Western Virginia Research Articles

A Notorious Woman: Anne Royall in Jacksonian America by Elizabeth J. Clapp

Reviewed by: A Notorious Woman: Anne Royall in Jacksonian America by Elizabeth J. Clapp Susan Imbarrato (bio) A Notorious Woman: Anne Royall in Jacksonian America. By Elizabeth J. Clapp. ( Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2016. Pp 280. $39.50 cloth; $39.50 ebook) Elizabeth J. Clapp’s A Notorious Woman: Anne Royall in Jacksonian America is a thoroughly researched, well-presented biography that chronicles the many unexpected turns in Royall’s life to construct a [End Page 430] comprehensive portrait of an adventurous, resilient, hardworking, and persistent woman. In doing so, the book also addresses Royall’s combative, controversial, and, at times, contradictory elements: she asserted her own freedom to travel yet supported the curtailment of rights for Native Americans and African Americans, and her own forthright assertions stood in contrast to her opposition to women’s rights efforts. More sympathetically, Royall petitioned relentlessly for pensions for widows of Revolutionary War veterans, supported efforts for female education, and sought to expose corruption in Washington. Clapp deftly weaves these various elements into a compelling narrative that brings this well-known public figure in her day to a new audience. In doing so, Clapp draws extensively on archival materials including Royall’s correspondence and travel writings, along with newspaper accounts and court records to construct a biography steeped in social context and historical background. Clapp charts Royall’s continuous ability to adapt to changing situations, from her childhood in frontier Pennsylvania through her witnessing of the French and Indian War, her family’s relocation to Virginia in 1787, and her marriage to Major William Royall in 1797. When her marriage ended with William’s death in 1812, Anne entered a protracted battle with his family over his will. Clapp’s detailed discussion about wills, probates, and executors provides helpful, relevant context for this section. With the proceedings ongoing, Anne “determined that she would no longer live in the isolation of William’s Sweet Springs plantation. She soon made preparations to move to Charleston in Kanawha County, western Virginia” (p. 35). She then settled in Alabama from 1817 to 1823. Eventually, the will was deemed invalid, and with her finances in turmoil, Anne began writing as a way to alleviate her situation. Royall’s first publication, Letters from Alabama (1826), followed by a novel, The Tennessean (1827), offered some relief. Here, Clapp carefully contextualizes Royall’s publication efforts with a discussion of the contemporary print culture. Royall then embarked on a series of book tours for her subsequent [End Page 431] volumes, ten in all, and developed clever, aggressive techniques for selling her books, by including caustic portraits of public figures, referred to as “pen portraits,” and elaborate descriptions of towns and scenery that, in turn, customized each volume. Clapp follows Royall’s travels from 1823 to 1830 along the “length and breadth of the settled United States and some parts not yet open to settlement,” including the “‘fashionable tour’” through New York and New England (p. 77, 82). Moreover, as Clapp elaborates: “As she traveled, Royall was constantly preoccupied with the need to earn a living—a concern she frequently voiced to those she met on her expeditions. Her journeys served the dual purpose of research for her new books and a search for patrons to buy those she had already written” (p. 82). Traveling amidst “dangerous and unpredictable” conditions of the day, Royall nevertheless “depicted herself as an indefatigable traveler” (p. 100). Royall also conveyed aspects of Jacksonian democracy, including a sense of patriotism in her travel books that mirrors notions of “Manifest Destiny,” while her public attacks on evangelical ministers for trying to enforce Sabbath laws aligned with Jacksonian policies that maintained the separation between church and state. In 1829, Royall’s troubles escalated when she was brought to trial as “a common scold.” Then living in Washington, Royall launched two newspapers intended to combat and expose corruption, the Paul Pry followed by The Huntress, and continued her attempts to secure pensions for widows of Revolutionary War veterans. In 1848, she herself was finally granted one, which provided some financial relief prior to her death in 1854 at the age of eighty-five. Presented in an engaging, accessible style, Elizabeth...

