Tag: Town

February 16, 2022 / Appalachia

My friend Ben and I were excited to explore West Virginia, aiming to visit locations featured in the Fallout 76 video game. Despite Ben’s tight schedule, we hoped to see key sites like the New River Gorge, Seneca Rocks, Mollohan Mill, and Dolly Sods. However, the extensive driving distances and winding mountain roads required us to condense our plans.

March 25, 2021 / Appalachia
June 7, 2016 / Explorations

Once a strategically important city at the juncture of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, Cairo, Illinois, is in terminal decline after decades of racial turbulence.

May 4, 2015 / Explorations

Western Pennsylvania is the industrial heart of the Rust Belt, as once-mighty steel mills, coke plants, and machine shops scattered alongside railroads, rivers, and highways have downsized and closed. A globalized economy and increased automation led to many jobs overseas; what remained was a shell, unable to be self-sustaining without government intervention.

October 2, 2014 / Explorations

Ghost towns along the New River in West Virginia are aplenty but what makes these three unique is that they lay within the New River Gorge National River. Prior to the creation of the national park in the late 1970s, much of the land was used for the production of coal and coke. Small, company-owned towns were developed for the miners and their families, and when those mines closed out—so did the communities.

May 19, 2014 / Explorations
January 24, 2014 / Explorations
June 11, 2013 / Explorations
December 21, 2011 / Explorations

Deerton, Michigan is an unincorporated community in Alger County that was founded in 1882 when the Detroit, Mackinac & Marquette Railroad constructed a station for a lumbering camp. A post office opened in 1922, and in 1926, a small school was constructed at the junction of Deerton-Onota Road. Today, not much is left in the community – most of the residences are abandoned, although the school still operates.

April 8, 2011 / Explorations

The coalfields of southern West Virginia, once teeming with life and industry, now stand as somber reminders of a bygone era. My recent journey through McDowell County, deep within the heart of the state’s coal country, unveiled a landscape etched with the remnants of a once-thriving mining empire, now grappling with the harsh realities of economic decline and depopulation.