Allegheny Mountains

Coordinates: 38°41′59″N 79°31′58″W / 38.69972°N 79.53278°W / 38.69972; -79.53278
Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
For the mountains in Antarctica, see Allegheny Mountains (Antarctica).
Allegheny Mountains
Spruce Knob of Spruce Mountain, Pendleton County, West Virginia
Elevation4,863 ft (1,482 m)
Coordinates38°41′59″N 79°31′58″W / 38.69972°N 79.53278°W / 38.69972; -79.53278
Geography
CountryUnited States
StatesPennsylvania, Maryland, West Virginia and Virginia
Alleghenian orogeny
Type of rockSandstone and Quartzite

The Allegheny Mountain Range (/ˌælɪˈɡeɪni/ AL-ig-AY-nee; also spelled Alleghany or Allegany), informally the Alleghenies, is part of the vast Appalachian Mountain Range of the Eastern United States and Canada and posed a significant barrier to land travel in less developed eras. The Allegheny Mountains have a northeast–southwest orientation, running for about 300 miles (480 km) from north-central Pennsylvania, southward through western Maryland and eastern West Virginia.

The Alleghenies comprise the rugged western-central portion of the Appalachians. They rise to approximately 4,862 feet (1,482 m) in northeastern West Virginia. In the east, they are dominated by a high, steep escarpment known as the Allegheny Front. In the west, they slope down into the closely associated Allegheny Plateau, which extends into Ohio and Kentucky. The principal settlements of the Alleghenies are Altoona, State College, and Johnstown, Pennsylvania; and Cumberland, Maryland.

Using the USGS classification of physical geography (physiography), the Allegheny Mountain range is part of the Appalachian Plateau province of the Appalachian Highlands physiographic division.

Etymology

The name is derived from the Allegheny River, which drains only a small portion of the Alleghenies in west-central Pennsylvania. The meaning of the word, which comes from the Lenape (Delaware) Native Americans, is not definitively known but is usually translated as "fine river". The closest approximation which makes sense is some context from the Jesuit Relations [1] showing that Alligeh was one of several accepted renderings of the name of the Erie people among the early 17th century missionaries among the Native peoples throughout the eastern Great Lakes region, along with Rique, Yenresh and Erichronon. The suffix -ni means "of the," in Lenape, despite the irony that geh is also Iroquoian for "of the." So, most likely, Alligehni, or Oligini, would probably be the Lenape name for the original homeland of the Erie people.

The word "Allegheny" was once commonly used to refer to the whole of what are now called the Appalachian Mountains. John Norton used it (spelled variously) around 1810 to refer to the mountains in Tennessee and Georgia.[2] Around the same time, Washington Irving proposed renaming the United States either "Appalachia" or "Alleghania".[3] In 1861, Arnold Henry Guyot published the first systematic geologic study of the whole mountain range.[4] His map labeled the range as the "Alleghanies", but his book was titled On the Appalachian Mountain System. As late as 1867, John Muir—in his book A Thousand Mile Walk to the Gulf—used the word "Alleghanies" in referring to the southern Appalachians.

There was no general agreement about the "Appalachians" versus the "Alleghanies" until the late 19th century.[3]

Geography

See also: List of mountains of the Alleghenies

Extent

From northeast to southwest, the Allegheny Mountains run about 300 miles (480 km). From west to east, at their widest, they are about 100 miles (160 km). [a] When combining the Allegheny Province with the Kanawa Province, they run 400 miles (640 km).

The USGS physiographic classification of all land in the United States lists the Allegheny Mountains as a section within the larger Appalachian Plateau province. [5] It may generally defined to the south by the Allegheny Front, and to the east by the Susquehanna River valley. To the west, the Alleghenies grade down into the dissected Allegheny Plateau. The westernmost ridges are considered to be the Laurel Highlands and Chestnut Ridge in Pennsylvania, and Laurel Mountain and Rich Mountain in West Virginia.

Big Stone Ridge marks the southern extent of the Alleghenies and is an outlier of

Valley and Ridge
physiographic province.

Allegheny Front and Allegheny Highlands

The eastern edge of the Alleghenies is marked by the

New River Gorge and the Blackwater and Cheat Canyons. Thus, about half the precipitation falling on the Alleghenies makes its way west to the Mississippi and half goes east to Chesapeake Bay
and the Atlantic seaboard.

