The Fourth Thursday

Today’s the fourth Thursday. It’s likely I may
Be asked, now, for what are you thankful today?
And I guess, if you asked that, here’s what you’d be told.
I’m glad that I don’t have to stay in the mold.

This life where we nomad
And somehow don’t go mad
Come and go without pomp, without guilt
Though it’s plenty of fun,
It’s not easily done
‘Cause it’s not how America’s built.

Not to say we are homeless, but home we have not.
And a home is expected for really a lot.
Car registrations
And voting locations
Depositing royalty checks for creations.

There isn’t a system to do those with ease
But that is the price for the life that I please.
So I’m thankful that, even though sometimes it’s wild
We are able to live this way: undomiciled.

A River Cuts Through It

Here is an amazing story of geological history. And it began around 270 million years ago (give or take). It’s a pretty dramatic beginning too because the African plate and the North American plate collided. (Neither of the continents looked exactly as it does today.) This occurred on the eastern side of the North American plate, pushing massive volumes of rocks to the west. These rocks crunched and bent and piled and became… (any guesses?)

This rock pile became the Appalachian Mountains, version 1.0. These were big mountains. We’re talking size of the Himalayas big.

Then what happens? Erosion, same as is happening now. But this is the part I never knew before. Over millions of years, the Appalachian Mountains eroded away completely, down to the roots of the mountains. So, the Appalachian Mountains of that time would be better called the Appalachian Plains.

Those of you paying attention should be saying, “Wait a sec, there are mountains there now!” Yes. The movie is never as fun if you already know the ending. Like when I saw the movie Titanic, I already knew the giant squid was going to win. But, unlike that story, there is an interesting twist to our already known ending.

In the time of the Appalachian Plain, there was a river called the Taeys River. (Taeys rhymes with daze or maze or the phrase that pays.) The river began in what is present day North Carolina and ran northwest, which was downhill at the time. It flowed through present day Virginia, then West Virginia, and then into Ohio. It flowed as far north as what today is Columbus and then turned west. Here it ran through the middle of what is now Indiana and Illinois before turning southwest and hitting the Gulf of Mexico.

Again, if you’re paying attention, you probably think, “It must have gone through some other states before hitting the Gulf, right?” Surprisingly, no. The Gulf of Mexico stretched as far north as present-day Illinois in that time.

So yes, the Taeys River is very old, but you are justifiably asking, “Why is the Taeys River the twist of the story? And you still haven’t explained why there are mountains in this supposed plain!” Calm down, reader, I’m getting to it.

The Appalachian Plateau started to rise again, buoyed and thrust by magma from the Earth’s mantle. But the rise was very slow. Geologically slow. While this changed the courses of some rivers, not so the Taeys. The Taeys River managed to cut through the land at the same rate that the land was rising. So it isn’t that the Taeys cut down to form a canyon, but rather that the land rose on either side of it forming the canyon. Meanwhile the Taeys River stayed pretty much where it had already been. It survived the rise of the Appalachian Mountains 2.0.

However, while the river survived the rise of the mountains, later, the downstream part of the river wasn’t so lucky. Though it wasn’t mountains that wiped it out, rather glaciers. Glaciers came down through Ohio and Indiana and Illinois. They pushed earth and rock and filled in the channel that the Taeys River took through those states. In fact, the earth pushed by the glaciers dammed the Taeys River. A huge lake with several fingers of water was formed called Lake Bright along the present day border of West Virginia and Ohio.

Eventually Lake Bright got too full and had to go somewhere. A new outlet formed that tumbled down the present-day path of the Ohio River. From then on, the downstream part of the Taeys was gone.

That wasn’t the last change to the Taeys. When a new river out of the Appalachian Mountains formed, the Gauley River of West Virginia, it met the Taeys and changed the course of the Taeys downstream of their confluence. That new path is the present-day Kanawha River which runs through Charleston and eventually to the Ohio River. Interesting note: Kanawha is pronounced K'naw.

Still, the upriver part of the Taeys, the part that runs from North Carolina to the junction with the Gauley River in West Virginia, that part is still in its same bed. It is the oldest river in North America and one of the oldest in the world. Some geologists believe it may be the second oldest river in the world, second only to the Nile River of Africa. (Presumably, everyone knew where the Nile River was, but clarity is a virtue.)