Multi-scale ecological filters shape the crayfish microbiome

A general and practical understanding of the processes that drive microbiome assembly and structure are paramount to understanding organismal biology, health, and evolution. In this study of stream-dwelling crayfish, we conceptualized colonization of microbial symbionts as a series of ecological filters that operate at the environment, host, and host microsite levels, and identified key ecological processes at each level. A survey of Cambarus sciotensis in western Virginia, USA, showed that the local environment and host microsites interact to create complex patterns of microbial diversity and composition. An in situ experiment confirmed a prevailing effect of host microsite on microbial composition, and also showed that an ectosymbiotic worm (Annelida; Branchiobdellida) which feeds on biofilms and other symbionts had significant effects on microbial composition of the host carapace, but not gills. Bacterial communities of the carapace were taxonomically rich and even, and correlated with microbial communities of the ambient environment. Conversely, communities on gills were less diverse and dominated by two taxa with potential functional significance: Comamonadaceae and Chitinophagaceae. The bacterial communities of the gills appear to be tightly coupled to host biology, and those of the carapace are mostly determined by environmental context. Our work provides the first characterization of the crayfish microbiome and shows how multi-scale and experimental studies of symbiont community assembly provide valuable insights into how the animal microbiome is structured under conditions of natural complexity. Furthermore, this study demonstrates that metazoan symbiont taxa, i.e., the branchiobdellidans, can alter microbiome assembly and structure.

Bias in carnivore diet analysis resulting from misclassification of predator scats based on field identification

ABSTRACTDiet studies are frequently used to improve understanding of predator ecology, potential effects of carnivores on prey populations, and competition among predators. However, field identification of carnivore scat typically relies on scat morphology, size, and contents resulting in possible subjective predator identification and potentially biased results. Advancements in noninvasive genetic sampling allow for molecular identification of predator scat, eliminating many issues associated with field identification methods. We collected scat samples once per month from June 2011 to May 2012 in western Virginia, USA, using morphological characteristics for field identification of the predator. We then used mitochondrial DNA to identify the predator species of each scat and identified prey remains visually. Using confusion matrices, we found a range of accuracy in field identification for the 3 target species: coyotes (Canis latrans; 54.0%), bobcats (Lynx rufus; 57.1%), and black bears (Ursus americanus; 95.2%), even though we only considered samples with high‐confidence field identification. We found a high coyote false‐positive rate (52.7%), indicating we often incorrectly identified scats as coyote (98% of misidentified bobcat scats and 75% of misidentified black bear scats were recorded as coyote in the field). This asymmetrical bias in predator identification resulted in inaccurate estimates of dietary niche breadth and overlap between competitors. Our results suggest that caution should be exercised when interpreting results from studies in which carnivore species are identified by scat morphology. Future studies should employ noninvasive genetic sampling for carnivore scat identification, especially in areas with sympatric predator species that have similar scat morphology. © 2016 The Wildlife Society.

Evidence for fine-scale habitat specialisation in an invasive weed

As an exotic species colonises a new continent, it must overcome enormous environmental variation in its introduced range. Local adaptation of introduced species has frequently been observed at the continent scale, particularly in response to latitudinal climatic variation. However, significant environmental heterogeneity can also exist at the landscape scale. A small number of studies have provided evidence that introduced species may also be capable of phenotypic and genetic differentiation at much smaller spatial scales. For example, previously we found US agricultural and non-agricultural populations of Sorghum halepense (Johnsongrass) to be phenotypically and genetically distinct. In this study, we investigated whether this phenotypic differentiation of agricultural and non-agricultural populations of S. halepense is the result of fine-scale local specialisation. We surveyed a nationally collected S. halepense germplasm panel and also collected neighbouring agricultural and non-agricultural sub-populations of S. halepense at four sites throughout Western Virginia, USA, raising seedlings in common conditions mimicking both agricultural and non-agricultural habitats. At the national scale, we found evidence of habitat differentiation but not specialisation. However, at the local scale, we found evidence of specialisation in two of the four local populations to non-agricultural habitat, but no evidence of specialisation to agricultural habitat. These results show that local specialisation is a possible, but not guaranteed consequence of kilometre-scale habitat heterogeneity in invasive species. This finding contributes to a growing awareness of the importance of fine-scale local adaptation in the ecology and management of introduced and weedy species.

Changes in Rates of Capture and Demographics ofMyotisseptentrionalis(Northern Long-eared Bat) in Western Virginia before and after Onset of White-nose Syndrome

Abstract Documenting the impacts of white-nose syndrome (WNS) on demographic patterns, such as annual survivorship and recruitment, is important to understanding the extirpation or possible stabilization and recovery of species over time. To document demographic impacts of WNS on Myotis septentrionalis (Northern Long-eared Bat), we mistnetted at sites in western Virginia where Northern Long-eared Bats were captured in summer before (1990–2009) and after (2011–2013) the onset of WNS. Our mean capture rates per hour, adjusted for area of net and sampling duration, declined significantly from 0.102 bats/ m2/h before WNS to 0.005 bats/m2/h (-95.1%) by 2013. We noted a time lag in the rate of decline between published data based on bats captured during the swarming season and our summer mist-netting captures from the same geographic area. Although proportions of pregnant or lactating females did not vary statistically in samples obtained before and after the onset of WNS, the proportion of juvenile bats declin...

