Appalachia’s Front Porch

01/23/2026

Hey y’all! Winter storm’s headed our way this weekend. Please be careful if you have to travel. Roads can turn slick quick, especially in the hollers and back roads. If you can stay in, stay in. And don’t forget to check on your neighbors, Appalachia takes care of its own!

12/14/2025

A cold snowy start to this December morning ❄️ What’s it look like in your neck of the woods?

11/29/2025

Ripley, West Virginia – “Biggest Small Town” with a Big Story

Tucked where Sycamore Creek meets Big Mill Creek, Ripley began as a 400-acre land grant in the 1760s. Early settlers William, John, and Lewis Rodgers made their homes here, and by the 1830s Jacob Starcher had laid out the town that would become Ripley. He chose the name to honor a young preacher, Harry Ripley, who tragically drowned in Big Mill Creek just before his wedding…a love story and heartbreak forever tied to this little valley. 

For years the community was known as “Jackson Courthouse,” with a post office established in 1832 to serve the newly formed Jackson County. The town later officially embraced the Ripley name in 1897 and grew into the county seat. 

Today, the limestone Jackson County Courthouse, completed in 1920, still stands watch over downtown with its clocktower and soldier’s monument out front, a true small-town landmark at the crossroads of U.S. 33 and I-77.

Ripley is best known for doing the Fourth of July big. Since the late 1800s, the town has hosted what’s billed as the “USA’s Largest Small Town Independence Day Celebration” – the oldest Independence Day parade in West Virginia. In 2002, President George W. Bush even came to Ripley to join the festivities and give an address from this little Jackson County town. 

And if you want to understand Ripley today, look at its mayor. Carolyn Rader isn’t just a name on the city letterhead….she’s the one out front on Friday mornings waving to school kids, cheering them on as they head to class, and the same mayor you might spot with a paintbrush in hand freshening up curbs around town. From greeting students to literally getting down on the sidewalk to paint, she’s known for being hands-on and deeply involved in the life of the community. 

With a population of just over 3,000, Ripley still feels like the kind of place where folks know your name, the courthouse square is the heart of town, and the Fourth of July sounds like freedom echoing off the hills. If you’ve ever spent an evening here listening to the cicadas and watching the lights of Main Street, you know: Ripley might be a small dot on the map, but it’s a big part of West Virginia’s story. 

🇺🇸 Have you ever been to Ripley’s Fourth of July celebration or seen Mayor Rader out greeting students or painting curbs? Share your memories in the comments!

11/27/2025

Did you know?

Long before Thanksgiving was a national holiday, folks in what is now West Virginia were already gathering to give thanks.

In 1861, during the darkest days of the Civil War, Governor Francis H. Pierpont of the Union-loyal “Restored Government of Virginia” in Wheeling proclaimed Thursday, November 28th as a special day of Thanksgiving. At that point, our region was still debating a new state name (believe it or not, “Kanawha” was on the table), and families were divided by the war.

Even then, people here put down their work, came together, and prayed for peace and unity. Two years later, Lincoln would declare Thanksgiving a national holiday…but in true Mountain State fashion, West Virginia was already ahead of the curve. 🌄🦃

11/27/2025

Tucked into the rolling hills just east of Union in Monroe County sits Rehoboth Church – the oldest surviving church building in West Virginia and the oldest Protestant house of worship still standing west of the Allegheny Mountains.

Built from hand-hewn logs around 1786 on land donated by settler Edward Keenan, Rehoboth began as a simple frontier meeting place for early Methodist pioneers. The little log church was dedicated by famed Methodist bishop Francis Asbury, and it quickly became an important stop on the old Greenbrier Circuit, hosting conferences and even the first Methodist ordination west of the Alleghenies in 1788. 

Step inside today and you can still see the rough log walls, plain wooden pews, and raised pulpit where those early worshipers gathered…no stained glass, no fancy trim, just the sturdy craftsmanship of frontier hands. The surrounding cemetery holds some of the region’s earliest settlers, a quiet reminder of the people who carved out lives here long before West Virginia was a state. 

Rehoboth Church is now a National Register of Historic Places site and a designated Methodist shrine, open seasonally with a small museum next door. Next time you’re in Monroe County, take a detour off Route 3 and visit this little log church that’s been standing watch over the hills for more than two centuries. 

Have you ever visited Rehoboth Church or driven past it without knowing the story?

11/26/2025

Tucked along Virginia Street in downtown Charleston sits one of the city’s most iconic buildings: the Charleston Municipal Auditorium. Opened in 1939 as a Public Works Administration project, this massive concrete-and-steel “Art Deco grande dame” was Charleston’s promise to itself that music, theater, and community belonged right in the heart of town. 

Designed by local architect Alphonso Wysong, the auditorium’s clean vertical lines, stylized facade, and sweeping curves are classic late-1930s Art Deco. Inside, the building could seat around 3,500 people, making it the largest theater in West Virginia. For decades it hosted everything from graduations and Broadway tours to concerts, conventions, and the beloved annual performances of The Nutcracker. 

