I'm trying to catch up. At one county per month, I would have visited 128 counties by now. I got way behind with the pandemic and my campaign for Congress last year, so I'm trying to catch up.
In Mr. Ames' class in sixth grade at Campfield Elementary School in Baltimore County, Maryland, we learned that one reason the borders of Maryland are so strange is because the border runs along the North Branch of the Potomac River, instead of the South Branch. Petersburg, the county seat of Gilmer County is on the north shore of the South Branch, south of Cumberland and Oakland in Western Maryland. It should have been in Maryland. Grant County is the most Republican in West Virginia, which is saying something. Still, I got 607 votes there for Congress last year, the same number as Joe Biden got against the then-incumbent President in 2020.
It's technically, according to Google Maps, 101 miles from Morgantown to Petersburg. I added some miles to get the rest stop on I-68 as one enters Maryland, and went through downtown Oakland, because there is a Sheetz convenience store. I needed both restrooms, so it was worth it.
Petersburg is a pretty town, with some old homes. I had lunch at a former doctor's office, now a small trendy café, and dinner at a Chinese buffet restaurant, where I had plenty to eat. The town has several restaurants, a Sheetz, a small supermarket. The weather was much too warm for February, so I walked all of downtown with a map from the café. It took me about an hour.
The closest branch of "The Usual Chain" was forty miles away in Virginia, so I stayed at The Hermitage Inn, a newish motel behind a 19th century hotel. Joe pointed out the joke to me when I made the reservation from home. The Hermitage is the art museum in St. Petersburg in Russia. Get it?
I didn't interact with a lot of people, but I didn't get the looks I get in some places, and I only saw one Confederate flag from a person unclear on the history of West Virginia. I'm only putting up a few pics; the first is a church in Germania on the National Register of Historic Places. Wikipedia doesn't have a pic of this church, so I will share it with them. I also am posting a pic of the old Hermitage Inn and the former Courthouse.
I spoke to the young women at the desk in the evening and the following morning. The evening woman thought that it always snows in Morgantown. I corrected that and she said "Maybe it just rains a lot and it's always cloudy." There is a lot of that, I had to admit. The woman in the morning told me that she had been to Ruby Memorial Hospital in Morgantown for a month. She was pregnant two years ago, when she came down with COVID and they sent her to Morgantown to the hospital. She shared all the gory details and showed me pictures of her wired up. She said she almost died, and that of the five pregnant women with COVID when she was there, three of them did die. She showed me a picture of her healthy toddler.
I drove out west in the evening to find a historic cabin. It's possible that I saw it, but I wasn't sure it was the right one. West of town on Route 28, there are resorts with rustic cabins along the flat land on the river. I guess people go out there for peace and quiet and to fish in the Potomac.
That was Wednesday. I left Thursday morning to drive 129 miles to Glenville, a tiny college town, the seat of Gilmer County, smack in the middle of the state of West Virginia. It's also pretty. Driving there on State Road 28 involves driving past Dolly Sods Wilderness in Monongahela National Forest, an ecosystem of bogs and heaths, more typical of Southern Canada than the United States, according to the Petersburg tourist brochure. Seneca Rocks are barren mountain peaks, the heart of Appalachia. There are hikes and mountain bike trails. I don't feel healthy enough to do that kind of hiking, but the views from the car were spectacular.
I stayed at a local hotel, Glenville Inn, located on Route 5 between Interstate 79 and the middle of Glenville. I had lunch at a little Italian restaurant in the middle of town, and saved my once-per-trip Subway experience for dinner.
While Petersburg is on a branch of the Potomac, Glenville is over the mountains on Little Kanwha River, so it flows into the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers.
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