Why Dont Virginia and West Virginia Unite Again

Why Virginia Split Into "East" and W Virginia (But With Only Three Shenandoah Valley Counties, and Without Southwest Virginia)

Virginia and Tennessee railroad, built before the Civil War, linked eastern and southwestern Virginia
Source: Library of Congress, Map showing the Fredericksburg & Gordonsville Rail Road of Virginia

Political conflicts among Tidewater, the Piedmont, Northern Virginia, and however many regions y'all wish to identify are a long part of the state'due south history. These differences led to a formal carve up and the creation of a new state, West Virginia, in 1863.

In the first inauguration spoken communication of a West Virginia Governor, Arthur Boreman made clear why splitting from Virginia was justified:¹

West Virginia should long since have had a separate State beingness. The East has always looked upon that portion of the State w of the mountains, as a sort of outside appendage - a territory in a state of pupilage. The unfairness and inequality of legislation is manifest on every page of the statute book; they had an unjust bulk in the Legislature by the original Constitution of the State, and have clung to information technology with the utmost tenacity ever since; they accept collected heavy taxes from u.s.a., and have spent large sums in the structure of railroads and canals in the East, but have withheld appropriations from the West; they take refused to make any of the modern improvements by which merchandise and travel could be carried on from the one section to the other, thus treating us as strangers; our people could non get to the Capital of their State past any of the usual modes of traveling, without going through the State of Maryland and the District of Columbia.

The East and the West have always been two peoples. There has been little intercourse between them, either social or commercial. Our people seldom visit the E for pleasure. The farmers practice non take their stock, grain, wool and other agricultural products there to sell; the merchants practise non get there to sell or purchase; the manufacturers take no marketplace there; indeed, we have had nothing to exercise with the Eastern people, except that our Senators and Delegates accept gone to Richmond to sit down in the Legislature and our Sheriffs have gone in that location to pay in the revenue as an annual tribute from this department of the State for the inequality and unfairness with which we take always been treated by them.

Our markets, our trade and our travel are North and West of Virginia, through natural channels, or those constructed through the enterprise of our own people, or such ways as they could procure. The mountains arbitrate between united states, the rivers rise in the mountains and run towards the Northwest; and, as if to make the separation more complete, Eastern Virginia adopted the fatal doctrine of secession, while the West spurned and rejected it as false and unsafe in the extreme.

Thus nature, our commerce, travel, habits, associations, and interests, all - all say that Due west Virginia should be severed from the Eastward. And now, to-24-hour interval afterward many long and weary years of insult and injustice, culminating on the part of the Due east, in an attempt to destroy the Regime, we have the proud satisfaction of proclaiming to those around united states that we are a divide Country in the Union.

Some boundaries proposed for West Virginia during the Ceremonious War extended much farther to the east. The new state could take included all Virginia counties west of the Blueish Ridge, and fifty-fifty all the counties forth the Potomac River downstream to the Occoquan River. In the terminate, W Virginia included simply three Shenandoah Valley Counties - and the southwestern Virginia counties within the Valley and Ridge province stayed with "onetime" Virginia, due to the influence of the Virginia and Tennessee Railroad.

Panhandle of West Virginia showing Morgan,
Berkeley, and Jefferson counties in the Shenandoah Valley

European settlers did not spread out through Virginia later on 1607 similar ripples from a stone thrown into a swimming. Settlement did non expand equally away from a primal indicate at Jamestown, with new farms and communities emerging a few miles in every direction every few years.

The English settled get-go in Tidewater Virginia, clearing the land well-nigh the rivers in the Chesapeake Bay watershed. Instead of a polish, gradual spread outward from ane central identify, English settlement spread primarily to the north of the James and east of the Fall Line. South of the James, in the Albemarle-Pamlico Audio watershed, at that place was less demand for state in the first 150 years afterward Jamestown.

Why? South of the Appomattox River watershed, Virginia rivers practise not empty into the Chesapeake Bay. Farm crops loaded on boats and shipped downstream end upwardly in North Carolina. Farmers south of the Appomattox River could load boats to conduct crops down the Blackwater, Nottoway, or Roanoke rivers - just those boats ended up in the Albemarle-Pamlico Audio, while most ships sailed to Chesapeake Bay ports.

Source: Chesapeake Bay Local Assistance Department

By 1700, a gentry of five% or so of the population (the "Start Families of Virginia" or Cavaliers) took control of the politics and economic system of the colony. The plantation owners shifted from importing indentured servants to importing slaves as the primary labor strength for their tobacco plantations.