This river is the only river that cuts across the Appalachians. It begins east of the mountains, but cuts through them and drains out to the west of the mountains. Not many rivers in the world do that!

One final note for the readers, who, as I mentioned previously, are paying attention. I would like to think that is many of you, but let’s be realistic. Still for those intrepid few, if you go looking for the Taeys River on a map or a globe or most likely the internet, you won’t find it. Because that isn’t its modern name.

And here is the irony: The river that run in this ancient bed, the oldest in the continent, the one that survived the rise of mountains, it’s called the New River. That brings a different meaning to the idiom “everything old is new again.”

The New River Gorge

 

We got to experience that amazing canyon that formed as the Appalachian rose around the river while we were in West Virginia. It is called the New River Gorge, and it is a national park. If you are ever in the area, you should check it out and know you are standing in a place not only of history, but prehistory. Really even pre what we usually call prehistoric. Though not so pre-prehistory that its primordial. Maybe just ordial. For those who are paying attention.

Authentic Chili Diving

When I was in college, my roommates and I made a distinction we called swimming vs. diving. It will likely come as no surprise that this definition came about while the Summer Olympics were going on. None of us were likely to achieve our dreams of standing on the awards platform, so we found tangential ways to be a part of the events.

The distinction between swimming and diving is this: In swimming events, meaning the races where you must do the breaststroke or backstroke for so many meters, there can be little argument about who wins the event. The person who swims the required distance in the minimum amount of time is the gold medalist. This is as opposed to diving which requires judges to give scores and hold up their scorecards. These scores are summed and the person with the highest total wins.

But the number of points given by two different judges who just watched the same dive may not agree. There is an element of subjectivity here. In fact, the entire event is subjective. Why is a small splash better than a huge splash that wets the first three rows. (This is transparently biased against breaching whales trying to enter the Olympics.) What determines if an tuck is more difficult than a curl (or whatever the terms in diving are.)

At some point, a group of self-proclaimed diving gurus decided upon the rules, what was good, what was bad, what was ugly. If a different group of gurus had decided upon the rules, the event might look very different. Well, the scoring would look different. The fundamentals of leaving a board and going downward into water would be the same. We can't overcome gravity. Even if the same group had decided upon the rules after having a very unpleasant meal, the event could look very different. This means the rules in diving are not only subjective, but arbitrary, as opposed to swimming where fastest is fastest and slowest is slowest and never the twain shall meet, because if they met, slowest would be going as fast as fastest and wouldn't be slowest, would it?

This post is, at its core, about several authentic experiences I had recently. But I want to make clear one point: Authenticity is diving. It is like deliciousness. It is possible for two people to eat the same thing and for one to say, "That's yummy," while the other believes the victuals have strayed far from delicious, tasty, or even palatable. 

Case in point: I made chili today. I would rate my chili's deliciousness at about a 5.5, but my wife would likely give it a 2 or less. I used too many jalapeños for her liking. There's an irony there. The very ingredient which, arguably, makes the chili authentic (namely, the chilis) is what detracts, in my wife's mind, from its deliciousness. So deliciousness is clearly diving. It is subjective, arbitrary.

I claim authenticity is similarly diving. So when I say, as I am about to say, that I had authentic experiences, you may disagree. It's just my arbitrary vision of what is authentic to various locales or foods or experiences.

Even above, when I said chili peppers are what determine the authenticity of chili (which does seem to follow from the name), that's still very diving of me. Just look at the insistence of Texans that real chili has no beans and the rest of the country's acceptance that beans are normal in chili. You can see that authentic chili has no universally agreed upon set of ingredients. (Or go to Iowa and get chili with a cinnamon bun, or go to Wisconsin where it is served over spaghetti. There's a lot of region flexibility to chili.)

I think the point is made. Let's move on to the experiences, shall we?

In Schenectady, NY, which is very fun to spell, Alrica and I had lunch one day at a place called First Prize Mike's. Alrica got a burger, I got a hot dog and a shake. We both had onion rings. The food was fine, not incredible, not bad, but fine. But the experience was so New York.

