John “Nolan” Hays

John “Nolan” Hays of Mineral Wells, West Virginia, passed away surrounded by loved ones on Christmas Day, December 25, 2025, in Parkersburg, West Virginia, at the age of 79.

Known as Nolan to his family and many of his friends, as John to most people he met while living in Mineral Wells or through business connections, none of these were as meaningful to him as his titles of Husband, Grandad, Father, Brother, Cousin, and Friend.

Born at home in Gilmer County, West Virginia, on July 31, 1946, to his loving parents, John Newton Hays and Floda “Irene” (Groves) Hays, Nolan had a happy childhood on his family farm where he learned by his parents’ example what was important in life, played with his dogs and work horses (Pat and Mike), and school friends, many of whom he remained close to throughout his long life. He often said that he couldn’t have had better parents, better friends, or a better childhood.

Nolan was the only child of his parents’ marriage and had four older sisters-Viona, Jean, Betty Joe, and Marge. He maintained close and loving relationships with each of them and with their families. Nolan’s friends from his time in Glenville and Mineral Wells also became like family to him, and he loved each of them deeply.

Nolan attended Glenville High School, where he graduated in 1964 as a varsity letterman in football, baseball, and basketball. His friends recall that he was an excellent athlete and a wonderful friend.

From Glenville High, he went on to study at Glenville State College, where he met his extraordinary wife, Patricia Ann Greer.

Nolan made what he would call the best decision of his life when he married his wife, Patricia, on May 4, 1968. Their marriage has been a beautiful example of true love to the family, and their devotion to one another was unparalleled. Nolan and Patricia cared tirelessly for each other and remained devoted through each of life’s triumphs and trials for the entirety of their 57 years of marriage.

Soon after marrying, Nolan enlisted in the United States Army Reserves. He remained proud of his service to his country.

Nolan and Patricia had two sons early in their marriage, Joe and Shawn, of whom he was immensely proud. He was a loving, proud, and devoted father who was actively involved in every aspect of his sons’ lives, providing them with yearly family trips, coaching their sports teams, and being a vocal spectator at their events. Some of his most cherished memories were golfing with his sons, and he often said that a game of golf with them was the best gift he could receive. Joe and Shawn loved, respected, and admired their father deeply and felt that they were the luckiest kids in the world to have him as a father.

Nolan was an equally devoted grandfather to his four adoring granddaughters-Morgan, Caroline, Samantha, and Aniston-who esteem him as the best Grandad who ever walked the earth. He will be remembered by his granddaughters as the smell of cigar smoke, a sunny day on a golf course; as someone who would have died for them, who loved his family fiercely; as the best-dressed man in the room, a master of dry humor, a talented golfer, a gifted storyteller, and one of their best friends.

Nolan had a long and fulfilling career in banking and business. Throughout his career, he worked at various banks and savings & loan establishments; he retired from Williamstown National Bank, where he was senior vice president and served on the board of directors. He was known to give people a chance, to give them the gift of their first home or their own business, when no one else would.

Aside from family and friends, Nolan’s greatest passion was golf. He spent countless hours golfing with friends and even played the legendary course at St. Andrews in Scotland, where he traveled with his wife Patricia and friends. Nolan also loved the beach, where he spent much of his time. He loved to travel, and saw much of the world.

At home, he could be found on the front porch on nice days (when not on the golf course), smoking a cigar and talking to the neighbors who passed by. On game days, he could be found watching the Mountaineers play in his chair on the back porch.

Nolan was amazingly generous, unfailingly brave, and so very kind. He exhorted those he loved to be the very best they could be, and he had the kind of voice that people want to listen to.

Nolan was preceded in death by his parents, John and Irene Hays; his sisters-Viona, Jean, Betty Joe, and Marge; and his brother, Charles Newton, who died in childhood before Nolan was born.

Nolan’s memory is cherished by his peerlessly devoted wife of 57 years, Patricia Ann Hays; his two loving sons, John Joseph Hays and wife Kris (of Clarksburg, West Virginia) and Shawn Patrick Hays and wife Liza Taylor (of Whittier, California); his four adoring granddaughters-Morgan Virginia Hays Riddle, Caroline Olivia Hays, Samantha Jo Hays, and Aniston Patricia Hays Riddle (great-granddaughter); innumerable friends, cherished golfing buddies, and beloved family members; and his pet cat, whom he lovingly called “Pup.”