Crustal and uppermost mantle structure beneath the United States

AbstractThis paper presents a new model of the shear velocity structure of the crust and uppermost mantle beneath the contiguous U.S. The model is based on more than a decade of USArray Transportable Array (TA) data across the U.S. and derives from a joint Bayesian Monte Carlo inversion of Rayleigh wave group and phase speeds determined from ambient noise and earthquakes, receiver functions, and Rayleigh wave ellipticity (H/V) measurements. Within the Bayesian inverse theoretic framework, a prior distribution of models is posited and a posterior distribution is inferred beneath all of the more than 1800 TA stations across the U.S. The resulting mean and standard deviation of the mean of the posterior distribution at each station summarize the inversion results, which are then interpolated onto a regular 0.25°×0.25° grid across the U.S. to define the final 3‐D model. We present arguments that show that the standard deviation of the posterior distribution overestimates the effect of nonsystematic errors in the final model by a factor of 4–5 and identify uncertainties in density and mantle Q as primary potential sources of remaining systematic error in the final model. The model presents a great many newly resolved structural features across the U.S. that require further analysis and dedicated explication. We highlight here low‐velocity anomalies in the upper mantle that underlie the Appalachians with centers of anomalies in northern Georgia, western Virginia, and, most prominently, New England.

Love and Danger on the Underground Railroad: George and Edy Duncan’s Journey to Freedom, 1820

Love and Danger on the Underground RailroadGeorge and Edy Duncan’s Journey to Freedom, 1820 Roy E. Finkenbine (bio) In 1820 fugitives from slavery in the American South began showing up for the first time at harbors such as Sandusky, Cleveland, Fairport, and Ashtabula on the southern shore of Lake Erie. Scores of antiquarian sources from these lake ports provide evidence. Cleveland witnessed its first court case involving runaway slaves in May after the citizens of Hudson forcibly freed two Virginia slaves who had nearly reached the lake and were being returned to bondage. Local people later assisted the runaways in gaining passage to Upper Canada (contemporary Ontario). Trailblazing Underground Railroad historian Wilbur Siebert scoured through local records and memories from these lake ports and found that “runaway slaves were arriving at Painesville in 1820 and embarking from Fairport” and “pioneer settlers of Ashtabula and Ashtabula Harbor were promoting the escape of slaves to Canada by 1820.” Attorney Rush Sloane, who aided many in reaching freedom, noted that “the first runaway slave known as such at Sandusky was there in the fall of the year 1820.” The Kentucky fugitive crossed Ohio on foot, with his master in hot pursuit. Unable to locate his bondsman in Sandusky, the master boarded the steamboat Walk-in-the Water bound for Detroit. Capt. P. Shepard then secretly sailed the slave in another vessel to Fort Malden and liberty on the Canadian side. Ohio’s Lake Erie ports soon [End Page 7] joined the Detroit River and Niagara River frontiers as major crossing points for freedom seekers going to Canada.1 A number of factors made this pioneering exodus possible. Among these, two deserve mention here. First, the advent of steamboats on the lake, beginning with the launch of the Walk-in-the-Water in 1818, made passenger travel between Ohio lake ports and Detroit, Erie, and Black Rock, New York, relatively routine. By the 1820s, sympathetic steamboat captains and crews were helping runaway slaves across Lake Erie. After reaching either Detroit or Black Rock (now part of Buffalo), fugitives crossed easily into Upper Canada. Second, slaves in the Ohio River valley were increasingly aware that they could find freedom in Canada. The 1793 Antislavery Act in Upper Canada placed the province on the road to emancipation. After the War of 1812, veterans returning to their homes in western Virginia and Kentucky brought news about the land of freedom to the north. This circulated quickly through slave communities in the Upper South. John P. Parker, an Underground Railroad worker in Ripley, claimed that “after the War of 1812 every slave knew the north star led to freedom and Canada.” Abolitionist politician Henry Wilson observed that “many of the slaves, catching at these vague items of information, made them the basis of plans of escape …, in entire ignorance of the distance and dangers of the way.” This generalized awareness of Canadian freedom assumed more concrete form after 1819, when John Beverly Robinson, Upper Canada’s attorney general, made it clear to American officials that colonial authorities in the province would oppose any efforts to extradite runaway slaves. “Whatever may have been the condition of the Negroes in the [United States],” he announced, “here they are free—For the enjoyment of all civil rights … and among them the right to personal freedom.” The volume of runaway slaves headed toward Canada expanded exponentially in 1820.2 [End Page 8] Among the first runaway slaves to make the Lake Erie crossing in 1820 were George and Edy Duncan, the property of Samuel Sprigg, common-wealth attorney for western Virginia and a prominent resident of Wheeling. Only seventeen and fourteen years of age, respectively, at the time of their flight, this obscure slave couple displayed the curious mixture of naïveté, courage, and desire that is found most often in the young. Absconding separately from bondage, and reuniting near the end of their journey, they fled Wheeling, crossed the Ohio River, moved through a series of Quaker settlements in east-central Ohio, then two Yankee farmsteads in the Western Reserve, ultimately crossing Lake Erie from Fairport. Most of what can be known about George and Edy’s journey to...

