Some counties sit low and let the water come to them.
Pocahontas County is not one of those.
This is the high ground. The roof of the whole state. Mean elevation better than 3,200 feet, and up on Cheat Mountain a spot called Thorny Flat tops out close to 4,848. Up here the rain doesn't arrive. It leaves. Eight rivers are born in this one county — the Greenbrier, the Elk, the Gauley, the Cherry, the Cranberry, the Williams, the Tygart Valley, and Shavers Fork of the Cheat. They call it the Birthplace of Rivers, and for once a tourism slogan is telling the truth. Stand on the right ridge and the trickle at your boot is making up its mind whether to run for the Gulf of Mexico or the Chesapeake Bay. That's a lot of weight on a little water.
People showed up here in 1749. Two of them, anyway. Jacob Marlin and Stephen Sewell, the first European settlers in this stretch of the mountains. They built a cabin where Marlin Run meets Knapp's Creek. Then they fell out. Over religion, the story goes. Couldn't agree on it, couldn't share four walls because of it. So Sewell moved out.
Into a hollow sycamore tree.
Wintered there. Two grown men, one cabin, one tree, and a church argument neither would let go of. The county seat that grew up on that ground got named Marlinton, after the fellow who kept the roof over his head. History always remembers the one who stayed inside. But I'd buy the tree man a cup of coffee.
The county got its name and its lines in 1821, carved out of Bath, Randolph, and Pendleton. When the war came, Pocahontas didn't hedge. It voted to leave the Union 360 to 13 and sent close to 700 men to fight for the South. Then West Virginia got born around it. A Union state. Nobody up here was asked. The last real battle in the new state happened at Droop Mountain in November 1863, and the Union won it. The men who'd backed Richmond couldn't vote for years after. You can walk that battlefield today. It's quiet now. Most things up here are.
The railroad took its sweet time. The mountains saw to that. Laying track over this country was slow, costly, miserable work, and it didn't start in earnest until 1899. Once it came, the timber went out fast. West Virginia Pulp & Paper built a mill at Cass and a whole company town to feed it, and the geared Shay engines clawed up grades that'd scare a billy goat. The big trees are gone now. The trains aren't. They still run at Cass, hauling tourists up Bald Knob behind the same kind of engine that once hauled the logs. A second life. Better than most things get.
Up in the corner of the county sits the strangest thing in it. Green Bank. The Robert C. Byrd telescope stands there like a white catcher's mitt the size of a football field, tilted at the sky, listening. The land around it is a National Radio Quiet Zone. Your cell phone won't work. Your microwave's a suspect. They will track down your bad spark plug if it muddies the signal. The one place in America where you legally cannot get a bar of service — and they did it on purpose, so a machine could hear a whisper from the far side of the universe. A holler with no reception, straining to hear the stars. I can't think of a truer picture of this place.
The most famous person born in Pocahontas County never really lived here. Pearl Comfort Sydenstricker came into the world at Hillsboro in 1892 and got shipped to China as a baby with her missionary parents. Grew up speaking Chinese before English. But she came back to that house. As Pearl S. Buck she wrote "The Good Earth," won the Pulitzer for it in 1932, and in 1938 became the first American woman to take the Nobel Prize in Literature. The girl from Hillsboro. The farmhouse where she was born is a museum now, out on Route 219, and they teach quilting in it. A Nobel laureate's birthplace, full of quilts. That's about right for here.
The music came out of these hills without a record deal. The Hammons family — fiddlers, banjo pickers, and ballad singers who drifted down out of Kentucky before the war and settled along the Williams River — kept tunes alive that the rest of the country had forgotten it ever had. Edden Hammons, born back in the 1870s, was the fiddler people traveled to hear. A WVU folklorist finally got him on record in 1947, better than fifty tunes. In the 1970s the Library of Congress set the whole family's music down for good. In 2020, nine Hammonses went into the West Virginia Music Hall of Fame at one time. They weren't chasing fame. They were just the best at something nobody outside the mountains knew was even happening.
And then there's the clown. Patch Adams — the doctor Robin Williams played in the movie, red nose and all — put down stakes in Hillsboro and started his Gesundheit! Institute, a long-promised free hospital meant to treat folks for nothing and laugh while it did. He's been raising money toward it since 1980. Some locals swear by him. Some call it a long con. Both can be true at once. That's a small place for you. Room enough for a saint and a question mark in the same man.
When you get hungry in Marlinton, go find Mim's Kitchen. It sits in an old country church, and the woman it's named for does the cooking, works the buffet line, and rings you up herself. Homemade, all of it. Salisbury steak, green beans, mac and cheese, and a cheesecake that'll make a table go quiet. Four entrees on a good day. Big plates. And when the food runs out, the doors close. No reservations, no pretense. You eat what Mim made, or you come back tomorrow.
There are fewer people here every census. Seventy-eight hundred and change at the last count, down from better than eight thousand the time before. The young ones leave the way the water does. Downhill, toward someplace bigger, gone before you've finished waving.
But the rivers keep getting born up here. Eight of them. Every spring. Whether anybody stays to watch or not.