Nolan was a great man, and his family will carry on his memory and legacy with honor, gratitude, and love.

A Memorial Service will be held Tuesday, December 30, 2025 at 3:00 pm at the Leavitt Funeral Home, Parkersburg with Reverend Chuck Furbee officiating.

Visitation will be Tuesday 1-3pm at the funeral home.

Donations may be made in his memory to House to Homes, 827 7th Street, Parkersburg, WV 26101.

Online condolences may be sent to the family at www.LeavittFuneralHome.com.

West Virginia is now on the frontline of a national shift that most people won’t notice until it shows up in their own bills, water tables or the substation down the road. This goes far beyond the typical Appalachian tragedies people are used to ignoring. Data centers and bitcoin mines are remaking rural America the same way coal once did. They move into weak regulatory terrain, rewrite the rules in their favor, drain the resources that communities rely on and send the value somewhere else. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, 37 states have modified tax codes and regulatory structures specifically to attract data centers, with billions in exemptions granted annually. But the pattern is clearest in West Virginia, where the script is old and the state has lived through every version of it.

There’s a familiar smell to the data center boom in West Virginia. It’s the same old rot that came with coal, but now it’s wired up and rebranded so people can pretend it’s clean. Coal took the hills, the streams, the air and young men’s lungs. You could see the damage from the road. Strip mining leveled ridgelines so flat you could land a plane on them. Slurry ponds sat above towns like loaded guns. Everyone knew what was happening even if they pretended not to.

Data centers are the same kind of extraction, only this time the corporations are hiding them behind fences, nondisclosure agreements and a lot of glossy PR about “upcycling” coal mines and powering the future. Local reporting shows Blockchain Power Corp. bragging about being the first industrial data center in the state, dropping five bitcoin mines into abandoned coal sites at Hazelton, Ben’s Run, Tunnelton, Miracle Run and Blacksville. They pull 107 megawatts of power to keep their specialized computers humming so a global ledger can update itself every ten minutes for people who will never set foot in West Virginia. One hydrocooling site alone sits on 200,000 gallons of water to keep stacks of machines from overheating so someone else’s balance sheet can tick upward. For all that, they employ only 44 people.

Strip mining used to at least throw a few hundred jobs at a county while it hollowed everything else out. Now, West Virginia is trading away water, land, noise and grid capacity for a workforce small enough to fit inside a school bus. 

The sales pitch hasn’t changed since coal. But instead of coal barons in hardhats, there are executives in tech vests talking about “work ethic,” “perfect climate” and how there’s “an abundance of water in the Mon[ogahela River].” They say things like “we lighten the load on residential customers” while they pull megawatts off the same system everyone else is struggling to pay for. 

The new Power Generation and Consumption Act, which was signed into law by Republican Gov. Patrick Morrisey in April, is just strip mining written into energy policy. Morrisey and the West Virginia legislature built a special lane for these projects. Microgrids. Off-grid gas plants. Custom tax structures. Counties get 30% of the tax revenue while the state scoops the rest and the companies get their incentives. Local governments lost almost all power. There is no zoning, noise rules, light ordinances or land-use limits. If a data center wants to roar like a jet engine all night, that’s the deal. It’s the coal playbook, but this time the blast pattern is invisible. Instead of blowing the top off a mountain, you build a gas plant next to a town and run it 24/7 for server racks.

Tucker County is living this right now. A Virginia company wants to construct an off-grid gas plant between the towns of Thomas and Davis to power its own private data complex. People there are asking basic questions: Where is the water coming from? How much noise? What happens to the air? How many jobs, really? How long before they leave? They’re getting redacted permits and shrugs in return. 

Mingo County is considering two more off-grid plants branded as the “Adams Fork Data Center Energy Campus.” Jefferson and Berkeley counties have another complex in the works. Fidelis wants to build in Mason County. 

Data centers can use several million gallons of water a day, the same as a town of 10,000 to 50,000 people. In a lot of places around the country, residents already fight them over wells running low and rivers running hot. Harvard University’s electricity lawyers have already documented what common sense told everyone here a long time ago: When industrial customers demand more power, regular people end up footing the bill.