They built large estate houses on their Tidewater plantations - Berkeley, Carter's Grove, Mountain Airy, Stratford Hall. Using their influence in the House of Burgesses and with the Governor, they obtained land grants and speculated in western lands - lands west of the Fall Line. The Lees and Carters competed in the upper Potomac watershed for control of the Fairfax country office and access to waterfront property downstream of Nifty Falls.

Governor Spotswood led a military machine exploration/real estate speculation trek upward the Rappahannock River valley in 1716. His "Knights of the Golden Horseshoe" crossed the Blue Ridge near where modern United states Route 33 passes through Swift Run Gap. The "knights" celebrated their arrival with multiple toasts on the banks of the Shenandoah River, in a party that is nevertheless memorable nigh 300 years later:ⁱⁱ

We had a expert dinner, and after it nosotros got the men together, and loaded all their arms, and we drank the King's health in champagne, and fired a volley, the Princess's health in Burgundy, and fired a volley, and all the residue of the Imperial Family in blood, and a volley. Nosotros drank the Governor's health and fired another volley. We had several sorts of liquors, viz.; Virginia red wine and. white vino, Irish usquebaugh, brandy shrub, two sorts of rum, champagne, canary, cherry punch, water, cider, etc.

Modern real estate agents will recognize the expedition (and the party...) as a familiarization tour to spur country sales. The old saying most real estate values beingness adamant by three things ("location, location, and location") applied in colonial times equally well every bit today. Spotswood himself imported indentured servants to develop an atomic number 26 plantation at Germanna, upstream from Fredericksburg, while defending his even-handedness in supporting evolution south of the James.

While the officials in Williamsburg processed requests for grants and occasionally an bodily survey for a patent due west of the mountains, a few of the gentry actually visited their state claims on the other side of the Blue Ridge. George Washington spent much of the 1750's in Shenandoah Valley and travelled s to Shawsville to inspect frontier forts. Patrick Henry travelled to visit his properties nearby in Christiansburg, a boondocks named afterward his brother-in-law William Christian.

Simply most settlement west of the Blue Ridge came from a dissimilar direction, *not* from Tidewater Virginia. The House of Burgesses created new counties stretching to the crest of the Blue Ridge (such as Prince William) in the 1730'south, but settlers did non spread westward in a steady flow. Instead, lands west of the Blue Ridge were settled by immigrants walking southwest from Philadelphia, before all the lands east of the mountains were fully occupied.

In an agricultural economy, the college-quality limestone soils of the valley were i reason for bypassing the Blueish Ridge. Fifty-fifty today, Virginia's ii primary agronomical producers are Augusta and Rockingham counties. Recognizing the uneconomic value of farming in the mountains, Virginia purchased the difficult-scrabble farms in the Bluish Ridge lxx years agone and donated the land to the Federal regime for Shenandoah National Park.

However, some other central reason for settling the Shenandoah Valley from the northward rather than the e was cultural rather than physical.

The religious intolerance in Europe spurred many refugees to abscond to the New Globe in the showtime half of the 1700's. Virginia had "established" the Anglican church as an official role of the government. Mandatory church levies (i. e., taxes nerveless by the sheriff) funded both social welfare and church operations, including the construction of the brick colonial churches nonetheless seen in Tidewater today (such every bit Bruton Parish church in Williamsburg and Pohick Church in Fairfax County).

Tidewater was dominated by the Church of England, the region but was not exclusively Anglican. International shipping ports like Norfolk had numerous non-Anglican sailors calculation diversity to the Virginia culture, and the colony was relatively tolerant of Protestant dissenters. Prior to the French and Indian War, Scottish merchants ("factors" purchasing tobacco in Autumn Line cities from small planters) provided a Presbyterian business class.

In add-on, in the Piedmont a substantial number of indentured servants and poor farmers were stimulated by the "Great Enkindling" and itinerant dissident preachers, especially the Baptists. Patrick Henry'south mother was a Presbyterian convert, perchance one reason he was such a rabble-rouser... Historians nonetheless debate how the threat to the hegemony (domination) of the gentry class affected the political thinking prior to the American Revolution.

West of the Blue Ridge, the Anglican and Tidewater English language presence was far more limited. Immigrants coming southward through Pennsylvania were predominantly Protestant - simply not Anglican - refugees, people who fled the many conflicts amidst political states that accept at present been assembled into modern-twenty-four hours Frg. These Pennsylvania "Dutch" fled to William Penn's haven, the Quaker colony of Pennsylvania. They discovered the toll of land was lower equally they moved west, and substantially less as they crossed the Potomac River into the "empty" Shenandoah Valley in Virginia.

