When Ann Roach of Ironton, Ohio visited the steep mountainsides of Hinton, West Virginia, she fell in love with the majesty and peace of the hills. She and her husband built a summer cabin there in 1995.
Little did she know that her adopted countryside would be a battleground where she and her neighbors would fight for their homes and their livelihoods.
This grandmother of nine came reluctantly to the fight. At first, Ann and her neighbors embraced a plan by the New River Parkway Authority (NRPA) to rebuild their hairpin mountain road and smooth over the potholes which were big enough to hide a truck.
The Authority, established in 1985 by the State legislature, held friendly backyard meeting beginning in 1987, and promised better ambulance service, a safer road and new tourism dollars. Even so, recalls Ann, “most of the decision-making was done behind our backs.”
Two years ago Ann and her neighbors unearthed a deep, dark secret. The biggest “improvement” in the road was to be the elimination of homes, farms and businesses along a 30-mile stretch of the New River road from I-64 south to the Virginia border near Princeton.
Those homes and centuries-old farms were messing up the new ideal of a “view-shed.” Everything “as far as the eye could see” from the road was now up for grabs.
Ann wondered if the National Park Service was involved. She knew the NPS managed the New River Gorge National River for 50 miles in the Appalachians.
“The Park Service told me the road wasn’t an NPS project,” says Ann. “Then we found out the project’s new money was from the Park Service, and the NRPA answers to them.”
“Conceptual plans [for the Parkway],” writes Jonathan Childers in his Virginia Tech Master’s thesis, “included management of public and private lands by the NRPA,” which contracted with Virginia Tech to prepare a Master Plan and a Land Management System (LMS). But the NRPA, says Childers, “does not have the authority to regulate many of the mountainous slopes beyond the Parkway Corridor.” The NPS owns only about a third of the land along the proposed Parkway. The rest is in private hands.
Childers, an outdoor enthusiast who once worked with the NRPA, began to see some disturbing trends. “The character of the Parkway project has changed,” he wrote in 1999. “On its face, the current project might not be recognizable to those who framed initial goals and objectives for the Parkway years ago.”
Childers documents the new direction of the Parkway’s LMS, calling it “mandated public involvement,” including “out-right easement” acquisition of private land. The NRPA dropped this little bomb of information September 9, 1999, when hundreds of New River neighbors saw their homes, farms or businesses as pins on a map. There were no formal presentations at that meeting, writes Childers, and “no microphones or other communication devices.” Just banks of tables where residents lined up like sheep to learn the fate of their homes.
“We’d no sooner work through the line and get to one table than we’d be told we should have gone to another table,” says Ann. “Then we’d wait forever at another table and be told to go to the next.”
One 84-year-old woman entered the room, then looked around in bewilderment. On a big wall map she spotted her home---slated for removal. She clutched her heart and fell into a chair. Once home from the hospital, she vowed never to leave her residence, where she died the following August.
In Europe, farmland is strictly managed. But those farms are coddled as a precious part of the view. Not so in Hinton, West Virginia, where the 200 year-old Terreo Farm nestling in peaceful grandeur near the river is subject to condemnation if owners 85-year-old James Terreo and his wife Louella don’t forfeit their farm to a permanent easement.
Louella Terreo is a direct descendant of original settle William Richmond, who was granted a Certified Land Patent in 1797. The Richmond farm is also in the viewshed , facing condemnation.
The Richmonds once trained oxen by voice command to bring logs off the mountain, where three rental log cabins and the original log home still stand. The Richmonds call these wooded cabins “Almost Heaven in West Virginia.”
“We were assured in the newspaper that our homes were safe,” fumes Ann. “But a Memorandum of Understanding signed by four agencies says the exact opposite.” Asked to put his signature to the false story in the newspaper, the Parkway coordinator refused. “State Sen. Leonard Anderson (D-Summers) pushed for the Parkway,” says Ann. “But the Parkway would pay him for his lost business. The road would bypass Hinton and bring all tourism to Pipestem State Park where his wife contracts all the big restaurants.”
“We are fighting and fighting hard,” says Sisters of the River member Sheila Davis. “I stay on this computer morning, noon and night, and I have learned that a willing seller right won’t exist if my land is federally regulated to death!”
Sisters of the River are fighting not just for the Constitutional right to own their homes, but for the wildlife which would be destroyed in the Parkway’s new tourism model.
“Human impact has not been adverse to the aquatic life of the river,” explains Ann. “The Hellgrammite is second in the fish food chain in the New River. Crawls in droves from the river to cross the road to pupate. But the projected 709% increase in tourism traffic, she laments, would forever affect the town of Hinton. “It’s the Hellgrammite Capital of the world.”
The New River is an American Heritage River. Its federal Navigator, Ben Borda, based at Huntington, is sponsored by the Army Corps of Engineers. But he also reports to the New River Community Partners (the ones who first nominated the river) to oversee the watershed plan. And that puts the New River out of the state of West Virginia and into a tri-state watershed initiative involving Virginia and North Carolina.
Childers’ thesis says that top-down government approaches don’t work, and neither does isolated community action. But what he recommends as the third best alternative is the very partnership approach which got the New River into its present troubles.
If the state legislators and town officials had done their homework, the National Park Service’s grand plan would have been exposed before now.