Citizen-General: Jacob Dolson Cox and the Civil War Era by Eugene D. Schmiel (review)

Reviewed by: Citizen-General: Jacob Dolson Cox and the Civil War Era by Eugene D. Schmiel Scott Mackenzie Citizen-General: Jacob Dolson Cox and the Civil War Era. By Eugene D. Schmiel ( Athens: Ohio Univ. Press, 2014. 340 pp. Paper $26.95, isbn 978-0-8214-2083-6.) This is a long overdue biography of an important Civil War commander. Eugene D. Schmiel, a retired foreign service officer, argues that Jacob Dolson Cox’s career exemplified the ideal of the citizen-general. Cox (1828–1900) rose from an Ohio politician and lawyer-turned-general in western Virginia to a competent corps- and army-level commander at Antietam, Atlanta, and Nashville. After the war, he served in state and federal politics, and became a prominent Civil War historian. While this book sat on the shelf for too long before publication to engage with the recent vibrant literature on this subject, it is nonetheless a sound biography of a significant figure. The biography focuses on Cox’s experiences with the stresses of his times. Schmiel begins with his early life, specifically his puritanical upbringing in northeastern Ohio from which he became a “detached intellectual” (11). Cox also adopted antislavery ideology but, Schmiel carefully admits, not immediate abolitionism, at Oberlin College. Once married, Cox began a law career that quickly led him into state politics. A protégé of Salmon P. Chase, he became a Republican as soon as the party began in Ohio. The radical gained sufficient influence that Governor Denison made him head of state militia in 1860. When war began the next year, the young politician found himself commanding thousands of soldiers securing northwestern [End Page 94] Virginia for the Union. Schmiel’s attention to detail pays off here as he takes Cox through his baptism of fire. Though he made mistakes, he adapted well to military life—better than many others, professionals and amateurs alike. Schmiel demonstrates this best with his coverage of Cox as a senior commander. First, he calls his performance at Antietam, where he led an entire wing of the Army of the Potomac, “the most effective citizen-general among the Union forces” (97). Despite this success, Cox spent a frustrating year in the political wilderness. He spends an entire chapter on how the lack of allies kept him without a command, ably demonstrating how political connections worked against him instead of the reverse. Skill, he argues, restored him in the western theater. In the Atlanta Campaign and finally at Franklin and Nashville, Cox proved himself to be an able commander. By the war’s end, Schmiel places his subject as the legendary Roman commander Cincinnatus, the citizen who selflessly assumed public service for the defense of the Republic. The last three chapters of the book deal with Cox’s lengthy and varied postwar career. First, he failed in Ohio. Although his war record and aid from Republican leaders propelled him into the governorship in 1865, Schmiel argues that Cox’s independent streak ruined him within a decade. His weak stance on race and support for President Johnson’s Reconstruction plan ostracized him from his party. Second, the same spirit of independence further hurt him as Grant’s secretary of the interior. Third, his coverage of Cox’s extensive writings on the Civil War constitutes one of the best parts of the book. He wrote reviews, books, and a memoir, the highly regarded Military Reminiscences of the Civil War, until his death. These efforts, aided by the Official Records, gave Cox a chance to speak for the non–West Point generals who saved the country and against Lost Cause–oriented southern works. The book’s main flaw is its age. Originally written in 1968, it says little about the new literature on the Civil War, especially memory. His text mentions “recent historians,” but his endnotes merely list them. This detracts from its overall importance. Citizen-General will rightfully become the standard work on Cox for years to come, but it could have been much more. [End Page 95] Scott Mackenzie Auburn University Copyright © 2016 The Kent State University Press