The valley was empty in function considering it was a border territory raided past Iroquois from the north, Cherokee from the southward, and Shawnee from the westward. In addition, diseases brought from Europe by Spanish explorers in the 1500's and permanent colonists in the 1600'south may have dramatically reduced the population of the indigenous Native Americans.

In the days when transportation was by one-horsepower carriage, the Blue Ridge was a pregnant physical barrier that divided the colony.

"Due east" Virginia was the Tidewater region, plus the Piedmont region where small planters produced tobacco for export. Those planters rolled hogsheads of tobacco eastward, downhill to the cities like Fredericksburg developing forth the Autumn Line, in order to ship their crop to Europe. Wagons that carried crops eastward to marketplace returned habitation with nails, fabric, and other manufactured products. The mercantile system ensured that industries in England would have a market place in the colonies, and the Fall Line cities became the "swivel" between the Piedmont and England.³

But those cities were irrelevant to the immigrants due west of the Blue Ridge, so long equally roads through the mount gaps were likewise poor for farm wagons. The immigrants who had come south from Philadelphia, migrating due west to Lancaster and then following the limestone valleys south into Virginia, sent their farm products back north as well. Since the roads were poor (OK, really really poor), hauling tobacco to Philadelphia was a poor (OK, really really poor...) economic conclusion.

Then the immigrants in the valley raised livestock, walking their herds to market place in Baltimore and Philadelphia long before cattle drives of Texas longhorns captured Hollywood's imagination. If the movie moguls ever flick a Virginia cattle drive, look for the herds of cattle from the South Co-operative of the Potomac River walking north, down the Shenandoah Valley. Afterwards numerous pauses for grazing on grasslands in the valley, the herds should cross the Potomac River and so veer east to the market cities of Maryland and Pennsylvania. Expect the herd of cattle to be followed by droves of pigs, feeding on the manure left behind on the trail by the cattle - with a flock of turkeys or chickens backside the pigs, fully utilizing all the nutrient resources on the way to marketplace.

Prior to the French and Indian War, the economical ties, religious sympathies, and family loyalties of the Shenandoah settlers were to the north, not towards Tidewater Virginia. However, after the Piedmont filled with settlers oriented to the Tidewater, a substantial number of "English" immigrants came into the valley across the Blue Ridge.

The French and Indian State of war triggered a decade of Tidewater commitment to the valley, from 1753-1763. George Washington lived in Winchester for several years every bit the commander of the Virginia forces, and the legislature and the governor committed substantial resource (though yet far-from-enough) to fund forts and militia on the frontier from the Potomac to the New River. He was sensitized to the western attitudes and sought throughout his political career to employ transportation improvements to link western loyalties to the primary American cities on the East Coast.

Past the 1800'southward, roads crossed from Tidewater through the "wind gaps" in the Blue Ridge to the Valley. In the 1850's, railroads such every bit the Manassas Gap Railroad cemented the economic ties between the valley and the Fall Line cities.

Only transportation improvements were never adequately allocated to the western counties of Virginia. After the Lath of Public Works was created in 1816, the land financed xl-60% of the price for turnpikes, plank roads, canals, and railroads. The legislature approved few projects westward of the Allegheny Forepart, where the waters drained into the Ohio River.

Instead, the Tidewater-dominated General Assembly supported projects to enhance farm-to-market transportation leading to Petersburg, Richmond, and Fredericksburg. (Alexandria was part of the District of Columbia from 1800-1846, and the State of Virginia was reluctant to finance improvements to a non-Virginia metropolis during those years.)

And the western counties were grossly under-represented in the General Assembly. In 1816, disgruntled political leaders organized the Staunton Convention with representatives from 36 counties, including some from the eastern region of Virginia. The convention noted that only 1/3 of the white population lived e of the Bluish Ridge, but that minority controlled the majority of seats in the Firm of Delegates and had even more power in the State Senate.⁴

The number of white males west of the Blue Ridge was greater than the equivalent population e of the mountains, when the country constitution was revised in the early 1850'southward. But the constitution was written and then the western counties would never achieve control of the State Senate.

Tidewater planters were concerned that western voters would alter the revenue enhancement structure to finance "internal improvements." The Tidewater planters ensured property taxes on slaves remained low, while taxes on state were relatively high. The western residents had most of their investments in country while the eastern planters had invested in slaves. Instead of ensuring the tax burden was fair, the western residents were taxed more heavily - and the taxes were used to finance transportation improvements in the eastern portion of the state.

