West Virginia
- West Virginia was once part of Virginia. It was separated because of local support for the Union during the Civil War, while Virginia joined the confederacy.
- In 2002 inhabitants of the western part of Mingo County petitioned the county to allow it to break off and join Kentucky on the other side of the Tug River. Neither state has seriously considered the request.
- The southern areas of the state have grumbled about the lack of representation and respect from the state capital in Charleston. Some southern counties, such as McDowell, Mercer, Raleigh and Monroe, have rhetorically raised the idea of joining rural counties in southwestern Virginia (which feel equally disenfranchised from their state government in Richmond) to form a new state. No serious proposals have ever made it to the state capital for debate, however.
Read more about this topic: List Of U.S. State Partition Proposals
Famous quotes containing the words west and/or virginia:
“We joined long wagon trains moving south; we met hundreds of wagons going north; the roads east and west were crawling lines of families traveling under canvas, looking for work, for another foothold somewhere on the land.... The country was ruined, the whole world was ruined; nothing like this had ever happened before. There was no hope, but everyone felt the courage of despair.”
—Rose Wilder Lane (1886–1968)
“Being blunt with your feelings is very American. In this big country, I can be as brash as New York, as hedonistic as Los Angeles, as sensuous as San Francisco, as brainy as Boston, as proper as Philadelphia, as brawny as Chicago, as warm as Palm Springs, as friendly as my adopted home town of Dallas, Fort Worth, and as peaceful as the inland waterway that rubs up against my former home in Virginia Beach.”
—Martina Navratilova (b. 1956)