📘 The mountains that are not mountains

What you’ll learn

1. Plateau countryRead plateau country from the window.The mountains that are not mountains; The only whole one.
2. Front and gorgeRead front and gorge from the window.The west door is the Ohio; Why they walked out of Virginia.
3. Rivers and statehoodRead rivers and statehood from the window.The capital had to fit; The New becomes the Kanawha.

Questions this course answers

Grounded in trusted sources

• West Virginia Geological and Economic Survey — Physiographic Provinces of West Virginia (rev. 6 Jan. 2020): two major provinces, Appalachian (Allegheny) Plateau and Valley and Ridge, plus a very small portion of the Blue Ridge near Harpers Ferry; Plateau is a dissected, generally westward-dipping table covering the western two-thirds, flat-lying to gently folded rocks with extractable coal and petroleum; eastern third folded and faulted, no minable coal; eastern boundary the Allegheny Structural Front, trending northeast–southwest; Great Valley Subprovince in the eastern panhandle; oldest rocks late Precambrian Catoctin Formation in the Blue Ridge outcrops; New River Gorge lidar example of the dissected Plateau; Gorge maximum depth about 1,600 feet
• e-WV: The West Virginia Encyclopedia — Howard G. Adkins, “Geography” (25 Apr. 2024): statehood 1863 with 48 counties; Berkeley and Jefferson added 1866; five new counties 1866–1895; 24,282 square miles; boundary 1,170 miles, 52 percent rivers, 31 percent Allegheny Mountain crestlines, 17 percent man-made straight lines; geographic center four miles west of Centralia, Braxton County; 40 peaks more than 4,000 feet; Spruce Knob 4,861 feet; Harpers Ferry 247 feet; average elevation 1,500 feet; about two-thirds of the land steeper than 20 percent; Allegheny Front roughly the Eastern Continental Divide, about 85 percent of drainage west to the Ohio and the Gulf, 15 percent east to the Potomac and the Atlantic; New River Gorge 1,100 feet in that account; about 78 percent forest; only two cities over 10,000 not on a major stream, Beckley and Martinsburg; 13 locks and dams, 350 miles of navigation on the Ohio, Kanawha, and Monongahela; population peaked at 2,005,552 in 1950, 1,793,716 in 2020; first coal reference an outcrop on the Coal River, 1742; commercial mining 1818 to fuel Kanawha salt evaporators; coal employment peaked at 127,000 in 1950; record 182 million tons in 1997, about 96 million in 2022
• e-WV — Howard G. Adkins, “Allegheny Front” (16 Feb. 2024): southeast-facing escarpment of Pocono and Pottsville sandstone, two to three miles wide, Keyser to Bramwell; unbroken slopes of 1,000 feet not uncommon; rises to 4,861 feet at Spruce Knob
• e-WV — Norma Jean Kennedy-Venable, “Spruce Knob” (23 Sept. 2024): 4,861 feet, Pendleton County, on Spruce Mountain; Pottsville sandstone, Pennsylvanian, more than 300 million years old; acquired by U.S. Forest Service 1921; President Lyndon B. Johnson created Spruce Knob–Seneca Rocks National Recreation Area in 1965, first such area inside a national forest; Spruce Knob Lake a 25-acre fishing lake built 1952, the state’s highest lake
• e-WV Geology exhibit: located entirely within the Appalachian region; most of the state is the Appalachian Plateau Province
• Appalachian Regional Commission — About the Appalachian Region: 423 counties across 13 states; residents live in parts of Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, Maryland, Mississippi, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia, and all of West Virginia
• U.S. Geological Survey — Elevations and Distances in the United States / Highest and Lowest Elevations: West Virginia high point Spruce Knob, Pendleton County, 4,863 feet; low point Potomac River, Jefferson County, 240 feet; geographic center Braxton County, four miles east of Sutton
• National Park Service — “A River Runs Through It,” New River Gorge National Park and Preserve (updated 29 Jan. 2021): established 1978 as New River Gorge National River; redesignated New River Gorge National Park and Preserve in 2021; more than 70,000 acres along 53 miles of the New from Bluestone Dam to Hawk’s Nest Lake; a rugged whitewater river flowing northward; among the oldest rivers on Earth; deepest and longest river gorge in the Appalachian Mountains; railroad opened the gorge in 1872

Every Wunder lesson is built from real, reputable sources — never invented.

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