The story behind it is very “New Deal era” Charleston: local leaders pushed hard for a proper performance hall, voters backed a bond issue during the 1930s, and federal PWA funds helped turn the idea into a $500,000 reality. When it finally opened, an estimated 5,000 people came out for a four-hour dedication ceremony to celebrate their new cultural showpiece. 

In 1999, the Municipal Auditorium was added to the National Register of Historic Places for both its role in the city’s cultural life and its standout architecture.  More recently, though, the building has faced serious structural and electrical issues, and it was closed in 2024 for safety reasons while engineers and city officials decide what comes next.

11/24/2025

11/24/2025

The good ole days

11/23/2025

11/23/2025

If you stand on Main Street in Matewan, West Virginia, it’s hard to imagine how loud this little river town once was. Coal trains rattled the tracks, men in dusty work clothes filled the sidewalks, and company agents kept a close eye on anyone who dared talk union. Tucked in the Tug Fork valley of Mingo County, Matewan was once a busy hub for the surrounding coal camps, its storefronts serving miners and their families from daylight to dark. 

By the early 1900s, coal ruled almost everything here. The company owned the houses, the stores, and in many cases even the money in workers’ pockets, paid in scrip instead of cash. When miners began pushing for better pay, safer conditions, and the right to join the union, they weren’t just challenging their bosses …they were challenging an entire system. Tension simmered in the hills around Matewan as organizers moved in and coal operators pushed back. 

On May 19, 1920, that tension finally exploded. Baldwin–Felts detectives arrived in town to evict miners and their families from company houses. What followed on Mate Street became known as the Matewan Massacre, a gun battle between the detectives on one side and a mix of miners, townspeople, Mayor Cabell Testerman, and Police Chief Sid Hatfield on the other. When the smoke cleared, ten people were dead, including seven detectives and the mayor himself. That shootout sent shockwaves through the coalfields and helped spark the larger West Virginia Mine Wars, leading eventually toward national recognition of miners’ unions. 

For a while after, Matewan was a symbol of resistance. Sid Hatfield became a folk hero to many miners, and the town’s name was spoken far outside West Virginia as headlines followed trials, assassinations, and marches that culminated at Blair Mountain. But as the decades passed, coal declined, jobs disappeared, and families drifted away in search of work. The crowds thinned, storefronts closed, and the town settled into a quieter rhythm on the banks of the Tug Fork. 

Today, Matewan’s population is only a few hundred people, but its history is bigger than ever. The Matewan Historic District is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and visitors come to walk the same street where the gunfire rang out in 1920, tour the museums, and ride the nearby Hatfield–McCoy Trails. Heritage tourism has replaced coal as the main draw, and the town now leans into its past instead of trying to hide it. 

It’s one of those West Virginia places where the hills feel like they remember. The brick buildings, the fading signs, the quiet curve of the river…they all carry a story of miners who risked everything to stand up to power. Matewan may be small and quiet now, but it’s still a town worth fighting for, and a reminder that even the tiniest dot on the map can change American history.

11/22/2025

Colonel Ruby Bradley’s story begins on a small farm just outside Spencer, West Virginia, and stretches all the way to the battlefields of World War II and Korea, ending at Arlington National Cemetery. Born in 1907, she started out as a schoolteacher in Roane County’s one-room schoolhouses before answering a different kind of calling: she became a nurse, joined the U.S. Army Nurse Corps in 1934, and stepped onto the world stage as one of the most decorated women in American military history. 

In 1941, Bradley was serving as an Army nurse in the Philippines when the Japanese attacked after Pearl Harbor. She was taken prisoner and spent more than three years in captivity. Inside the internment camps at Camp John Hay and later Santo Tomas in Manila, she and her fellow nurses became known as the “Angels in Fatigues.” Despite starvation and brutal conditions, Bradley assisted in hundreds of surgeries and helped deliver more than a dozen babies, often saving part of her own meager rations for children and secretly smuggling in medical supplies in the folds of her now-baggy uniform. 

When U.S. troops liberated the camp in 1945, Ruby Bradley weighed under 90 pounds, but she refused to let that be the end of her service. She stayed in the Army, earned her bachelor’s degree, and when war broke out in Korea, she went right back to the front. As chief nurse of the 171st Evacuation Hospital, she helped evacuate wounded soldiers from Pyongyang in November 1950. Bradley famously refused to board the last plane out until every one of her patients was loaded; moments after she jumped aboard, the ambulance she’d been using exploded on the runway. 

Bradley went on to serve as chief nurse of the Eighth Army in Korea, supervising more than 500 Army nurses. In 1958 she became a full colonel, one of the first Army nurses to hold that permanent rank. Over her career she earned 34 decorations, including two Legion of Merit medals, two Bronze Stars, multiple campaign ribbons, and the Florence Nightingale Medal, the Red Cross’s highest international honor. 

After retiring from the Army in 1963, Ruby Bradley came home to West Virginia, working for years as a civilian nurse supervisor in Roane County and quietly caring for her community just as she had cared for soldiers and prisoners of war around the world.  She passed away in 2002 at the age of 94 and now rests at Arlington. From a rural Roane County farm to the front lines of two wars, Colonel Ruby Bradley showed what it looks like when courage, skill, and compassion all wear the same uniform.