Roxy Todd has been working with the 219 Project since October, 2011, when she began working as a VISTA volunteer. Prior to this project, Roxy has worked as a teacher, a massage therapist, and a farm worker. She graduated from Warren Wilson College in 2005. In 2006 she wrote and directed a rock opera with Patrick Seick called "Osama Baby", and she has just finished writing her first novel, "The Girl in the Glass".
By Gibbs Kinderman Country general stores were the center of community life a hundred years ago along what is now US 219 in West Virginia. They often housed the local post office and provided an informal meeting place for discussion of local affairs and the great issues of the day. These stores sold staples – […]
“You don’t see people raising turkeys now. When I grew up, everyone had turkeys,” recalls Layuna Rapp, who grew up on a family Dairy Farm outside of Frankford, W.Va. This photo is dated 1900 in Lewisburg. The turkeys were probably being driven down the road from a farm in Greenbrier or Monroe County to be […]
On a an overcast, October day a crowd of 600 people gather in the little town of Webster Springs. Twenty cooks and 20 Burgoos. Helping judge the best of these Burgoos is Tim Urbanic, chef and owner of Cafe Cimino. “You got to love Burgoo. I really love the rattlesnake. And the snapping turtle. They’re […]
In a public performance on Wednesday, Romanian artists joined the Appalachian Ensemble, a Davis & Elkins College student string band and dance group. The Romanian students are participating in a year-long project exploring the connections between Appalachian and Romanian folk music. Teacher Emanuela Tulpam says there are geographical similarities between Romania and West Virginia too. […]
“In its day a fashionable spa, one of the oldest in the South, now drowses by the roadside, lost in dreams of a glamorous past. Renowned as Old Sweet, it opened as a watering place in 1792.”- West Virginia Writers’ Project, 1941.
Listen to a 102 year old resident of Sweet Springs, Pauline Baker, who learned to swim in the pure, blue water at the once famous resort.
photo of the Alleycats outside the Delmonte in Elkins, by Bill King. The Tribble’s house stands out from the street because of the solar panels on the roof, and because even from outside you can hear the sound of 16-year-old Walter King warming up his fiddle. Beside him stands Nevada Tribble, with long, straight red […]
By Gibbs Kinderman: The “Traveling 219” project was inspired by the New Deal Federal Writers Project and the Guides to the States it produced. Nobel Prize winning writer John Steinbeck, who was a struggling young author when he was hired to work for the Writers’ Project, was also a big fan of these amazing books. […]
In 2013, park superintendent Mike Smith organized a series of four memorial hikes to the top of the top of Droop Mountain to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the battle. In June and July, Dan Schultz and I joined the hikers as they made their way up Droop Mountain on the first two of these […]
“Nobody in Pocahontas County has the slightest doubt but what the name of Cal Price will live on forever after he dies, that is if you can find anybody who believes he will die,” fellow journalist Jim Comstock wrote in 1953. “Most Pocahontasites think of him just living on and on like the trees of the forest.” Price was the editor of the Pocahontas Times for over 50 years, and his name indeed lives on.
“I saw the panther. I whistled at him, and he growled at me,”- Calvin Price, 1956. Skip Johnson was a well followed outdoors writer for the Charleston Gazette. He passed away in 2010, but a book that he completed just before his death, called West Virginia Mountain Lions, the Past Present and Future of the […]
Click the map to download a high-resolution copy of the Traveling 219 map, or pick up a hard copy at one of many locations along U.S. Route 219. You may also view our interactive map of Traveling 219 stories [HERE].
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