Thread by @cinemashoebox

COUNTRY ROAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAADS, TAKE ME HOOOOOOOOOOOOME

it's West Virginia! like Virginia, but West. or, possibly, not like Virginia at all, since Virginia was all mansions and slavery and West Virginia has been historically incredibly poor and split off from Original Flavour Virginia over slavery during the Civil War. We'll find out!

we've kind of touched on the Appalachians before but West Virginia is the ultimate Appalachian state: wooded, mountainous, once heavily industrialised but now rusting, rich in a certain kind of backwoods history that may or may not be properly recorded by the official listings

also Joe Manchin if you're reading this, end the filibuster, binch

off to a great start here

very into these brick kilns that look like evidence of a lost Ottoman colony in the Appalachians

this is wild (also has recently been restored, as you can see, and painted a fetching pink). the guy who lived here was the main theorist and proponent of bimetallism, the debate about which dominated US politics for decades for deeply baffling reasons

there's no nice way to sayy this but all the West Virginia Historic Districts look like the header image in a "i talked to some Trump voters who told me they were angry racists" article

on the other hand it is also an insanely beautiful state

these two trends come together in places like Kay Moor, an abandoned coal mining complex. some powerful, powerful vibes off this state

"we used to mine coal in this state. now we just mine...vibes"

i want this to be my bank

uhhhhhhhhhhhh

so named because this formation inside looks like a pipe organ, supposedly

here's the entrance. did i mention that this state absolutely fucking slaps?

a derelict classical pavilion, built to shelter a hot sulfur spring that was the centre of a major resort hotel, but the hotel was burned down in the civil war and only the pavilion and the spring survive?

VIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIBES

there's a more successful hot springs spa resort nearby, the Greenbrier: in the 1950s the US govt built an enormous secret bunker underneath it to house themselves during a nuclear war. it was staffed at all times by government workers posing as hotel employees.

huge parts of it were hidden in plain sight - some of the above-ground rooms have immense columns that were designed to withstand massive explosions, blast doors were carefully concealed behind screens, etc. the Washington Post reported on it in 1992 and it was closed immediately

i can't even dislike this round barn because the vibes in this picture of it are so good (also it fell down in 2005, yay)

trying to stay relevant

NOUNS

v i b e s

alright alright alright, this is Harper's Ferry, a town in an absolutely, jaw-droppingly beautiful natural situation...

...and architecturally pretty too, evidence of its crucial role as a 19th century transport hub. there was also, though, a federal armory here, which is how the place got famous...

because in 1859 (when this was all still just Virginia) the radical anti-slavery activist John Brown tried to seize the town and armory to start a national uprising and free slaves through armed revolution. Brown was an extraordinary man, a proper Biblical prophet type.

it didn't work, obviously and Brown was subsequently hanged for treason, but it was a clear sign of what would happen the very next year when the country went fully to war over it

also he just looked the part at all times and this deserves appreciating. this is him with the flag of his "Subterranean Pass Way" organisation, which was intentionally conceived as "the Underground Railroad, but very violent"

only one of the buildings that he occupied in the armory during the siege there remains, and that one is...questionable, since it has been moved four times, including all the way to Chicago and back: it became something of a shrine

(here it is moving back in 1968)

mansion built by and for George Washington's grand-nephew and which since 1974 has been in the possession of an "intentional community" that seems to follow a fusion of Sufism and Gurdjieff stuff. it's what Washington would have wanted

VIIIIIIIIIIBES (1850s wine cellars)

we pass briefly through Charleston, the state capital and largest city (tho still not very large), which has the requisite booooooooooooooooooooring capitol building

more up our street is the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum, a massive asylum and apparently - this is possibly my favourite incredibly niche architecture claim ever, the "second largest hand-cut sandstone building in the world, with the only bigger one being in the Moscow Kremlin."

it was - guess what - incredibly awful and abusive (at one point in the 1950s an attempt was made to solve overcrowding by just lobotomising and releasing a bunch of patients), and closed in the 1990s

in 1999 four city police officers were fired when it turned out they'd been using the place for paintballing and doing a bunch of damage to the structure in the process

*extremely architectural theory voice* the secret of beauty is to make each floor fancier than the one below it

West Virginia has...an entire village of Hare Krishnas with a giant golden shrine to their founder, which i did not expect

regret to announce that this prison is pretty rad (it was a completely horrendous facility and is now closed)

viiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiibes

viiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiibes

those derelict buildings are two of a dozen former company stores in McDowell County, which have all been listed together, an excellent initiative. here's one of them in use in 1949. hope you like the limited range of goods your employer stocks and the prices they charge!

what must it have been like to be a miner in West Virginia in the mid-20th century, hearing your politicians tell you that under the evils of Communism workers were forced to shop with fake money in special stores with a limited selection of goods?

speaking of which, here's a listed battlefield - the Matewan Historic District, in downtown Matewan, where miners fought a famous gun battle with strikebreaking forces on May 19, 1920, at the peak of West Virginia's extremely brutal labour disputes

(subject of this great and unfairly forgotten film)

Matewan led to the Battle of Blair Mountain the next year, where a million rounds of ammunition were fired and police dropped bombs on miners, and where the back of the union movement was effectively broken until the Depression came around

this is all by way of pointing out that behind stuff like this - the whimsical decision to build an entire building out of coal as a publicity stunt - there is a certain other history to be told (and to be fair the NRHP listings do a decent job)