First Prize Mike's is laid out like a diner. It is long and narrow with a big bar around the open kitchen and then there are booths on the wall opposite the open kitchen. But it was the people who made it such an experience. The employees: cooks and wait staff, constantly razzed one another, griping that each was making everyone else's job harder to do. The waitress called her patron's "honey" and treated them like she'd known them all her life. She probably had known some of the regulars for a long time. But Alrica and I were first-timers, and we got that treatment too. It took forever to get our food, my chocolate shake, when it arrived, was strawberry, and when I tried to clean up my own table, I got scolded for taking away my waitress's job. It was fantastic, fast-talking, and friendly in that authentic matter-of-fact New York style. Or at least what I consider authentic for New York. It felt authentic to me.

When we traveled from Schenectady, NY to Cambridge, MA, we took a scenic route. This led us through country roads in Vermont. It so happened that we passed by a huge outdoor farmers' market and so we stopped. This market was so Vermont (a diving statement if ever there was one.)

What do I mean? The port-a-potties were sawdust compost toilets. If you bought food to eat on site, the utensils were all wooden or cardboard so they could be recycled. (There were multiple kinds of recycling at the recycling station, so you had to figure out which bin your utensils went into.) One vendor made a point to tell me that everything sold at the market was made or grown by the vendors selling at the market. And I found my fashion peeps, or at least I could camouflage as a Vermonter.

I like to wear t-shirts. I find them comfortable. But I do make concessions to the temperature. And one of those concessions is that when it is nippy, I put on a flannel shirt over my t-shirt. Usually I leave it unbuttoned in the front. For some reason I don't entirely know, the vast majority of flannel shirts are plaid. Mine are no exception to that rule. (In fact, now that we live out of a car and backpacks, I only have one flannel shirt. And it is plaid.) So, point being, I was wearing my plaid flannel shirt over my t-shirt.

Proof of my flannel shirt (and my ugly hat (and the Mohawk River))

 

As I looked around, I was astonished to see how many of the men were wearing plaid flannel shirts. (They did not have them open in front.) But by buttoning up my plaid flannel shirt, hiding the t-shirt beneath, I became one of the crowd, indistinguishable from lifelong Vermonters (or at least I couldn't distinguish between them and me, except I have the secret knowledge that I am not now nor have I ever been a Vermonter.) It's possible that the Vermonters could tell I wasn't one of them, but if so, I don't know what gave it away. I was certainly wearing the uniform.

You could argue this is more about stereotyping than a quest for authenticity. You might be right, but they were all dressed in plaid flannel. You can't take that away from me. That's swimming.

Alrica talked to a sugarmaker (a person who makes maple syrup, but isn't called a syrupmaker) about what causes the different grades (colors): golden, amber, dark, and very dark. Spoiler: It's bacteria. We got hot mozzarella (on a compostable wooden fork, of course) which is an entirely different experience from not hot (though not exactly cold) mozzarella, or so we were told by the cheesemaker (a person who makes cheese, though that word was pretty self-explanatory.)

Authentic Vermont, right? Unless you have a different definition of Vermontiness (or maybe Vermonticity,) which is totally diving of you.

In Charleston, West Virginia we visited a fast-food restaurant called Tudor's Biscuit World. (Sadly, people who make biscuits are not called biscuitmakers. They are called bakers. But it rhymes.) The biscuits were great. They are served with a variety of things inside, mainly products of pork, cheese, and potato. Definitely delicious (diving) and arguably authentic (diving).

Regardless of whether or not you agree with my various diving arguments, we all must concur that I need a deep dive into the leftover chili. I'm not likely to get much help in eating it. That's okay, because I think its reasonably good (diving), but not really good enough for a chili cook-off (which is completely a diving event.) Though maybe I could train for the Leftover Chili Eating Olympics. Then, just like all those years ago in college, I can dream about being an Olympian.

Spy vs. I

We wandered a museum devoted to the spy.
Those spies, you may not see ‘em, adrenaline is high.
Such craft to learn, and assets turn, and drones to glide and fly.
Would I become a spy, they asked. Now I’m asking, “Why?”

Are you a wandering ranger? Yes
Are you seduced by danger? No
Do you like solving puzzles? Yes
Do you like guns and muzzles? No
Are you good with disguises? No
Do you watch for surprises? No
A fan of obfuscation? No
Or one who’d serve his nation? Now, hold on a minute.

Is what I do any less important to the nation than what a spy does? I’m not sure that it is. But for comparison’s sake, let’s say we are talking about a really good spy, one who obtains critical intelligence that saves many lives. We won’t talk about the ones who turn on the country or who cause civil unrest in a foreign land that comes back to haunt us twenty years later.