“Like a Dark Cloud”: Loyalty, Virtue, and War in Western Virginia, 1861–1863

“Like a Dark Cloud”: Loyalty, Virtue, and War in Western Virginia, 1861–1863 Charles R. Welsko In January 1861, a printed circular from Samuel Woods announcing his candidacy to represent Barbour County at the Virginia Secession Convention made its way through the local community. The lawyer, an emigrant to Barbour County twelve years earlier from Maine, had a simple message. The Constitution, that sacred document “made by the patriots and sages of the revolution, to secure equal rights to all the States,” had been “trampled under foot by most of the nonslaveholding States.” From that abuse, predominately stemming from the North’s reluctance to return escaped slaves and prohibiting the extension of slavery from expanding westward, western Virginians, along with the rest of Virginia, had a choice to make. Civil war, he argued, loomed over the nation “like a dark cloud of desolation and national ruin,” compelling Virginia to demand the preservation of her rights. If the federal government failed to maintain those rights through a compromise including amendments to the Constitution preserving states’ rights, Woods asserted it would be necessary for all Virginians to prioritize their “allegiance” to the state of Virginia, abandon the Union, and join the Southern Confederacy. Through this circular, Woods affirmed that his primary loyalty rested with the state of Virginia, over that of the Federal Union. By mid-April 1861, Woods and eighty-seven other Virginians confirmed that interpretation of allegiance by voting to support secession, which pushed the Old Dominion into the Confederacy.1 Woods was not alone in his use of the term loyalty, as competing notions of allegiance dominated the discourses of western Virginians from Lincoln’s election through the creation of West Virginia as the thirty-fifth state in the Union.2 Secessionists and Unionists alike used the idea of loyalty as a means of referencing their relationship to the conflict, as well as a lens through which they viewed their friends, family, allies, enemies, communities, and nation. As Woods foretold, the dark clouds that hovered over America’s future [End Page 45] in the winter and spring of 1861 brought forth a bitter spell of civil war and destruction. For western Virginians, that war brought its own foreboding portents in the form of conflicting allegiances that generated intense and derisive sentiments that hung over the region throughout the war.3 A wide and impressive breadth of scholarship already chronicles much of the interconnected history of secession, unionism, and West Virginia statehood.4 This article seeks not to supplant those narratives but rather to flesh out newer understandings of how, during those events, individuals conceptualized the meaning and nature of loyalty. In any civil war, competing notions of loyalty and treason are common. As William Blair has recently acknowledged, it is difficult not to find mention of treason (and inversely, loyalty) in newspapers or personal correspondences during the war years.5 It should come as no surprise then that examinations of loyalty are nothing new among historians, and regional studies have produced varied approaches to this subject. For scholars of the Civil War North, defending a specific socioeconomic, political, or ethnic subgroup of the population has been a common trend. They argue that such groups (often Northern Democrats or “Copperheads”) were in fact loyal elements of society intentionally misrepresented for political or economic gain.6 Comparatively, in examinations of loyalty in Southern or border states, historians place the focus more on categorizing and explaining the complex factors that drove individuals to support unionism or secessionism.7 Historians of Appalachia and the divided communities in eastern Tennessee, eastern Kentucky, western North Carolina, and western Virginia have similarly stressed the complexity of factors that drove men and women into Unionist or Secessionist camps. For these Appalachian historians, everything from place of birth to partisan background, economic orientation, kinship, and religion have helped explain the loyalty of their subjects.8 Collectively these historians have offered us broad and insightful interpretations of loyalty, astutely explaining how specific parts of the American public experienced or divided along the lines of competing allegiances. Yet, as Blair’s recent study of Northerners’ conceptualizations of treason demonstrates, our discussion of loyalty has room to expand. For western Virginians...

Hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal axis activity is not elevated in a songbird (Junco hyemalis) preparing for migration

