West Virginia
Photographer Reimagines The Hawks Nest Tunnel Disaster – West Virginia Public Broadcasting
Hawks Nest Tunnel is a landmark in West Virginia — a place in Fayette County, West Virginia, where much of the New River is diverted through a mountain to generate hydropower before it rejoins the river near Gauley Bridge. It’s also the site of a historic workplace disaster.
The site and its legacy now are the subject of a new photography book. It’s titled Appalachian Ghost: A Photographic Reimagining of the Hawks Nest Tunnel Disaster. It features the photos of Raymond Thompson Jr., an artist, educator, and journalist now based in Austin, Texas. Inside Appalachia host Mason Adams reached out to Thompson to learn more.
Adams: So your book is Appalachian Ghost: A Photographic Reimagining of the Hawks Nest Tunnel Disaster. It was published this spring. For those unfamiliar, can you describe Hawk’s Nest tunnel and what happened there?
Thompson: In West Virginia in the 1930s, there was a construction project to divert the New River, and in that project, they were building a dam to divert the river, and they also were building a powerhouse roughly three-and-a-half miles downstream, and they also were building a tunnel to connect the dam in a powerhouse. To do that, they needed to dig through a mountainside, essentially. While they were digging through the mountainside, they came across a portion of silica rock. Because they were using improper drilling techniques, using dry drills like rock filled with silica, it kicked up a lot of silica dust, and many of the men working in a tunnel would have contracted silicosis. Silicosis, once it gets into your lungs, pretty much just destroys your lungs and you slowly suffocate. It’s thought that roughly there are 5,000 workers in total who worked on the project, and roughly 3,000 of those workers are actually working underground and in the tunnel. A demographer has put the number of potential workers who have died roughly around 764 people, which would make the Hawks Nest disaster one of the worst disasters in US history.
Adams: How did you first become aware of the story of these workers who excavated Hawks Nest tunnel?
Thompson: I was working at West Virginia University for their alumni magazine, and we would often get books from West Virginia University Press to review. My coworker brought me a copy of Muriel Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead, with this intro essay by Catherine Venable Moore. I got to it and began to read it, and I was super fascinated by the story. One thing I forgot to add earlier was that of those 3000 workers, roughly two thirds of the men who worked in the tunnel were African American. When I got this book from my coworker, I was reading Catherine’s essay. I was reading Muriel Rukeyer’s work, which is really fascinating. It’s a book of poetry, but I always think of Muriel Rukeyser as a journalist poet. She went into the field and reported like a reporter would for a typical written piece. Instead of just producing articles, she produced this book of poetry about what happened in the place that, combined with Catherine Venable Moore’s really beautiful essay about navigating the space, just captured my imagination. Maybe a year or a year-and-a-half after that I actually got to meet Katherine and get a tour of Hawks Nest locations, which really, really hooked me to this story. I knew that I wanted to do something to talk about what happened in this space.
Adams: It’s kind of wild. This huge industrial disaster, which is what it is when you look at it from this distance, is forgotten in a lot of circles, but you can see this chain of how the memory has been kept alive, from Muriel Rukeyser collecting poems about some of the tragedy’s victims and how it’s affecting the families in The Book of the Dead,” to Catherine Venable Moore’s further work going there and matching the poems to the area, to now your photography. How does that feel, to build on that chain of work and give more attention to this tragedy that’s been forgotten by so many people?
Thompson: I was totally building on the people who came before me in this work. With my role, I was super fascinated by the visual archive that was surrounding Hawks Nest. I found that when I began just to do a little bit of research into what visually existed around Hawks Nest, and oftentimes I couldn’t find African Americans represented in stories that were out there. I was super curious, like, ‘Where are they in these spaces?” In the visual archive itself, you can see little glimpses, little threads of their existence in the space. I knew that I wanted to start from this point, right? But also, at the same time, this is the beautiful thing about storytelling. It’s a beautiful thing about photography, about arts, about journalism, that it’s all cumulative. We’re all building on each other. None of us is this in vacuums. It takes more than one brick to build a house or wall, you know? And I feel like my project is one brick, along with Catherine’s brick, along with Muriel Rukeyer’s brick, and hopefully many others after me who might take up the story. The book itself is, I call it a “speculative archive,” but like a speculative visual archive. It’s this combination of images that I’ve made, images that I’ve constructed, images that I just found through direct observation of looking at the landscape around Hawks Nest, archival images from the archive, and it’s filled with writing: a couple poems and a lot of historical details about the Hawks Nest tunnel. It almost feels like a collage experience, in some ways, but I feel like this is another way for us to open up what’s possible in our understanding of history, understanding of West Virginia and understanding of Appalachia.
Adams: One thing that just strikes me when I consider your book and Murial Rukeyser’s work is the value of art, not only in helping people process what happened, but in documenting it and tracking the landscape and the human impact outside of official company records.