In coal country, we watched this cycle play out for a century. First came the promises of jobs, prosperity, schools and roads. Then came the exemptions. No local control; the state would handle it. The externalities that never made it into the press releases. Flooded hollers. Black water. Broken roads. Sick workers. 

When the coal gave out, the companies left and the bills stayed. Now data centers are pulling cheap power and water out of the ground and shipping the value out of state in the form of bitcoin, cloud storage, AI training runs and corporate “efficiency.” Instead of company towns, there are company microgrids. Rather than coal dust, you get a constant low-frequency hum and diesel backups.

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The state knows exactly what it’s doing. You don’t strip local governments of zoning, noise control, and land-use authority by accident. It’s a modernized method of extraction. The same agencies that refuse to release unredacted permits are the ones writing the compliance rules. They hold the hearings, take industry testimony and call it public input, even when no one from the public has enough information to challenge what is being approved. The regulatory framework is built around the assumption that these projects must happen and that whatever collateral damage emerges can be managed later or ignored entirely. West Virginians keep being told the state is “open for business,” but what it means is that communities have been positioned as collateral.

There is also a political calculation under all of this. Lawmakers know that most of these sites break ground long before the public even hears about them. By the time residents learn where the water is coming from or how loud the turbines will be, the permitting infrastructure is already locked into place and the tax structure has been negotiated behind closed doors. And that’s the point: The process moves faster than the opposition.If the public wants answers, they are told to wait until the next comment period, by which time the project is too entrenched to stop. 

West Virginians have been told their whole lives that they have to choose between being poor and in the dark, or selling themselves cheap to a jobs number that collapses under scrutiny. Data centers are being presented as permanent fixtures, but the industries they serve are some of the most volatile on earth. 

Bitcoin can collapse in a single bad cycle. Artificial intelligence workloads spike and fall depending on capital flows and investor appetite. Corporate cloud contracts shift between hyperscalers every quarter. When the economics turn, these companies will not hesitate to walk away. A data center stays only as long as it can pull cheap power. When they leave, the economic floor drops out from under the town with no warning. A data center that no longer fits a global balance sheet becomes nothing more than a warehouse full of dead machines and a power hookup the utility still has to maintain.

People in this state carry the outcomes of past booms in their daily lives. School closures came after projections that never held. Heavy industrial traffic tore up rural roads that were never built for that kind of weight, and the counties hit the hardest didn’t have the money or manpower to keep up with the damage. Streams turned chemical when operators left and the cleanup passed to taxpayers. 

None of this fades from memory, and it shapes how every new proposal is received. Any promise of economic renewal is measured against a long record of industries that took what they wanted — and left residents to manage the fallout.

Are you looking to win big? The West Virginia Lottery offers a variety of games if you think it’s your lucky day.

Lottery players in West Virginia can choose from popular national games like the Powerball and Mega Millions, which are available in the vast majority of states. Other games include Lotto America, Daily 3, Daily 4 and Cash 25. 

Big lottery wins around the U.S. include a lucky lottery ticketholder in California who won a $1.27 billion Mega Millions jackpot in December 2024. See more big winners here. And if you do end up cashing a jackpot, here’s what experts say to do first.

Here’s a look at Saturday, Dec. 27, 2025 results for each game:

Winning Powerball numbers from Dec. 27 drawing

05-20-34-39-62, Powerball: 01, Power Play: 2

Check Powerball payouts and previous drawings here.

Winning Lotto America numbers from Dec. 27 drawing

08-10-20-47-50, Star Ball: 04, ASB: 05

Check Lotto America payouts and previous drawings here.

Winning Daily 3 numbers from Dec. 27 drawing

6-4-3

Check Daily 3 payouts and previous drawings here.

Winning Daily 4 numbers from Dec. 27 drawing

5-1-4-7

Check Daily 4 payouts and previous drawings here.

Feeling lucky? Explore the latest lottery news & results

When are the West Virginia Lottery drawings held?

• Powerball: 11 p.m. ET on Monday, Wednesday and Saturday.
• Mega Millions: 10:59 p.m. ET Tuesday and Friday.
• Lotto America: 10:15 p.m. ET on Monday, Wednesday and Saturday.
• Daily 3, 4: 6:59 p.m. ET Monday through Saturday.
• Cash 25: 6:59 p.m. ET Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday.