• West Virginia in the Early 1970s

  An excerpt from the Buffalo Creek chapter in John Alexander Williams’ West Virginia History:

  By the beginning of the 1970s there was an abundance of tangible evidence that things were not so as bad as they had been. Measurements that had once inspired gloomy prognoses now provided statistical glimmers of hope. Unemployment, which had fluctuated between two and three times the national average during the worst years of the preceding decades, had fallen to within one percentage point of the national average by 1970. Migration diminished, and while the 1970 census registered another drop in the state’s overall population, official estimates for 1971 and 1972 showed a slight population increase, the first since 1950. Per capita income, which dipped below seventy five percent of the national average during the early 1960s rose to eighty percent by 1972. These signs were all the more encouraging in that they were no longer confined to industrial and suburban districts. The coal industry’s long promised upsurge was well under way by 1971, while the eastern mountain counties were on the verge of a boon in recreational industries and lands…

  Generally, however, West Virginia was not yet a leader among states. It was still a follower, struggling to catch up with most of the others. The most that could be said in 1971 was that this struggle had become somewhat less desperate than before. By almost any standard of measurement, West Virginia had drawn perceptibly closer to national norms, and this was important. For fifty years, even longer if one looked all the way back to the start of the mine wars, West Virginians had repeatedly found their state being examined in the national limelight as some place different, a bad example, a backward, unprosperous, violent island in the rich and placid current of American life. Most West Virginians were tired of the limelight that showed only blemishes; even those who were most critical of the state’s continuing deficiencies sometimes longed to be thought of as typical, ordinary, normal Americans. In 1971 those feelings did not seem so unrealistic as they had in earlier years. For most people it was a time of satisfaction and optimism, a well–deserved and long-awaited moment. And the moment found a perfect mode of expression in the friendly lyrics and lilting tune of “Take Me Home, Country Roads.”

  Then came the disaster at Buffalo Creek.

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