Thompson: Yeah. Archival records are interesting things, because we often look at them as these primary source documents, as truth in a way, that come from history. But we always have to remember that each archival record was made with a purpose, made by a person behind a record who had a point of view. And if we don’t know what that point of view is, then we have to be very careful with those records when looking at them. Art is one of the ways to look at these records and try to both see the truth of who made it, but then also realize it’s a double-edged sword. It was made for a purpose, but then it could be reused to tell a different story.
Adams: I want to quote a line from Anita Jones Cecil, who’s the granddaughter in one of the families that was involved. This is from Catherine’s essay. Anita says, “”they actively sought people who were poor, who were desperate and uneducated, and shipped them up here. Expendable people. People that nobody would miss.” And that was a descendant of a family of white workers who still received roughly twice as much money as the black workers did. I appreciate photographers for your eyes and what you can see and capture that a lot of us don’t see. So as a photographer and a human being, when you look back on this tragedy, what do you see?
Thompson: It’s an interesting question, because I think almost naturally, we tend to want to focus on the negative. We know a number of lives lost. We know the extraction from the landscape and how the landscape has been changed. We can see the violence. If you’ve ever traveled in that area around Hawks Nest State Park, you have a river and then you have these dries. All the water is gone, which creates another sort of recreational space, but it’s almost like a weird little scab on the earth where water should be. We have all this, the disaster that’s in our face all the time, and the violence that’s in the landscape. For my method and how I’m working, I need to recognize that and embrace that violence in the landscape, but then also find the light. And for me, that light came in just interacting with these archival records, finding these threads of these African American men in the archive, popping them out through my artwork and my process, and taking a picture that initially was meant to document an industrial process — it was never about the people — and popping those men out and making that image about them again so we could remember who they are. And in those images, you can see lives. You can see desires and needs in those images. So for me, that is the light of this. It’s where I find hope, is the that these just weren’t victims, they were people with full lives, and to learn how to look at people with this wider embrace,
Adams: This is emotionally heavy material. It’s hard to read these poems, and to read Catherine’s work and to look at these images, but this work required you to spend lengths of time immersed in that material, in that world. What wisdom do you take away from that work?
Thompson: We live in this super-digital age where we see things through other mediated experiences, whether it’s from the phone or even from a book. For me, it was the importance of actually showing up to the space, and then taking that quiet time to look at something out of our busy digital lives, to pay homage to a space and with these people on your mind. It feels almost religious or spiritual in a way. It’s a way of paying honor to what’s happened in these spaces, even though there’s nothing really in that landscape that points directly at that, or them or their presence, but almost taking time to sense it. It’s almost like an honoring of the ancestors in a way. I think it’s important in our busy digital lives, to slow down and make time to do that.
Courtesy Raymond Thompson Jr.
Adams: What are you working on now? How did this experience change the shape of how you view your photography?
Thompson: Working on Appalachian Ghost required me to use archives in creative ways, to use archives as threads to create a new work. I’m currently applying that technique now, just in a different place. I’m wrapping up a project in North Carolina, where I again use archival records. That’s visual records like archival runaway slave ads, and using the information in those runaway slave ads, and visiting the locations that are mentioned in the ads. When I was working on Appalachian Ghosts, I was looking for ghosts in the landscape. And I’m doing it again in North Carolina — this time using runaway slave ads as my reference and trying to learn how to look at the landscape through their eyes. That project is called, “It’s hard to stop rebels that time travel.” So again, it’s this revisiting of a landscape that has a really, really hard history. One thing that’s different this time is that my family has roots in these locations that I’m working currently. So I did take a much more personal look at the archive in a space where I have blood connections to the land.
ST. MARYS, W.Va. (WTAP) – The Battle Against Cystic Fibrosis football game is almost here.
Six West Virginia cheerleaders were picked to cheer during the football game.
These girls are representing St. Marys High School, Tyler Consolidated High School, and Wirt County High School.
They have all graduated and will be cheering for the last time.
Savannah Keife from St. Marys said she is excited to cheer at the game.
“Being able to cheer one last time. It’s just I didn’t think it would happen, so I’m so very glad it’s happening, and I think everyone should come out Friday night and at least come here to support, like the football players and the cheerleaders and everyone’s who got everyone who is battling cystic fibrosis. And if you can’t do anything else, at least be here to support the game,” said Keife.
Their coach, Becca Mathews, is familiar with Battle Against Cystic Fibrosis.
She performed as a cheerleader in 2019 with girls from West Virginia and Ohio.
Mathews said it will be a night to remember.
“It’s a great feeling. I personally cheered this event myself and it’s one of my favorite memories as a cheerleader, so I know it’s gonna be one of theirs. It’s a great feeling just coming out one last time and just to coach it is amazing,” said Mathews.
