The Punch Jones diamond is a 34.46 carat diamond, named after the boy who discovered it in 1928 while he and his father were pitching horseshoes at their home outside Peterstown, WV. For most of its course through West Virginia, US 219 borders rivers and creeks— The North Fork of the Blackwater, The Shavers Fork […]
Eighteen miles south of Elkins, in Randolph County, lies the town of Huttonsville. Huttonsville sits in the Tygart Valley, where the historic Route 250–the Staunton-Parkersburg Turnpike–and route 219 meet. “The town of Huttonsville was named in honor of the Hutton family. Before the war the village was the educational center of the county. Until the […]
After two years of forest restoration work on top of Cheat Mountain, a new tourist train is climbing the old logging tracks to the old ghost town of Spruce, which sits nearly 4,000 feet above sea level. The forests here are returning after decades of timber and coal extraction that nearly devastated the rare boreal […]
The Traveling 219 Project continues its Maryland series, at a place where US route 219 becomes part of a major interstate i-68, in the northern part of Garrett County. This also happens to be where rt. 219 crosses rt. 40 the historic National Road, the first federally funded road in the country, built back in […]
The ballad of Omie Wise has been sung many times. It has been included in Jim Comstock’s West Virginia Songbag, sung by Maggie Hammons and other West Virginian ballad singers.3 Some say that Naomi Wise, or Omie Wise, of ballad fame is actually from Randolph County, WV: I’ll tell you the story about little Naomi […]
Another audio story in the Greenbrier Episcopal School series, featuring students from Birch Graves’ class. Here are Wyatt Bair, Bronwyn McMahan O’Shea, Alex Casto talking about the projects they researched for their social studies class: Shanklin’s Grand Theatre in Ronceverte, O’Shea’s All About Beauty in Lewisburg, and the Ginkgo Tree in Lewisburg. We’ll be posting […]
World War Two Veteran Sherman Beard remembers flying over Europe as a B-24 pilot in the last months of the war. Sherman was stationed in Foggia, Italy in 1945, where he flew 35 missions over Europe. Traveling 219 interviewed him recently about his experiences, and put this piece together in commemoration of Veterans Day. Sherman […]
The Traveling 219 Project teamed up with classes at the Greenbrier Episcopal School in Lewisburg this school year to bring local history and folklore into the classroom. Here is Elsa Howell and Zoe Hinkey, retelling the story of the Greenbrier Ghost, or the haunting of Elva Zona Heaster, which they researched and turned into cranky […]
The town of Oakland, Maryland lies 11.5 miles north of the West Virginia-Maryland line on U.S. Route 219. The history of Oakland is linked to the Baltimore & Ohio railroad, which laid its tracks through the Allegheny Mountains of Western Maryland in the 1850s. When the original train station in Oakland burned down, the current […]
The McNeel Mill at Mill Point, which is being restored today by local resident Matt Tate, 150 years after it was first constructed in this once bustling little West Virginia mountain town. If you’ve driven U.S. Route 219 through Mill Point,you’ve probably seen the old McNeel Mill, which has stood down on Stamping Creek since […]
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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