During spring, increasing daylengths stimulate gonadal development in migratory birds. However, late-stage reproductive development is typically postponed until migration has been completed. The hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal (HPA) axis regulates the secretion of glucocorticoids, which have been associated with pre-migratory hyperphagia and fattening. The HPA-axis is also known to suppress the hypothalamic–pituitary–gonadal (HPG) axis, suggesting the possibility that final transition into the breeding life history stage may be slowed by glucocorticoids. We hypothesized that greater HPA-axis activity in individuals preparing for migration may foster preparation for migration while simultaneously acting as a “brake” on the development of the HPG-axis. To test this hypothesis, we sampled baseline corticosterone (CORT), stress-induced CORT, and negative feedback efficacy of Dark-eyed Juncos (Junco hyemalis) in an overwintering population that included both migratory (J.h. hyemalis) and resident (J.h. carolinensis) individuals. We predicted that compared to residents, migrants would have higher baseline CORT, higher stress-induced CORT, and weaker negative feedback. Juncos were sampled in western Virginia in early March, which was about 2–4wk before migratory departure for migrants and 4–5wk before first clutch initiation for residents. Contrary to our predictions, we found that migrants had lower baseline and stress-induced CORT and similar negative feedback efficacy compared with residents, which suggests that delayed breeding in migrants is influenced by other physiological mechanisms. Our findings also suggest that baseline CORT is not elevated during pre-migratory fattening, as migrants had lower baseline CORT and were fatter than residents.

Report of First Specimens ofPekania pennanti(Fisher) from Virginia

Abstract Pekania pennanti (Fisher) is believed to have occurred in portions of western Virginia prior to the late 1800s. However, except for fossil remains, no specimen or evidence of this species from Virginia has ever been reported in a museum collection. Here we document recent evidence of Fishers in Virginia from verified photographic records submitted to the Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries and voucher specimens deposited into the Mammal Collection of the Virginia Museum of Natural History. These recently collected and observed Fishers in Virginia are likely dispersers from expanding Fisher populations in western Maryland and eastern West Virginia. This report provides the foundation for future investigations into the distribution and abundance of this species in Virginia.

“Storys, scalping and mohawking”

This work examines an often underappreciated factor in the defeat of General Edward Braddock’s infamous expedition against Fort Duquesne of 1755. This, of course, was the influence of the frontier tales, narratives and other stories (or the ‘rhetoric of fear’) fed to the regular British soldiery by their provincial allies—and indeed the colonial civilian population—as they marched across Western Maryland and Virginia on the long and arduous route to the Monongahela. These frequently exaggerated rumors and tales, evoking what many British colonists considered the almost mystical martial prowess (at least in North America’s backcountry) and merciless brutality of American Indian warriors, large numbers of whom were allied to the French, severely undermined morale among Old World soldiers advancing through what was a foreboding and unfamiliar country. This paper establishes that such literature and stories were factors of far greater significance than is recognized in traditional accounts of the Braddock defeat.

Daydreams and Nightmares: A Virginia Family Faces Secession and War by Brent Tarter (review)

Reviewed by: Daydreams and Nightmares: A Virginia Family Faces Secession and War by Brent Tarter Ken Fones-Wolf Daydreams and Nightmares: A Virginia Family Faces Secession and War. By Brent Tarter. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015. Pp. xi, 147.) Sometimes, the story of a rather mundane family caught in calamitous times can reveal a great deal. Although thousands of historians have looked under seemingly every rock from the Civil War era, a heretofore forgotten cache of letters in the right historian’s hands might still have power to evoke for readers the hopes, fears, and personal contradictions of individuals faced with momentous choices. Such is the case with Brent Tarter’s poignant telling of the stories of George William Berlin and Susan Miranda Holt Berlin. Their experiences during the late antebellum and early years of the Civil War divulge much about West Virginia at its founding as well as the impact that the war would have on families and communities. The Berlins represented the changing nature of western Virginia. George, born in 1824, grew up in Pennsylvania and was briefly a schoolteacher before he and his brother began studying law in Staunton, Virginia, in the 1840s. The two brothers married sisters, building an extended family network that took them and their in-laws over the Allegheny Mountains to the small western Virginia towns of Philippi and Buckhannon, where they prospered as attorneys and land speculators. Like many others who made up the rising “buckskin elite” of northwestern Virginia, Berlin was a Whig in politics who harbored some resentment against the state’s tidewater planters for their undemocratic practices and their control over the state’s purse strings, but not, Tarter notes, because they were slaveholders. In fact, Berlin believed that every “real woman” (by this he meant white female) should have a husband and a slave. When Virginia began to debate secession following the election of Lincoln, Upshur County chose Berlin to represent its strongly pro-Union sentiments at the state convention. For weeks, Berlin voted against secession and advanced western interests on tax and development issues. Then, the clash at Fort Sumter and Lincoln’s call for troops decimated support for remaining in the Union; most northwestern delegates stole away from Richmond under cover of darkness, but Berlin remained. In fact, he changed his vote to support his adopted state and defy the voters who had elected him. Tarter beautifully relates this story through the letters that George and Susan Berlin exchanged in the critical months of 1861–62 when George was [End Page 93] away, first in his role as delegate and later in the new role of pariah. Through these letters a much broader story unfolds. It is the tale of a border region torn between loyalty to a state and a nation, of families and communities ripped apart by those divided loyalties, and of individuals coming to grips with dreams that became nightmares and regrets. For George Berlin, the coming conflict deeply affected his psyche and weighed on him for the remainder of his life. That fateful decision in April of 1861 put his family in jeopardy, strained his close relationship with his brother, and meant that he had to give up all that he had amassed in Buckhannon, including the comfort of a large, extended family. Just two years after the end of the war he also lost his soul mate, Susan, only forty-one years old. Although hardly the typical account of the splintering of Virginia and the nation, this compact book is ideal for use in undergraduate courses seeking to examine the processes of and the personal consequences of secession for noncombatants in a border state. Ken Fones-Wolf West Virginia University Copyright © 2015 West Virginia University Press