All of the proceeds from the game will go towards Cystic Fibrosis research and helping local families affected by Cystic Fibrosis.
Ava Mongold from Tyler Consolidated said she is excited to support a good cause.
“It’s just an honor, honestly, all of us being here and supporting it. It just makes me feel good. Makes others with this diagnosis probably feel good too, and just help everyone out,” said Mongold.
Kickoff is at 7 p.m. at St. Marys High School’s football stadium.
See an error in our reporting? Send us an email by clicking here!
Copyright 2025 WTAP. All rights reserved.
West Virginia
Utility player Armani Guzman leads West Virginia into 2nd straight NCAA super regional
When West Virginia hit its lowest point of the season, utility player Armani Guzman was just getting started.
A blowout loss to Arizona in the Big 12 tournament semifinals sent regular-season champion West Virginia to its ninth loss in 13 games — a momentum-killing stretch at the worst possible time heading into the NCAA tournament.
Nearly forgotten from that game was a pair of late singles by Guzman in a pinch-hitting role. First-year coach Steve Sabins noticed, promoting the sophomore to a starting spot in the regional.
It was the spark the Mountaineers sorely needed.
Batting last in the lineup, Guzman went 8 for 12 with six RBIs in three games and was named regional MVP. The Mountaineers (44-14) beat host Clemson once and Kentucky twice to advance to their second straight super regional starting Saturday at No. 6 national seed LSU (46-15).
“I bet there’s never been a nine-hole hitter been a tournament MVP,” Sabins said. “What he did was epic.”
Guzman had shown a flash of stardom earlier this season. In an April 1 game at Ohio State, he reached over the right-field wall to take away a home run, then threw out a runner at first base for a double play. He is West Virginia’s third-best hitter with a .337 average and leads the Mountaineers with 16 stolen bases.
West Virginia catcher Logan Sauve, left, fist bumps Griffin Kirn (54) during an NCAA regional college baseball game against Kentucky, May 30, 2025, in Clemson, S.C. Credit: AP/Sean Rayford
But from April 11 to May 22, Guzman was used sparingly as a defensive replacement and went just 1 for 8 at the plate.
Guzman stayed patient until his turn came up again.
“His mentality has been so spot on,” Sabins said. “You want to talk about a confident guy that’s not arrogant. He is in such a strong place competing right now that he knows he’ll have success.”
Making his first start in nearly a month, Guzman hit a walk-off sacrifice fly in the ninth inning of a 4-3 win over Kentucky in the regional opener. In the clinching 13-12 win over the Wildcats on Sunday, the Mountaineers overcame deficits of 6-1 and 12-7. Guzman went 4 for 5 and his single in the eighth inning drove in the go-ahead run.
West Virginia infielder Ben Lumsden warms up before an NCAA regional college baseball game against Kentucky, May 30, 2025, in Clemson, S.C. Credit: AP/Sean Rayford
“I was a guy who didn’t play the last month and a half, and I’m here in this position,” he said. “I think it’s a big confidence boost to each guy. The confidence that we have in each other is huge.”
Being used on defense in the outfield and at third base while often being inserted as a pinch hitter during the season, “I just try to be an athlete,” Guzman said. “Sabs talks about it all the time. His job is to place us where he thinks we best fit. My job is to play the game. So that’s all I do.”
Clutch all around
As good as Guzman played, West Virginia needed all the gutsy individual performances it could get in the regional.
“That’s just the type of group we are,” said catcher Logan Sauve, who went 5 for 15 in the series. “We all stuck for each other and played for each other and wished for the kid behind us to do better than what we just did.”
Griffin Kirn threw 117 pitches over seven innings in the opener, then returned two days later to pitch the ninth inning in relief and earn the save in the clinching win.
Utility player Ben Lumsden, a starter a year ago who managed just four hits previously this season, started in place of veteran Grant Hussey at first base and had a breakout series in his home state with three hits and five RBIs.
Lumsden and Guzman “bought into the fact that regardless of results, the only path forward is to work,” Sabins said.
Getting refocused
As a rookie head coach, Sabins, who took over for the retired Randy Mazey, saw new experiences throughout the season.
West Virginia opened with 13 straight wins, captured its first outright Big 12 regular-season championship and set a school record for wins.
But the final month of the season, when the losses were piling up, was mystifying. So team and individual meetings were held. Videos were reviewed. Highlight films were emphasized.
“We threw things into a fire and started over,” Sabins said.
He even tried to figure out different ways to conduct practices.
“You try to keep it light and intense at the same time, and you try to push the right buttons every step of the way,” Sabins said.
Road confidence
West Virginia’s 24-5 road record is the best among teams in the super regionals.
