored to seize the land of mountain farmers in the Volunteer State, a family matriarch named Mattie Randolph refused to give in to intense federal pressure to give up her land.
She told a federal staffer, “I’ll stay here until the water come up (for the artificial lakes created by the TVA) and float down when it does.”
Some, emulating Russian and Ukrainian peasant farmers from whom Josef Stalin was seizing land, burned down their domiciles with themselves inside rather than leave their mountain homes for a mainstream world that neither respected nor wanted them.
It’s not that the delegates want to rename a mountain in West Virginia after Trump. In fact, many might agree that it is not a bad idea to honor Trump in this fashion because his policies have done much to help the state and he remains very popular here.
The fact that they want to rename a specific landform that serves as such a powerful symbol for West Virginia and West Virginians is the rub.
Late in World War II, British forces attempted an ambitious plan to roll up Germany’s northern flank by seizing a series of bridges and positions in an operation called “Market Garden.” The plan failed because a misreading of the map put them one bridge past where the plan had placed support.
The film about the event carried the title “A Bridge Too Far,” which became a common phrase about taking a good idea well past a reasonable point. Most West Virginians would likely agree that phrase certainly applies here.
Spruce Knob is not just another mountain. It is one of the primary landmarks of the state. It is immersed in the history of the frontier, of agriculture, of the timber industry, and now of tourism. From its majestic heights, it witnessed literal brother against brother battles in the Civil War. It rises from, but also well above the Allegheny Front that divides east and west flowing waters.
To most West Virginians, including many who support the President, changing the name is replacing the timeless with the transitory and represents almost a sin against the land.