Variation in the Microbiota of Ixodes Ticks with Regard to Geography, Species, and Sex.

Ixodes scapularis is the principal vector of Lyme disease on the East Coast and in the upper Midwest regions of the United States, yet the tick is also present in the Southeast, where Lyme disease is absent or rare. A closely related species, I. affinis, also carries the pathogen in the South but does not seem to transmit it to humans. In order to better understand the geographic diversity of the tick, we analyzed the microbiota of 104 adult I. scapularis and 13 adult I. affinis ticks captured in 19 locations in South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, Connecticut, and New York. Initially, ticks from 4 sites were analyzed by 454 pyrosequencing. Subsequently, ticks from these sites plus 15 others were analyzed by sequencing with an Illumina MiSeq machine. By both analyses, the microbiomes of female ticks were significantly less diverse than those of male ticks. The dissimilarity between tick microbiomes increased with distance between sites, and the state in which a tick was collected could be inferred from its microbiota. The genus Rickettsia was prominent in all locations. Borrelia was also present in most locations and was present at especially high levels in one site in western Virginia. In contrast, members of the family Enterobacteriaceae were very common in North Carolina I. scapularis ticks but uncommon in I. scapularis ticks from other sites and in North Carolina I. affinis ticks. These data suggest substantial variations in the Ixodes microbiota in association with geography, species, and sex.

English

Since its 2009 detection in Virginia hibernacula, the fungal pathogen Pseudogymnoascus destructans causing White-nose Syndrome (WNS) has had a marked impact on cave bats locally. From 2008-2013, we documented numeric and physiologic changes in cave bats through fall swarm (FS), early hibernation (EH), and late hibernation (LH) capture and banding surveys at 18 hibernacula in western Virginia. We coupled active surveys with passive biennial winter counts in 2009, 2011, and 2013. We compared individual body mass index (BMI) across years for FS, EH, and LH hibernation to determine if WNS impacts on extant bats would be manifested by changes in body condition (as anecdotally observed elsewhere for WNS-impacted bats) as well as a population reduction. To estimate percent declines in bat presence or relative activity, we used FS capture per-unit-effort data, and the winter hibernacula absolute counts. We captured 4,524 bats of eight species, with species-specific capture success declining by 75-100% post-WNS. Little brown bats (Myotis lucifugus) exhibited the greatest declines in winter hibernacula counts (AVG. = 99.0% decline), followed by tri-colored bats (Perimyotis subflavus; 89.5% decline) and Indiana bats (M. sodalis; 33.5% decline). Graphical analyses of captures-per-trap-hour in FS showed declines for little brown bats, tri-colored bats, and northern long-eared bats (M. septentrionalis), but suggest a modest rebound of Indiana bat numbers. Fall swarm trends in BMI suggested some drops post-WNS exposure, but these trends were not consistent across sexes or seasonal time blocks. Our inconclusive BMI metrics and little brown bat band recapture data suggest little competitive advantage or selection for surviving bats. Lesser (but apparent) declines in Indiana bat numbers mirrors trends seen elsewhere regionally, and band recoveries do show that some individuals are persisting. Additional surveys will determine if bats in Virginia will persist or face extirpation due to presumed low recruitment and survivorship. Key words: Bat, hibernaculum, Pseudogymnoascus destructans, Virginia, white-nose syndrome.

Forming a Middle Class: The Civil War in Kanawha County, West(ern) Virginia 1861–1865

Forming a Middle Class: The Civil War in Kanawha County, West(ern) Virginia 1861–1865

Hydroacoustic and spatial analysis of sediment fluxes and accumulation rates in two Virginia reservoirs, USA.

