TRJF's 4,000-Mile Road Trip!!!

[TheRealJoeFish]

Day 2: Charleston, West Virginia (Part 1: History and State Capitol)

Day two of my trip was a 200-mile drive southwest from Pittsburgh to Charleston, the Capitol of West Virginia. West Virginia is a very rural state: although its population is 1.9 million, Charleston is its largest city at only 50,400 (that would be the 11th-largest city in my home state of Pennsylvania), and among the fifty states only Vermont's largest city is smaller. West Virginia is known as "the only state born of the civil war": while Virginia seceded, the northwestern portion of the state was more aligned with the Union (and, importantly, of course, was secured by Union soldiers for all but 6 weeks of the war). Lincoln declared it a separate state by presidential decree in 1863.

The town of Charleston is located on the Kanawha River, and was actually pretty nice!

Here are some pictures of the State Capitol and the historical monuments on the grounds:

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The Capitol in all its glory. One of the nicest I've seen. It was built in 1931, as the previous Capitol building burned down. This is actually the back of the building.

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A closer view of the statue of Lincoln on the steps.

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The front of the Capitol. There is a reproduction of the Liberty Bell in the foreground (big deal, my state's got the real one ).

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Statue of Booker T. Washington near the Capitol. He lived in WV for a period of his childhood. Washington may have done more for the community of newly-liberated slaves freed during the civil war than anyone else.

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A statue commemorating the coal miners of WV and the coal mining industry. Leaving aside the politically charged state of the coal industry today, there was a very long period of time during which West Virginia, even more than the state's bordering it, was essentially the battery that powered the nation's industrial progress.

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The interior of the war memorial on the Capitol grounds. This is the WWII wall; there were walls for WWI, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War. This list (which extends out of the frame on both sides) is that of all West Virginia residents who were killed in action during WWII. By my calculation of 20 panels, 72 lines in each panel, and 5 or 6 names on each line, that's just under 8,000 names.

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Just across the Kanawha River from the Capitol is the (quite pretty, I must say) University of Charleston (not to be confused with the College of Charleston; that's in Charleston, South Carolina). It's a small school (about 1000 students) but looked rather neat from across the river. The picture doesn't do it justice; it looked a lot less... industrial in person.

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Pictures from Downtown are coming next!