New trail will connect Blackwater Falls to Maryland

TUCKER COUNTY, W.Va. – A number of new trails will likely be added between tourism scorching spots within the West Virginia mountains, to assist remodel the realm’s coal heritage into tourism heritage, the Mates of Blackwater introduced Thursday.

The Appalachian Regional Fee will award a $1,226,000 “POWER Grant” to the non-profit Mates of Blackwater for a brand new “Blackwater Loop Path” connecting the cities of Thomas and Davis, Blackwater Falls State Park, and the Monongahela Nationwide Forest.

The 8-mile “Blackwater Loop Path” will join and enhance present trails, construct new segments, and offers new pedestrian/bicycle crossings of the Blackwater River and its tributaries. Along with Thomas and Davis, it would additionally join key hubs of tourism and employment, historic property, and different essential areas, in response to the discharge.

The ARC grant may even help an interstate initiative to create a brand new “West Virginia Mountain Railroad Nationwide Historic Path” between Elkins, West Virginia, and Cumberland, Maryland. The path would join Blackwater to the Broader Potomac Highlands Area, spanning from the Metropolis of Elkins, by Thomas and Davis, as much as Cumberland and to twenty different heritage places in 4 West Virginia counties.

“Appalachia is a area with distinctive downtown communities, vibrant cultural and humanities traditions, and delightful pure property,” stated ARC Federal Co-Chair Gayle Manchin. “I’m excited that this POWER grant to the Mates of Blackwater will assist increase regional tourism, promote outside recreation in Northeast West Virginia and Western Maryland, and bolster partnership between two Appalachian states.”

Blackwater Canyon, a rugged and delightful eight-mile-long gorge carved by the Blackwater River within the Allegheny Mountains, which incorporates Blackwater Falls State Park, is a world-class outside recreation and heritage tourism space.

West Virginia is investing closely in outside recreation and heritage tourism to make up for different dying industries that after saved the state alive. Tourism is now $5 billion sector that’s rising and serving to the state diversify and prosper economically. In keeping with Mates of Blackwater, the Potomac Highlands area the place this mission is targeted produces $317.5 million in whole direct tourism spending yearly and 4,100 jobs, in response to knowledge from 2018.

All alongside this rail hall are the stays of the early industrialization period within the mountains – some crumbling, some standing sturdy. From coal mines and sawmills, to coke oven complexes, pulp mills, leather-based making services; from firm shops and headquarters to firm homes, railroad bridges, tunnels, depots, restore retailers, energy vegetation, and banks.

At present, this hall is a spot of nice magnificence, as nature has healed the scarred industrial panorama and opened up new alternatives for outside recreation and heritage tourism as an essential business, taking the place of mines and mills.