What do I do in comparison? I help people to learn mathematical techniques that will propel them through college. And I would like to think maybe it gives them vital skills that will prove useful in their lives. This isn’t to say I think they will all be differentiating functions or writing proofs by contradiction. But I hope they will be thinking not only about what things are like now, but how they can change (and how we can predict that change.) I hope that when presented with some supposed “fact” that they can think critically, be a skeptic, and analyze it to determine if it is true or not.

It is like the parable of the frog in the pot of water. The story says if you drop a frog in a pot of boiling water, the frog will jump out immediately. But if you put the frog in a pot of room temperature water and then heat it up to boiling, the frog will stay there until it’s boiled.

This is a story. Remember the analyzing-something-to-determine-if-it-might-be-true-or-not? Well, this doesn’t ring particularly true to me. The slowly heating water will eventually start to hurt and the frog will notice that and jump away. That’s how it seems to me.

And then I did a bit of research. I am not the first to ask this question. Guess what, I was right. Frogs thrown into boiling water may jump out, but they will be badly hurt by the time they can do so. Frogs in room temperature water that is being heated will jump out before it gets hot enough to hurt them.

You might wonder, what do frogs have to do with spies?

The spy is the hero of the moment. At that one moment, Spy gets crucial information and saves lives. Or if Spy is of the James Bond type, Spy defeats Villain and saves lives. We think that is impressive, because we just judge the spy in that moment. We ignore the months of slogging or undercover work. We ignore all the times the spy lied or hurt people who got in the way. That moment is hitting the boiling water and we frogs jump out (meaning we give our congratulations to the spy.)

But the educator is the long-slogging hero. There’s not one moment that defines it. But through the many lessons, the years of influencing students, the knowledge that has been obtained, bit by bit, Educator changes our nation, hopefully for the better. Sometimes, like Spy, for the worse.

Almost everyone can remember that teacher who touched their life and gave them a new idea, a new confidence, a new outlook. Almost everyone can remember that teacher who put them down, made them doubt themselves, or turned them off a subject. (I’m looking at you, math.)

But this is the slowly heating pot. Since it isn’t one moment of huzzah, we, as a society, don’t see it, we don’t celebrate it.

In 2001, someone sent some anthrax through the mail. Four such letters were sent. Four out of over 100 billion letters that are sent in a year. I need not tell you, that is a tiny, tiny percentage. (Maybe I do need tell you, if you were turned off from math at a young age.) Yes, this was terrible to imagine what could happen. And because it was short term terrible, we spent billions of dollars refurbishing the postal distribution center. I’m sure that saved some lives, a few lives.

Climate change is happening, slowly, creeping along. And it is killing people all over the world. It is changing economics in region after region. It is causing droughts and floods and gigantic hurricanes. And yet, we do little about it. In some state governments, we have done more to ban a state employee acknowledging the existence of climate change than we have done to help people affected by it.

Why is that? Because anthrax is the boiling water and climate change is the slowly heating pot.

This isn’t about the museum. If you are ever in Washington, D.C., you should go to the Spy Museum. It is amazing, interesting, and there are so many stories you either only half knew or never heard of that will make you gape.

But don’t forget those slowing heating pot professions that make your life as good as it is: road work crews, trash collectors, water treatment plant operators, electrical line maintenance workers, researchers, engineers, oh, and teachers.

So ask me, “would I be a spy?” I’ll say no, through and through.
But I would like to ask the spy, “Would you do what I do?”

Howe vs. Yankovic

Long ago, in this very blog, I posted about something I discovered which I called Ordinal Awareness Fallacy. It is when you assume that things happened in the same order that you knew about them, but they didn’t.

That particular post was when I first encountered a pomelo, a citrus fruit somewhat like an orange. I assumed that a pomelo was hybridized from an orange and some other fruit. But when I did some research, I found out I was exactly wrong. The pomelo came first. In fact, the orange is hybridized from a pomelo and a mandarin.

But I had known about oranges my whole life and only recently encountered the pomelo. And that’s where the fallacy came in. Just because I knew about one of them first doesn’t mean it existed first.

I recognize that I may not be the first person who ever made note of this phenomenon. Maybe it has been written about before, but I didn’t know about it before I discovered it. So I could have Ordinal Awareness Fallacy about Ordinal Awareness Fallacy.

