WPA Writers’ Program — American Guide Series2.0

West Virginia: A Guide to the Mountain State, its preface announces, represents the work of many minds over a period of several years. The State’s activities, the State Supervisor observed, are as diversified as its topography and borders are irregular; but at last the multitude of facts was reduced to order and the guide reached completion. The director, editors, writers, research workers, draftsmen, consultants, and typists who had a part in its compilation took pride in presenting it to the public as the first comprehensive picture of the State’s varied life.

Much of that life had gone unrecorded. The development of West Virginia from a backward frontier state to one of the most highly industrialized areas in the nation is portrayed here in text and illustration — a transformation so extensive, diversified, and rapid that, as the preface notes, many West Virginians themselves had not been fully aware of it. In the Tours especially, important but little-known phases of activity and incidents of history were set down for perhaps the first time in print, each community treated, so far as space allowed, in relation to its background.

The book’s arrangement reflects the hard arithmetic of a word limit. Some of the smaller cities, among them Bluefield and Beckley, could not be given a place in the cities section and were instead handled at length in the tour division and the picture folios; Shepherdstown, by reason of its historic interest, was given a section of its own. Because the 1940 population figures were not yet available while the guide was being written, the 1930 figures are used throughout the text, except in the chapter on population and its distribution, while an alphabetical list of the final 1940 returns was gathered into the appendices.

Like its companion volumes, the West Virginia guide leaned on many hands beyond the project’s own. The State Conservation Commission, which sponsored the book, was joined by the State Road Commission and the departments of education, agriculture, labor, mines, and archives and history, by the United States Forest Service, West Virginia University, and the Kanawha County Public Library. Dr. Roy Bird Cook served as an ever-ready consultant on historical matters, Professor Rexford Newcomb of the University of Illinois contributed the essay on architecture, and the West Virginia Art Project supplied the art work. The preface was signed at Charleston on the first of February, 1941, by the state supervisor and his assistant.

What emerges is a portrait of the way West Virginians are: a mountain people whose state, narrow and irregular on the map, holds within its ridges a surprising abundance of history, industry, folklore, and song. Sponsored by the Conservation Commission of West Virginia, with the State Board of Education as state-wide sponsor of the Writers’ Project, the volume was first published in 1941 by Oxford University Press and opens, fittingly, with the essay from which this introduction takes its name.