As with any good, historic highway, there are mysteries along US 219 too. There are tales of black panthers that lurk at the edge of the Cranberry Wilderness, a 35 carat diamond that was unearthed in a game of horseshoes, and tales of ghosts in Greenbrier County.
By Sheila Bowyer Kline. It was a hot, humid, lazy kind of summer day….you know the kind when it is so dang hot you can fry an egg on a concrete sidewalk? Yeah, that hot. “Hot as blazes!” the old timers would say. But I reckon since we were living on our farm in the hills of Southern West […]
Now here’s something you don’t hear about everyday: A chicken that lays wooden eggs. It’s a tall tale told by a man named Johnny Hill, in Pocahontas County, West Virginia. Gibbs Kinderman brings us this archived recording of Johnny Hill’s magical story about some very peculiar hens. The above photo of the chickens was taken […]
“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 […]
Bear hunting is a long running tradition in the mountains along US 219. It started more than 200 years ago, when the farmers began running sheep on their hill farms and the native black bear discovered a new food source. In the old days the mountains rang with the baying of dogs on a […]
1906 was a tough year for Charles Darwin Gillespie. Gillespie, an infamous saloon owner and liquor runner was being sued for $20,000, a fortune at the time. It was only ten years earlier that Charles Darwin Gillespie left Virginia in a pair of dusty boots, a derby hat, and his only black suit. He arrived […]
Bear hunting is a long running tradition in the mountains along US 219. It started more than 200 years ago, when farmers began to run sheep on their hill farms and the native black bear discovered a new food source. In the old days the mountains rang with the baying of dogs on a […]
Bear hunting is a long running tradition in the mountains along US 219. It started more than 200 years ago, when farmers began to run sheep on their hill farms and the native black bear discovered a new food source. Nowadays bear hunting is a high tech sport, with radio tracking systems, GPS, and CB […]
Along the highway in Pocahontas County, West Virginia sits a pink,15 foot Tepee. Shrouded in local mystery, no plaque or sign is out front to explain just what it is, but chances are if you’ve driven past the thing, it’s caught your eye. It is located along US 219 up Elk Mountain about five miles […]
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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