Happy 160th Birthday, West Virginia!

[Staph]

[appalachiablue]

1. THE VIRGINIA, WEST VIRGINIA SPLIT. -

[Staph]

3. Thanks for posting that!

It takes me back to eighth grade and West Virginia history class.

[appalachiablue]

5. YW, I remember the history from school too.

[Sneederbunk]

2. Lee lost a third of the state he chose to defend.

[Staph]

4. Virginia more than got their money back!

After the Civil War, Virginia insisted that West Virginia pay their share of Virginia's debts, mostly infrastructure costs for things like canals, roads, and railroads.

In 1915, the US Supreme Court decided that we owed Virginia one-third of their debt. We West Virginians eventually paid more than twelve million dollars (400 million in today's dollars!), with the final payment in 1939. There is no way on God's green earth we owed them that much. One of the leading reasons that the folks of western Virginia wanted to leave in the early 1800s is that all of their tax money went east to Richmond and next to none of it came back.

I seem to remember learning, once upon a time, that the only building that Richmond paid for was the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum. Construction began in 1858, and when the War began, Richmond wanted the building funds sent back to pay for the war. But a group of Union troops grabbed the money from the local bank and sent it to the Reorganized Government of the State of Virginia (!) in Wheeling. The money was eventually used to finish construction of the hospital.