But I also had Ordinal Awareness Fallacy about something else. Here at the Harpers Ferry National Historic Park, we went to the John Brown Museum. It is about John Brown, his life before the raid on the U.S. Armory, the raid itself, and the aftermath of the raid including his death. In one of the videos at the museum, there was a chorus singing “John Brown’s Body.” It goes like this:
John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the ground.
John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the ground.
John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the ground.
His soul is marching on.

You may have guessed, it is to the same tune as The Battle Hymn of the Republic. So I assumed that someone wrote new lyrics to the existing Battle Hymn of the Republic, but about John Brown. I was wrong on both counts.

John Brown's Fort - where he made his last stand

 

The Ordinal Awareness Fallacy is that John Brown’s Body existed before The Battle Hymn of the Republic. However, it is also a set of new lyrics to an older song called Say Brothers, Will You Meet Us?

But I was also wrong that the song was about John Brown, or I was sort of wrong. The origin of the song is way more interesting.

The lyrics were written, originally, by Union soldiers in the Massachusetts Volunteer Militia. They had a sergeant named John Brown. What amused them so much was that John Brown the abolitionist was a larger-than-life figure, depicted as gigantic, with powerful arms, an unwieldy beard, and blazing eyes of judgment. Whereas Sergeant John Brown was small, quiet, and even-tempered. It was this juxtaposition that so amused the soldiers of the Massachusetts Volunteer Militia, and that led them to write the lyrics. The body a-mouldering in the ground was John Brown the abolitionist. The soul that was marching on was the mild-mannered sergeant.

The song caught on with other Union regiments, and they wrote more lyrics, bawdier lyrics, bloodier lyrics. Eventually it was being sung by soldiers who had no idea it was about Sergeant John Brown. They thought it was only about the abolitionist. And it became very popular among Union troops.

Writing new lyrics to existing songs, that’s something I enjoy. I am a big fan of Weird Al Yankovic, Allan Sherman, and Spike Jones. These are just a few of the artists who have engaged in the practice of song parodies. The idea goes back millennia. In fact, the word parody comes from the ancient Greek para (beside or altered) and ode (song). Parody songs are funny. Even in Ancient Greece where the word parodia referred to burlesque songs. (So maybe they weren’t all funny, maybe they were dirty. But that was probably funny.)

But how did this bawdy song become The Battle Hymn of the Republic? Julia Ward Howe was a published poet of some repute at the time of the Civil War. She was in Washington with some other dignitaries and was invited to see a marching and inspection of Union troops. And while the soldiers were marching, some of them were singing John Brown’s Body.

One of Howe’s colleagues, a reverend, suggested that she write “better lyrics”, probably meaning cleaner ones. And she did, the very next morning. Howe said that she woke up in the middle of the night with words in her head, hastily jotted them down, and then in the morning discovered she had written The Battle Hymn of the Republic. That’s an amazing story that must have involved a lot of midnight jotting, because the full song has five verses (plus lots of glory, glory hallelujahs.)

The song was soon published and became a huge hit among Union supporters. It also became wildly unpopular in the south, because the song placed God on the side of the Union. It reframed the war as a war for what was capital R Right and capital G Good. For example, in verse five there is a line that reads “As he died to make men holy, let us die to make them free.” (The “he” in that sentence is Christ.)

So here is the question I pose to you. What do you call this, writing lyrics to an existing song but not to make it funnier? Rather to make it more serious? It’s not parody, right? Maybe intrody? Serody? Dramody? (I suppose that’s too close to dramedy, which is already a thing.)

I don’t know. But it is not the same fine art of the Honorable Yankovic and Squire Sherman. It is another fine art of its own.

And I wonder if I am wrong about assuming that parody songs came first and serody songs came second? I am drowning in my own fallacy. Or someone else’s.

Happy Accidents

You know how Bob Ross, while painting, would talk about happy little accidents? There were no errors, because you could make the error into something that seemed intentional.

We experienced our own happy little accident, though it wasn’t any sort of error. Alrica and I are staying in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia at the moment. And here in Harpers Ferry is the Harpers Ferry National Historic Park. Naturally, we wanted to visit that while we here and we waited until the weather was going to be very nice to do so.

