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C h a p t e r 1 5 The Convention Site at the “Permanent Seat” Post–Civil War Charleston was a town straining to revive its fortunes. Prior to the war, the Great Kanawha River town had enjoyed a boom-and-bust prosperity based on the extensive salt industry of declining national importance whose production field stretched from the town’s eastern limits up the river on both sides and along the James River and Kanawha Turnpike beyond Malden. The Kanawha salt industry’s rise had dated from the century’s first decade, and its recent decline in the 1850s had plunged Charleston into a depression that forced city promoters to seek an alternative economic future. Although a few Kanawha salt furnaces and accompanying coal mines remained operational and an extensive agricultural enterprise based on the valley’s rich alluvial soils sustained Charleston as the area’s market town, Charlestonians sought other possibilities as the sectional war erupted. Initially, boomers had thought their future rested on the mushrooming coal-oil factories, but war and rapid economic obsolescence doomed the hope. The town’s location on one of the strategic east-west routes through West Virginia ensured a destructive and almost paralyzing outcome, more than what occurred in the normally fractured West Virginia communities, from the presence of migrating armies. Even nature conspired against it, when a more than sixty-foot rise on the Great Kanawha River in 1861 engulfed the town and swept everything in its path.1 Charleston, however, contained entrepreneurs and speculators who had previously tasted prosperity and thirsted for its revival. These residents knew that the surrounding hills harbored enormous quantities of brine, coal, oil, natural gas, and timber that awaited exploitation. Late in the 1860s, the boomers witnessed the first stirrings of the new age when the Chesapeake & Ohio Railway constructed its tracks across the river from their town. Besides bringing around two thousand transient laborers to the area, the Chesapeake & Ohio would tie the local resources into a national and international industrial economy unlike any previously experienced. 401 402 West Virginia’s Civil War–Era Constitution Dr.JohnP.Halewasoneofthemostprominentofthecity’sgo-getters.Aspresident oftheCharlestonChamberofCommerce,heofferedinNovember1870,$10.00perday plusexpensestorenownedauthorandartistDavidHunterStrothertovisitCharleston and write and illustrate a publication promoting Charleston’s and Kanawha County’s economic attributes. Porte Crayon, Strother’s familiar nom de plume, accepted the offer and came to Charleston with his daughter to undertake the task. While there, Strother met another promoter, twenty-four-year old John Brisban Walker, who offered him the editorship of his fledgling and short-lived newspaper, the Charleston Herald. Strother accepted for three months, long enough to become intimate with Kanawha society and state politics and to see his daughter betrothed to Walker.2 Observant to the core, Strother had seen firsthand the Democratic movement for the constitutional convention achieve success, the defeat of the Unionist/Republican regime, and the inauguration of Governor John J. Jacob. None of these events pleased the Republican former U.S. Army general. When Dr. Hale took him to the capitol to meet Governor William E. Stevenson and others, Strother informed the lame-duck Republican governor of his new editorship and suggested “that the true way to overthrow Democratic influence in West Va was not to combat opinion by dogmatism or argument, but to civilize it out of the Country by Rail Roads, Education & material progress—Republicanize opinion by the Arts industry & prosperity of Republican society—Emigration is the true way to bring this about.” Governor Stevenson could not have agreed more.3 Porte Crayon had heard the talk of railroad building and had seen the visiting speculators. Upon his departure from Charleston’s waterfront, which he declared on his first view as “not prepossessing,” Strother captured the essence of Charleston’s activity. He trenchantly observed, “Charleston is full of Jack Tibbets Land Speculators , schemers, stock jobbers and people so occupied with their own affairs that they are oblivious & dreamy. Incapable of continuous conversation on other subjects. Mouthing money by thousands & handling it by fractional Currency—One indeed has to use a strong magnifier to see the cash used after having his imagination stimulated by the talk.”4 Upon arriving to cover the Constitutional Convention’s opening, the Wheeling Daily Intelligencer’s reporter proclaimed that “nature has been more liberal in her gifts to man in minerals, forests and rivers in this locality than almost anywhere else on the continent.” He was aware of the rumors about schemes to build a railroad to connect the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad across...

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