Watershed sediment fluxes and reservoir sediment accumulation rates were analyzed in two contrasting reservoir systems in central and western Virginia. Lake Pelham, located in the Piedmont geologic province, is a human-impacted reservoir with a watershed dominated by agricultural, residential and industrial land uses. Conversely, Lake Moomaw has a largely undeveloped watershed characterized by very steep slopes and forested land use located in the Valley and Ridge province. The Revised Universal Soil Loss Equation (RUSLE) and sediment delivery ratios (SDRs) were used to estimate soil losses in the two watersheds. Bathymetric and sediment accumulation surveys of the two reservoirs were also conducted using a multi-frequency hydroacoustic surveying system. The RUSLE/SDR erosion model estimates 2150kgha(-1)year(-1) for Lake Pelham and 2720kgha(-1)year(-1) for Lake Moomaw, a 410 and 13% increase from assumed pristine (100% forested) land use for the respective basins. Mean sediment accumulation rates of 1.51 and 0.60cmyear(-1) were estimated from the hydroacoustic survey of Lake Pelham and Lake Moomaw, respectively. Overall, Lake Moomaw has relatively low sediment accumulation rates; however, the reservoir is vulnerable to increases in sediment fluxes with further human development due to the steep slopes and highly erodible colluvial soils that characterize the basin. Higher erosion and sediment accumulation rates in Lake Pelham are most likely reflecting the impact of human development on sedimentation processes, where the loss of vegetal buffers and increase in impervious surfaces exacerbates both the surficial soil losses as well as intrinsic stream sediment production leading to the current annual reservoir capacity loss of 0.4%.

Effects of Management Techniques on Grassland Butterfly Species Composition and Community Structure

Semi-natural grasslands are a crucial habitat for many butterfly species and the structure and extent of that grassland often dictates the composition of butterfly communities on the landscape. To understand effects on butterfly communities, we studied the impacts of different management schemes used to maintain semi-natural grasslands, including mowing every 3 y, mowing annually, and continuous summertime grazing. Transect count data were gathered over the 3 summers (2007–2009) in the Southern Appalachian Mountains of western Virginia and North Carolina. Eleven thousand two hundred and four butterfly individuals of 42 different species were documented over the course of the study. Fields with minimal management, being mowed only once every 3 y, had the largest benefit to butterfly communities. Species richness, abundance, and Shannon diversity was significantly higher in these fields. While abundance was not significantly different between annually mowed fields and grazed fields, mowed fields were significantly higher in richness and diversity. The analysis of habitat specialist species revealed minimally managed and mowed fields were higher in abundance and richness than grazed fields. The response of individual butterfly species also showed negative effects of grazing on habitat specialists. Overall, the results suggest a varying response by different groups of species as well as individual species, indicating multiple management techniques are necessary for conserving a wide range of species. Specific techniques can be used in conservation to target specialist groups of butterflies and rare species.

Measuring empowerment: Developing and validating the Resident Empowerment through Tourism Scale (RETS)

Despite empowerment playing a crucial role in sustainable tourism development, there have yet to be scales developed to measure whether residents perceive themselves as being psychologically, socially, or politically empowered from tourism. To address this gap, the Resident Empowerment through Tourism Scale (RETS) was developed following Churchill's (1979) criteria for scale development. The RETS was purified through a pilot and pretest study before being tested in a three county region of western Virginia, USA. The data were initially analyzed using multiple exploratory factor analyses before being validated through confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). Results of the CFA demonstrated that the RETS displayed construct validity with standardized factor loadings ranging from 0.65 to 0.92 for the three subscales and construct reliability scores ranging from 0.85 to 0.92. The RETS is presented as a scale ready for use to measure the extent to which residents perceive themselves as being empowered or disempowered by tourism.

Development of a Fuzzy Inference Performance Index for Ferrous Drinking Water Pipelines

Accurate prediction of water pipeline structural and functional deterioration plays an essential role in the utility asset management process and capital investment planning. A key to implementing an asset management strategy is a comprehensive understanding of asset condition and performance and how asset condition and performance change over time. The primary objective of this paper is to develop a fuzzy inference performance index for metallic drinking water pipelines. Furthermore, the developed fuzzy inference performance index is applied to the Western Virginia Water Authority (WVWA). Evaluation of the performance index is accomplished through testing of artificial, field, and lab data. Overall, the fuzzy inference performance model was successfully developed to aid in the evaluation of current drinking water infrastructure systems. The fuzzy inference performance model incorporated with an infrastructure management plan will aid in the prioritization of future inspection, repair, rehabilitation, and replacement of water mains.