So it turns out we first went to the park on September 14. This, so it happens, was a happy little accident. The Harpers Ferry National Historic Park commemorates many things. Certainly high among them is John Brown’s Raid on the U.S. Armory that was once here. But it also marks various battles from the Civil War in which possession of Harpers Ferry changed hands.

You see, Harpers Ferry is a very strategically important point. The Shenandoah River and Potomac River meet here and then flow downstream, as the Potomac, through the Blue Ridge Mountains. This pass cut by the Potomac River is the only easy way through the Blue Ridge Range. So it became an important transportation center, basically a bottleneck.

Yes, the view is from a cemetery, but it is a view of the
Potomac cutting through the Blue Ridge Mountains

 

The B&O Railroad (for you Monopoly fans) connects Baltimore with the Ohio River. (Hence its name, Baltimore and Ohio Railroad.) And how does it get through the mountains? Right through the pass, following the Potomac River and passing through Harpers Ferry. Also, the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal (called the C&O Canal) followed the Potomac River. And the Winchester and Potomac Railroad ran along the Shenandoah River until it met the Potomac River in Harpers Ferry.

The Rivers and States

All this transportation made Harpers Ferry a big prize. To control your supply lines, it's nice to control the trains and canals. Add to that the fact that Harpers Ferry is right at the border between the Union (West Virginia and Maryland) and the Confederacy (Virginia) and this area saw more different battles than most anywhere in America. It is estimated that Harpers Ferry changed hands eight times during the Civil War.

The biggest of these battles took place when General Robert E. Lee invaded the north. He was on a winning streak in battles in Virginia and decided to take the war into the Union’s lands. This is going to lead to the Battle of Antietam (as the Union soldiers call it) or the Battle of Sharpsburg (as the Confederate soldiers call it). But before that occurred, Lee wanted to capture Harpers Ferry from the Union garrison that was stationed there.

Here comes the happy accident: That battle took place September 13 through 15, 1862. So we happened to go to the national historic park during the anniversary of that fight. Because of that, we were treated to special ranger programs about the battle.

We went up to Bolivar Heights where the Union troops were stationed. Interesting note: Bolivar Heights is in a town called Bolivar which borders Harpers Ferry. Before the town incorporated, it was usually referred to as Mudfort. But the people didn’t want that to be their city name. So they asked the state of Virginia (it was still Virginia at that time) to incorporate as the town of Washington. But the State of Virginia had so many places already named Washington that they said, “Not gonna happen.” The people had to come up with another name.

This was in 1825, when Simón Bolivar was in the news, liberating South American colonies from Spanish rule. So they asked to incorporate as Bolivar. Except newspapers don’t give pronunciation guides. So the local name of the place is pronounced Bolliver, rhymes with Oliver.

On Bolivar Heights we met Ranger George. He hiked us down the heights to the skirmish line. He hiked us back up. He told us about stages of the battle, how Jackson (confederates) outflanked Miles (union), about the different regiments there, about the Union surrender, and then about the hard march of the confederate soldiers to Sharpsburg, Maryland. After their decisive victory in Harpers Ferry these exhausted men would have a pretty rough defeat two days later.

It was fabulous. There were plenty of signs to tell you about the battle. But the ranger gave lots of extra information, answered questions, described it and how the land looked then, and made the story come alive in a way that the signs couldn’t have.

So just like Bob Ross assured us, sometimes accidents work themselves into something beautiful.

A Tale of Two States

When I first got to NYU, I was waiting in line to get my NYU ID Card. Also in line with me were a young man and a young woman chatting about where they were born. And I heard the young man say, “I was born in West Virginia or East Virginia. Whichever one of those is a state.”

I’m thinking, “You don’t know what state you were born in? You are an incoming freshman at a university, meaning you presumably made it through high school, and you don’t know whether or not the U.S. has a state called West Virginia or East Virginia?” I sometimes wonder what happened to that young man, if he made it through college, if he knows his address or if he lists it as being in North Connecticut or Old Hampshire or Rhode Isthmus.

I happen to know which of those two is a state. In fact, I happen to be in West Virginia right now. Today, Alrica and I visited Charles Town, WV (not to be confused with Charleston, WV. Unlike West Virginia and East Virginia, both of those exist.) Charles Town was founded by Charles Washington, younger brother of George Washington. And one of the sites we saw in Charles Town was the Jefferson County Courthouse.

