Rural West Virginians
Wage an Identity War

FAIRMONT, W.Va. -- Robert Ashcraft, Fairmont's assistant city manager, says someday he'd like to build a house near his wife's family farm -- but only if the street address doesn't have to be Pinchgut Hollow Road.

Pinchgut is just one of many Dogpatch-style names in West Virginia. The state highway department lists 1,649 roads here in Marion County, with names like Clear Drain, Hoglick Branch, Idamay Camp, Johnny Cake Branch, Monkey Wrench Hollow and Salt Lick Run. There's a big split over whether these are cherished echoes of the past or merely retrograde.

West Virginians, Mr. Ashcraft complains, "do nothing ... except make fun of West Virginia."

The name game is further complicated by the gradual phaseout of rural-route and box numbers, which have long sufficed as addresses in rustic America.

Bickering Neighbors

Nancy Bickerstaff and Sarah Summers own houses on the same two-mile roller coaster of a road through the bottom of a steep Appalachian valley. But when it comes to the addresses on their mailboxes, they are anything but neighbors.

The 44-year-old Mrs. Summers, who has lived here for more than five years, proudly says her address is Route 6, Box 71-B, Pinchgut Hollow Road. Pinchgut Hollow is a name of uncertain origin that she likes and uses. One story has it that a passage between two rock outcroppings along the road was so narrow that horses had to have their bellies squeezed to get through. Today, a one-lane bridge spans the bottleneck. She thinks the name is "quaint."

Names like that drive Mrs. Bickerstaff, who is Mr. Ashcraft's mother-in-law, crazy. She says her family's 33-acre farm is on Stoney Road, not Pinchgut. That name is used, too, and also describes how the road once was. "Would you want to be called Pinchgut Hollow?" asks Mrs. Bickerstaff, 60, a retired banker who has lived in Fairmont all her life. "It's like a guy being named Shirley. Those guys fight their whole lives."

The 73 property owners along County Route 31/1, which is yet another name for it, have been feuding for the past 16 months. The U.S. Postal Service and 911 emergency-dispatch services are pushing to replace box numbers with street addresses along back roads and to do away with rural-route numbers in order to make life easier for mail carriers and fire departments. The project, begun a decade ago, has no deadline and has proceeded at a leisurely pace. If it is ever finished, 7.5 million mailboxes on roads less traveled by will have sanctioned names and street addresses.

Mrs. Summers, a part-time secretary at a metal-fabrication shop, had never attended a city council meeting until this fight erupted. She says Mrs. Bickerstaff "has been sticking her nose into everybody else's business for a long time." Mrs. Bickerstaff calls the pro-Pinchgut faction "a lot of yahoos."

In most places, new addresses are greeted with some grumbling, nothing more. But in Henry County, Va., thousands of pieces of mail were returned to senders in 1998, the year new addresses became effective there, because residents weren't taking well to the change. As many as 50 holdouts in Manorville, N.Y., are sticking to the old rural-route system to protest encroaching suburbs.

But things got notably ugly here in this former coal-mining and glass-making town, which has seen its population shrink to less than 19,000 from a peak of about 30,000 in the mid-1970s. It turns out that a lot of West Virginians are deeply attached to those old names.

"People want to hang onto their past," says 53-year-old Ronald Maze, who owns Country Cousins Grocery at the southern end of Pinchgut Hollow Road. Referring to change in a town that values tradition, he says, "Once you get rid of it, it don't come back."

No one imagined there would be such an uproar when the county's "Advisory Committee for Conversion of Rural Routes to City-Type Addresses" took up the task in 1997, when some remote roads here had no names at all.

After hearing that the committee was leaning toward affirming Pinchgut Hollow Road, Mrs. Bickerstaff and another woman swooped in with a petition from residents who thought it would be nice to call it by yet another descriptive name, Valley River Road. They were OK with Stoney Road, too.

The street-naming committee obliged, voting in October 1999 to recommend Stoney Road. Before Marion County commissioners could officially adopt the name, Carolynn Hamilton, whose grandmother moved to the road 90 years ago, brought in a petition from the pro-Pinchgut side. She also alleged that Pinchgut's foes played dirty by including on their petition signatures of presumably transient trailer-park residents who don't even live on the road. The committee decided to settle the mushrooming battle by formally polling property owners.

Whatever it is called, the humble strip of disputed asphalt begins within sight of Interstate 79, the main route to Pittsburgh, and quickly disappears into the valley. After a sharp left turn, it narrows to barely the width of a car. A lot of junk rests on the ground near back porches and sheds around here. On a recent Saturday afternoon, tires were piled behind a pink 1954 Plymouth Savoy at the house of Mrs. Summers's in-laws. Down the road, two beached Volkswagen minivans sat near a car which still runs and has a front license plate reading, "West Virginia Almost Heaven."

Mrs. Bickerstaff thinks Fairmont has to ditch its redneck image if it hopes to attract economic development and rekindle its pre-Depression glory days. "We are on the march to save the town," says Mrs. Bickerstaff, who in other recent campaigns has helped restore the church bells at Agape Evangelical Methodist Church and bring back, after 30 years, the town's annual Fourth of July fireworks show. "Down the road," she says, "the people we're up against will thank us."

The road ballots came back last summer with a seemingly unmistakable mandate: Pinchgut won by a 38-to-19 vote. County commissioners quickly approved the name. "History kind of compels you to leave it the way it is," says Cecily Enos, a county commissioner who, fortunately for her, lives on Country Club Road.

The Pinchgut haters aren't backing down. Mrs. Bickerstaff claims the vote is meaningless because ballots weren't sent to a more densely populated area near the Conaway Feed & Supply store but did go to others she thinks shouldn't have been allowed to vote.

Thanks to all the contention, Allan Babcock, who heads the road-naming committee, has put the brakes on the name-change for the time being. And he is wary as he moves on to other roads. "If anybody wants to take it on and finish the job, then bring 'em on," he says.

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