At Clemson, the visitors’ bullpen is pinned in the left-field corner just a feet away from fans, and West Virginia’s pitchers heard relentless banter from the stands.
“I was thankful we played at Clemson because I thought that environment at Clemson was loud and pretty raucous,” Sabins said. “You had those kids in the bullpen that were like touching our guys warming up. So I think our guys will be prepared in that avenue.
“Our team will go into anybody that we play for the remainder of the season believing that we can win the game if we play good baseball.”
West Virginia
This underrated vacation state has whitewater rafting, hiking trails, skiing and much more
Fans watch live of bald eagle couple’s hatching journey
Scout and Bella, a bald eagle couple from West Virginia, are hopeful this year will be different from last year’s unsuccessful breeding season.
- West Virginia offers affordable and accessible outdoor activities for families, including hiking, biking, whitewater rafting and rock climbing.
- The New River Gorge is a popular destination, with various lodging options ranging from camping to hotels.
- West Virginia is a four-season destination, offering activities like skiing and viewing fall foliage in addition to warm-weather adventures.
“Family Travel” is a five-part series showcasing the best experiences and destinations for young families looking for an escape. If you’d like to contribute to our future reporting and share your experience as a source, you can click here to fill out this quick form.
OAK HILL, West Virginia ‒ Extreme sports like whitewater rafting and rock climbing may seem like something best left to adults, but in West Virginia’s New River Gorge, outdoor adventure can easily be an activity for the whole family.
Guided excursions can be tailored to everyone’s skill level and ability for those who want to go all-out, but there are less-extreme ways to get in touch with nature along one of the world’s oldest rivers, too.
Here are just some of the reasons West Virginia should be on your list if you’re looking for a family-friendly outdoor vacation.
Why West Virginia is a great place for family outdoor adventure
Affordability and accessibility are two of the big benefits to getting outside in West Virginia.
Hiking and biking trails in state and national parks are free to access for everyone who visits the state, but even for more intense guided excursions, the prices are a good deal. (There is also an entry fee for Harpers Ferry National Historic Park.)
“We’re definitely one of the most affordable destinations,” Lindsey Funk, a public relations assistant at West Virginia Department of Tourism told USA TODAY on a recent visit. “Hiking is probably one of our most family-friendly activities.”
Funk said there are plenty of short hikes, like the Endless Wall trail, which can be done in just a few hours, though guides are available for hire as well.
For more intense activities like whitewater rafting and rock climbing, families may prefer to hire a guide to keep things safe.
“With a lot of those guided trips, like, in the Gorge specifically, you can kind of tailor it,” she said. “There’s a family-friendly option that’s more of afloat, and then there’s a more intense trip for more experienced people.”
ACE Adventure Resort is one of the guide outfitters, and charges $99 per adult for a full-day guided family trip with rapids up to Class III on the New River. On that excursion, kids ages 6-11 go for free (one per full-fare adult), and youths ages 12 and up are charged $79.99.
For comparison, the Colorado Rafting Company charges $159 per person for a full-day guided excursion on the Colorado River.
Pricier and more intense excursions are also available. Depending on conditions, rapids in some sections of the New River can hit Class IV or higher.
West Virginia is also home to professional circuit bike races and other events, which Funk said attracts spectators and encourages more families to try outdoor activities.
Where to go
Outdoor adventures in West Virginia are available in many parts of the state, but the New River Gorge is certainly among the biggest draws with the most options for activities.
Charleston, the state capital, is about an hour north of the National Park there, and other cities closer to the park include Fayetteville, Beckley and Hinton.
Where to stay and how to get there
The closest major airport to the New River Gorge is in Charleston, WV. Amtrak also serves the area, and of course, cruising the country roads is an option as well.
Funk said that families should think about what their lodging priorities are when they book, because there are options at all different price points from traditional tent camping to boutique hotels. Because the Gorge is so accessible from Charleston, staying in the city is a viable option, too.
“The thing would be families to decide what they want their lodging to be like. If they’re wanting more of a remote cabin, then staying in in the Gorge is best. Whereas if they want more of these city options, they could stay (in Charleston) and just go to the Gorge for a day trip.”
Four seasons of outdoor fun
Funk said that outdoor adventures aren’t limited to the warmer weather months in West Virginia, either.
“The seasons is a big thing that we appreciate here and is interesting to a lot of other people that we are a four season destination,” she said. “We have beautiful fall foliage, but then we have ski resorts and snow in the winter, so people can try out a season-specific activity if they want to.”
This story was updated to refresh headlines.
The reporter on this story received access from West Virginia’s Department of Tourism. USA TODAY maintains editorial control of content.
Zach Wichter is a travel reporter and writes the Cruising Altitude column for USA TODAY. He is based in New York and you can reach him at zwichter@usatoday.com.
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