William Stanek's The Living New River Gorge Biography
River, Coal, and the Reinvention of an Appalachian Gorge

The river made the gorge. Coal and railroads made another landscape inside it. Communities formed along steep slopes and narrow corridors where industry could reach resources hidden in the Appalachian terrain. Mines opened. Rail lines followed the river. Towns grew, changed, and in many places disappeared. William Stanek's The Living New River Gorge Biography follows river, stone, forest, Indigenous presence, settlement, coal, railroads, labor, industrial decline, recreation, conservation, and the transformation of a working gorge into one of America's newest national parks. The wild and industrial stories are not opposites. They occupy the same ground. This is the biography of a gorge repeatedly reinvented by water, work, abandonment, memory, and return.