Talk:Southern West Virginia

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[edit] Charleston-Huntington Metro Valley is not "Southern" WV

I have to strongly object to the way this article blindly lumps the Huntington-Charleston I-64 corridor into "Southern West Virginia". Given that the listing of Cabell, Wayne, Putnam and Kanawha has been done in a way that directly violates WP:AWW, I can only conclude that those counties were placed into this article more or less randomly. Barring any objection, I'll be creating a separate Metro Valley section in the next day or so. --Aaron 05:15, 3 February 2006 (UTC)

As the contributor that wrote this stub article, I feel I should respond. I am a native of West Virginia's Eastern Panhandle region so I admit that I am unfamiliar with Southern West Virginia. I felt Southern West Virginia deserved its own article because of its unique culture, history, and location so I wrote up a stub that would remain until another editor that was more familiar with the region could write a necessary article. From a geographical standpoint, looking at a map of West Virginia, geographically speaking only, Kanawha, Cabell, Wayne, and Putnam counties could be seen as the northern fringes of "Southern West Virginia." I did not mean to imply that these counties were culturally part of Southern West Virginia, although that in itself is a grey area as their more rural regions have much in common with Southern West Virginia. As I stated before, I am a native of the Eastern Panhandle, and even there, half of the panhandle is also a part of the Potomac Highlands of West Virginia, so it is sometimes conceivable that counties can be located in transitionary geographical grey zones. I didn't mean to offend and was not trying to express a POV, I just felt it appropriate when crafting the stub to include those counties so that other more familiar contributors could do with them as they pleased. I feel a "Metro Valley" article is definitely merited and needed, but from an outside strictly geographical perspective, those counties do lie geographically in Southern West Virginia, so they deserve a geographical honourable mention in the Southern West Virginia article. --Caponer 17:06, 15 February 2006 (UTC)

As a Charleston resident, (I was born here) I'd like to put a few thoughts here. I think much of Kanawha County is certainly both geographically and culturally part of Southern West Virginia. The largest county in the state, it's southern section dips down nearly 30 miles south of Charleston and this part of the county is very much a part of the coal fields region. All of the communities lying upriver from Charleston also can easily be placed in the Southern West Virginia region culturally and geographically. So I agree with the original post which placed Kanawha County in the region.

I also agree with the person who raised an objection that the Metro-Valley does not quite fit the Southern West Virginia mold. Huntington, especially. (I graduated from Marshall university and lived in Huntington during my college years) Huntington has much in common with the Mid-Ohio Valley, and I have always considered Huntington to be more culturally a part of that region of our state. I've always viewd Huntington as the southern tip of the Mid-Ohio Valley, which begins just north of Parkersburg and follows the Ohio River past some very beautiful little town to the Huntington area. Built as it is on a wide flood plain with broad city streets and spaciaous parks, Huntington reflects the fact that it is on the edge of the Mid-West.

The Charleston Metro region is harder to define, and it really seems like an island unto itself, not really being a part of any other region of the state. From the MacCorkle Avenue extit of the Turnpike all the way to Cross Lanes, and these days into Teays Valley and as far as Hurricane, the I-64 Corridor has developed a regional identity of its own, which is hard to define. I'd love to see someone add a separate wikipage for the Charleston Metro Region.