In that location was sick will between the regions of Virginia before the Ceremonious State of war. Northern Virginians benefitted when Whigs controlled the General Associates, supporting internal improvements in the Potomac watershed such as the C&O canal. Democrats steered investments to the James River watershed when they controlled the political machinery. Simply westerners never got their fair share... no matter which party was in control before the Civil War.

After the 1776 country constitution was revised for the kickoff fourth dimension in 1830, the Tidewater planters provided a higher level of public support for residents west of the Blue Ridge. The Board of Public Works provided financing for turnpikes, canals, and railroads linking the southern ("upper") Shenandoah Valley near Staunton to Richmond, and the more than-northern portion of the valley about Forepart Royal/Mount Jackson to Alexandria.

As one written report of the origins of West Virginia has noted:⁵

Before 1830 the Shenandoah Valley and Trans-Allegheny regions cooperated in their efforts to gain common objectives: universal manhood suffrage; increased representation in the General Associates; liberal appropriations for internal improvements, pop election of governor, judges, and members of county courts; abolitionism of the governor's council; and the removal of revenue enhancement discriminations in favor of slave property...

...Earlier 1830 the Shenandoah Valley and Trans-Allegheny Regions stood together in opposition to eastern domination. Just at the Constitutional Convention of 1830 the Valley deserted its erstwhile allies and moved toward the heart of the pro-slavery orbit. Afterward 1830 the pattern of sectional conflict continued to change, always reducing the geographical area in Virginia that was seriously at odds with the bourgeois, slaveholding east. By 1861 Northwestern Virginia had little more in common with the Valley and Southwestern counties included in the new country than a cobra and a mongoose.

Three conventions in western Virginia agitated for the General Assembly to expand the political power of those living w of the Blue Ridge, but failed to make major revisions. The 1830 constitution did non extend suffrage to all white men, reducing the influence of the "freeholders" working on farms owned by others in the Valley and Ridge physiographic province. Election districts were drawn and then the counties west of the mountains could elect merely a minority of the General Assembly members. The ratio of the east-of-the-Blue-Ridge members vs. due west-of-the-Blue-Ridge members was frozen, no affair how population was calculated after a time to come census.⁶

By 1850, the legislature had created 19 additional counties west of the Blue Ridge. A new country constitution that twelvemonth eliminated the requirement of voters to own a certain amount of property, increasing the number of white men west of the mountains who could vote. Yet, Eastern legislators maintained their dominance over the legislature when cartoon the boundaries of election districts. The districts w of the Blue Ridge elected 66 seats in the 152-member Firm of Delegates, ensuring that westerners would command no more than 43% of that house. In the 50-member State Senate, 19 seats (38%) were allocated to districts west of the Blue Ridge.⁷

The regional dispute was centered on unbalanced tax and investment. Westerners resented how Eastern Virginia slaveowners used their political ability to limit taxes on "slave property," but that objection was not the same as opposition to the institution of slavery. The bulk of white landowners in the western counties, including those who owned no slaves, were not advocates of emancipating the enslaved people.

As the Washington Post noted in 2020, when West Virginia legislators invited Virginia counties to carve up from Virginia and become office of West Virginia during a political uproar over legislation affecting guns:^eight

At 3 land constitutional conventions, western advocates mostly failed to eliminate special privileges enjoyed by slaveholders, largely concentrated in eastern Virginia. These advocates, later the founders of West Virginia, were not anti-slavery. They were anti-slaveholder. They thought that government in Virginia was undemocratic, serving eastern slaveholders' special interests over those of the denizens.

When Virginia'south Secession Convention finally voted to go out the Union in April 1861, the representatives of the western counties chose to run across separately and to "secede" from Virginia. This political decision was the final suspension, creating a fixed political boundary between two dissever states after Westward Virginia was accepted into the Spousal relationship. What had been a shifting frontier betwixt Virginians who were oriented towards the Chesapeake Bay vs. the Mississippi drainage was locked into identify.

In 1862, Governor Pierpont of the Restored Authorities of Virginia described why the western and eastern sections of the state had developed very different cultures:^nine

Geographically, the E is separated from the West by mountains which form an almost impassible barrier, equally far as trade and commerce is concerned. The bulwark is and then bang-up that no artificial means of intercourse have ever been made across a mud turnpike road. All the trade and commerce of the West is with other States, and not with Eastern Virginia.