The Jefferson County Courthouse

 

This courthouse has an interesting claim to fame. It is the only county courthouse in America which has been the site of two different treason trials against two different states. How is this possible?

Before the Revolutionary War, the colony of Virginia included both present day Virginia and present day West Virginia. When the Constitution was ratified, this entire area became the state of Virginia. At some point after this, the counties of Virginia in the Shenandoah River Valley and further west wanted to form their own state, to be separate from Virginia. They didn’t feel that Richmond represented their interests. But this was a non-starter. The U.S.Constitution didn’t allow new states to be formed from old states unless the old state said, sure, you can leave. And naturally Virginia wasn’t keen to let this northwest part go.

Enter John Brown. Brown was an avid abolitionist. He believed slavery was an offense against God. On the other hand, he was okay with murder if the people he were murdering were slavers or pro-slavery. Brown came to Harpers Ferry, Virginia with a plan. He gathered men together to complete his plan. And then one October night in 1859, he and his 21 men attacked the U.S. Armory in Harpers Ferry.

They captured the Armory, killed a couple people, freed slaves, and then abducted Armory employees when they arrived to work the next day. The townspeople didn’t take too kindly to this. They began firing on Brown and his raiders inside the Armory. Deaths ensue, but the townspeople managed to oust Brown from the main armory. He and some of his remaining raiders took refuge in an engine house.

The next day, a party of U.S. Marines arrived in Harpers Ferry. They raided the engine house. One marine was killed, but they prevailed. Brown was terribly wounded, but alive. And interestingly, who led that party of marines? General Robert E. Lee.

This leads to the first treason trial at the Jefferson County Courthouse. John Brown and his raiders were convicted of treason against Virginia and they were hanged. And yet, many Americans felt that Brown was right (not necessarily to kill people, but to rebel against a government that allows slavery.)

Of course you know what happens just a few years later: The Civil War. But this has an important implication for the people in the northwest counties of Virginia.

In 1861, Virginia held a Secession Convention and decided to secede from the Union. This was overwhelmingly popular in Virginia as a whole, but not as popular in the northwest part of the state. Lawmakers there held a convention in Wheeling. They stated that the Virginia Declaration of Rights said that any substantial change in the government of the state had to be approved by the people, not just the legislature. This was certainly a substantial change. So the Wheeling Convention said that the lawmakers of Virginia had broken Virginia Law by seceding without making sure it was the will of the people. So the people in Wheeling established the “Restored Government of Virginia”. They elected their own governor and other officers.

Now there were two different governments claiming to represent Virginia, one in Richmond which had seceded and one in Wheeling which said, “We do not secede!” The federal government chose to recognize the “Restored Government”. And one of the first acts of this restored government was to grant permission for the northwest counties to form their own state separate from Virginia.

Originally this new state was going to be named Kanawha, named for the Kanawha River. But there was already a county named Kanawha County. Many lawmakers were worried there would be confusion if there was a county in a state with the same name as the state. Besides, most people in this new state considered themselves Virginians by birth. So the name West Virginia was chosen instead. It became the first of two states to be admitted to the United States during the Civil War. (I bet my friends in Reno know what the other one was.)

What about the other treason trial? In 1921, a group of coal miners in West Virginia wanted to unionize. The coal mine owners didn’t want to allow them to do so. The owners hired strikebreakers and were also backed by law enforcement. The miners armed themselves and confronted the strikebreakers. The ensuing melee is called the Battle of Blair Mountain.

The Battle of Blair Mountain is the largest labor uprising in the history of the United States. It is also the largest armed uprising that has occurred in America since the Civil War. The miners had numbers, but the strikebreakers had better arms. Eventually the miners lost, but many people were killed in the process.

Though the fighting had occurred in southwestern West Virginia, the leaders of the labor movement were put on trial in northeastern West Virginia. Guess where? The Jefferson County Courthouse. It was another trial for treason, but this time it was treason against West Virginia. One of the miners’ leaders, Bill Blizzard was acquitted of the charge of treason. He was tried first as the state thought it had the best chance of convicting him.

In the end, one miner, Walter Allen, was convicted of treason and three other men were convicted of second-degree murder.

It’s an interesting distinction for a courthouse that didn’t move but still changed states. And unlike the young man at NYU, it knows which state it was born in and which state it is in now.