The ii sections are entirely different in their social relations and institutions. While the East is largely interested in slaves, the Westward has none, and all the labor is performed by freemen. The fashion and subjects of revenue enhancement in the State have been a source of irritation and indeed of strife and vexation, between the two sections for many years past, besides as that of representation in the Legislature.

Despite the tilt towards Tidewater, the southwestern counties west of the Bluish Ridge stayed in Virginia and did not join West Virginia in 1863-66. A decade before the Civil War, the Virginia and Tennessee Railroad crosed the Blue Ridge. The rail line was built w from Lynchburg through the Roanoke River gap, so down the Valley and Ridge to Bristol.

The easy transportation link to the Autumn Line ports transformed the economy of southwestern Virginia. While the percentage of slaveowners in the region remained depression compared to the portion of Virginia east of the Blueish Ridge, the economic links between the southwest and the eastern function of the country grew essentially.

in 1860, the Trans-Allegheny District of western Virginia was divided into Northwest and Southwest districts
Map Source: US Geological Survey (USGS), National Atlas

Counties west of the Allegheny Front seceded from Virginia starting in 1861, and established a new capital in Wheeling for the new Land of West Virginia in 1863. All the same, the far southwestern counties retained their loyalty to the capital based in Richmond, due to economic and cultural ties that had been strengthened through business facilitated by the rail line.

The Federal regime anticipated the outbreak of a civil war that might trigger the western counties in Virginia to splinter off and form a split state. The United States Declension Survey obtained early access to the 1860 Census data, and created the offset map displaying that data in June, 1861. By September, a new version of the map displayed the name of the proposed new land - Kanawha.¹⁰

the percentage of population held in slavery was lower in the 39 original counties proposed for the Land of Kanawha - though McDowell County was excluded
Map Source: Library of Congress, Map of Virginia : showing the distribution of its slave population from the census of 1860 (September, 1861)

On December 3, 1861, the First Ramble Convention in Wheeling started debate with:¹¹

The Land of Kanawha shall be and remain ane of the The states of America. The Constitution of the U.s.a., and the laws and treaties made in pursuance thereof, shall exist the supreme law of the land.

MR. SINSEL. Mr. President, in the get-go section I motion to strike out the discussion "Kanawha."

MR. POWELL. I second that.

MR. VAN WINKLE. I should similar, sir, to hear some reason assigned if there is any, why this proper noun is non a good one.

The subsequent debate included expressions of reverence for supposedly-virgin Queen Elizabeth; concerns over confusions if the proper name "Kanawha" was used for both a county and the unabridged state; suggestions for "Allegheny/Alleghany," "Potomac," and "Augusta;" back up for "Columbia," "Western Virginia," and "New Virginia;" and opposition to any use of "Virginia" in the name. One member of the convention drew laughter when he suggested it would be unfair to utilise "Virginia" in the name of the new land:¹²

Those gentlemen who are and so tender for their former mother, should be a little more than magnanimous, sir, and when they are going to rob the sometime lady of her territory should not steal her name too.

The debate concluded past striking out "Kanawha" from "The Land of Kanawha shall be and remain one of the Usa of America... and inserting a blank, then voting on how to fill up the blank in "The State of ______ shall be and remain one of the United states..."

The commencement vote was to choose the name "Due west Virginia" to fill the blank. When 30 of the 44 members voting endorsed that selection, fence ended and the name of the new state had been decided.¹³

1830 Constitution of Virginia

1851 Constitution of Virginia

Regions of Virginia - and Why Isn't There An Eastward Virginia?

Virginia-West Virginia Boundary

W Virginia was called over Kanawha, Allegheny, and New Virginia, among other choices
Source: West Virginia Division of Culture and History, "What'southward In A Name?" The Naming of West Virginia

Links

• Brief sketch of the erection and formation of the state of West Virginia from the territory of Virginia (1891 book past John Marshall Hagans)
• California Law Review
• Is Due west Virginia Unconstitutional?, by Vasan Kesavan and Michael Stokes Paulsen, Vol. 90, No. two (March 2002)
• Debates and proceedings of the offset Constitutional Convention of West Virginia (1861-1863) (1939 book, edited by Charles H. Ambler, Frances Haney Atwood and William B. Mathews
• West Virginia - American Local History Network (genealogy/history)
• West Virginia Athenaeum and History (genealogy/history)
• Countdown Address (June xx, 1863) of Governor Arthur I. Boreman
• Payment of the Virginia Debt
• US GenWeb - W Virginia Counties (genealogy/history)
• W Virginia: A History (1984 book by John Alexander Williams)
• West Virginia Division of Culture and History - A State of Convenience - The Creation of the Land of West Virginia
• W Virginia History (History 153 grade at West Virginia University)
• Intrasectional Disharmonize and Slavery
• Secession and the Reorganized Regime
• Statehood
• West Virginia: Documents in the History of a Rural-Industrial State
• Westward Virginia Armed services Enquiry
• W Virginia History
• West Virginia Independence Hall (Wheeling, WV)

West Virginia could take been much smaller...
Source: W Virginia Public Broadcasting, Apr 17, 1861: Virginia Politicians Vote to Secede from the Union

References

i. "Inaugural Address of Governor Arthur I. Boreman - June twenty, 1863," A State of Convenience: The Creation of West Virginia, W Virginia Division of Culture and History, http://world wide web.wvculture.org/history/boremania.html (last checked April 3, 2013)
two. Edward Porter Alexander (editor), The Journal of John Fontaine: An Irish Huguenot Son in Spain and Virginia, 1710-1719, Colonial Williamsburg, 1972, p.106, http://books.google.com/books?id=ZQyVinBxMRMC (concluding checked March eighteen, 2013)
iii. Jean Gottmann, Megalopolis: The Urbanized Northeastern Seaboard Of The United States, The Twentieth Century Fund (New York), 1961, pp.103
4. Carl Edward Skeen, 1816: America Rise, University Press of Kentucky, 2003, p.167, http://books.google.com/books?id=aDHBSYXazMcC (last checked March 18, 2013)
5. Richard Orr Curry, A Business firm Divided: A Report of Statehood Politics and the Copperhead Move in Westward Virginia, Academy of Pittsburgh Press, 1964, p.6, http://books.google.com/books?id=q9Lna2shH7oC (final checked March 18, 2013)
6. John J. Dinan, The Virginia Country Constitution, Oxford University Press, 2011, p.8, https://books.google.com/books?id=fe9MAgAAQBAJ; "1830 Virginia Constitution," Semi-Centennial History of West Virginia, Semi-Centennial Committee Of West Virginia, 1913, posted online by Westward Virginia Archives and History, http://www.wvculture.org/history/regime/182930cc.html; "Virginia Constitution, 1830," http://vagovernmentmatters.org/files/download/430/fullsize (terminal checked June xix, 2019)
seven. John J. Dinan, The Virginia State Constitution, Oxford Academy Press, 2011, pp.eight-9, p.11, https://books.google.com/books?id=fe9MAgAAQBAJ; Virginia General Assembly, "Virginia Constitution, 1851," in Virginia Civics, Particular #519, http://vagovernmentmatters.org/primary-sources/519 (last checked December 27, 2017)
8. "West Virginia's effort to split upward Virginia betrays the history of both states," Washington Post, Jan 29, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/01/29/westward-virginias-endeavour-separate-virginia-up-betrays-history-both-states/; "State of division: how Westward Virginia broke away from Virginia," Richmond Times-Dispatch, April 11, 2020, https://world wide web.richmond.com/discover-richmond/land-of-division-how-west-virginia-broke-away-from-virginia/article_1e0e5977-a27a-5ecc-b0de-e9253f91f6a3.html (last checked Apr 22, 2020)
nine. "Governor Pierpont's Address to the Reorganized Government of Virginia - May vi, 1862," A State of Convenience: The Creation of West Virginia, Westward Virginia Division of Culture and History, http://www.wvculture.org/history/statehood/pierpont050662.html (last checked April ii, 2013) 10. Susan Schulten, "How a Map Divided Virginia," New York Times, May five, 2011, http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/05/how-a-map-divided-virginia/ (terminal checked March xviii, 2013)
11. "'What's In A Name?' The Naming of West Virginia," West Virginia Athenaeum and History, http://world wide web.wvculture.org/history/statehood/statename.html (last checked September 5, 2019)
12. "'What's In A Name?' The Naming of West Virginia," West Virginia Archives and History, http://www.wvculture.org/history/statehood/statename.html (terminal checked September 5, 2019)
13. "'What'south In A Proper name?' The Naming of West Virginia," West Virginia Archives and History, http://www.wvculture.org/history/statehood/statename.html (final checked September 5, 2019)

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Regions of Virginia
Virginia Places

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Source: http://www.virginiaplaces.org/regions/westva.html

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