The highest ridges of the Alleghenies are just west of the Front, which has an east/west elevational change of up to 3,000 feet (910 m). Absolute elevations of the Allegheny Highlands reach nearly 5,000 feet (1,500 m), with the highest elevations in the southern part of the range. The highest point in the Allegheny Mountains is

Bald Knob on Back Allegheny Mountain (4,842 ft; 1,476 m), and Mount Porte Crayon (4,770 ft; 1,450 m), all in West Virginia; Dans Mountain (2,898 ft; 883 m) in Maryland, Backbone Mountain (3,360 ft; 1,020 m), the highest point in Maryland; Mount Davis (3,213 ft; 979 m), the highest point in Pennsylvania, and the second highest, Blue Knob
(3,146 ft; 959 m).

Development

There are very few sizable cities in the Alleghenies. The four largest are (in descending order of population):

Corridor H
). This region is still served by a rather sparse secondary highway system and remains considerably lower in population density than surrounding regions.

In the telecommunications field, a unique impediment to development in the central Allegheny region is the United States National Radio Quiet Zone (NRQZ), a large rectangle of land—about 13,000 square miles (34,000 km2)—that straddles the border area of Virginia and West Virginia. Created in 1958 by the Federal Communications Commission, the NRQZ severely restricts all omnidirectional and high-power radio transmissions, although cell phone service is allowed throughout much of the area.

Protected areas

Much of the

wilderness areas, such as the Dolly Sods Wilderness, Laurel Fork Wilderness, and Cranberry Wilderness
in West Virginia.

The mostly completed Allegheny Trail, a project of the West Virginia Scenic Trails Association since 1975, runs the length of the range within West Virginia. The northern terminus is at the Mason–Dixon line and the southern is at the West Virginia-Virginia border on Peters Mountain.[7]

Geology

The bedrock of the Alleghenies is mostly

Appalachian orogeny
.

Because of intense freeze-thaw cycles in the higher Alleghenies, there is little native bedrock exposed in most areas. The ground surface usually rests on a massive jumble of sandstone rocks, with air space between them, that are gradually moving down-slope. The crest of the Allegheny Front is an exception, where high bluffs are often exposed.

The Homestead (Hot Springs, Virginia
; original lodge built 1766).

Ecology

Flora

The High Alleghenies are noted for their forests of

American beech, pine and hickory can also be found. The forests of the entire region are now almost all second- or third-growth forests, the original trees having been removed in the late 19th and (in West Virginia) early 20th centuries. The wild onion known as the ramp (Allium tricoccum
) is also present in the deeper forests.

Certain isolated areas in the High Alleghenies are well known for their open expanses of

ecologic succession
throughout the area have made the region one of enduring interest to botanists.

Fauna

The larger

squirrels and a cave bat. Bobcat, snowshoe hare, wild boar and black bear and coyote are also found in the forests and parks of the Alleghenies. Mink and beaver
are much less often seen.

These mountains and plateau have over 20 species of reptiles represented as lizard, skink, turtle and snake. Some of the

birds of prey
.

The water habitats of the Alleghenies hold 24 families of fish. Amphibian species number about 21, among them

grub worm. Cave crayfish (Cambarus nerterius) live alongside a little over seven dozen cave invertebrates.[8]

History

Pre-contact Native Americans

The indigenous people inhabiting the Allegheny Mountains emerged from the

Late Middle Woodland culture people have been called the Montaine (c. A.D. 500 to 1000) culture.[9][10] Their neighbors, the woodland Buck Garden culture, lived in the western valleys of the central Allegheny range. The Montaine sites extend from the tributaries of the upper Potomac River region south to the New River tributaries. These also were influenced by the earlier Armstrong culture of the more southwestern portions northern sub-range of the Ouasioto (Cumberland) Mountains and by the more easterly Virginia Woodland people. The Late Woodland Montaine were less influenced by Hopewellian trade from Ohio, although similarly polished stone tools have been found among the Montaine sites in the Tygart Valley.[11] Small groups of Montaine people appear to have lingered much beyond their classically defined period in parts of the most mountainous valleys.[12]

The watershed of the

Siouan
territory.

Detail of a French map of 1671. The Alleghenies are in the lower center portion.

In 1669, John Lederer and members of his party became the first Europeans to crest the Blue Ridge Mountains and the first to see the Shenandoah Valley and the Allegheny Mountains beyond.

Native Americans in the 17th century

The proto-historic Alleghenies can be exampled by the earliest journals of the colonists. According to Batts and Fallows' September, 1671 Expedition, they found Mehetan Indians of Mountain "Cherokee-Iroquois" mix on the New River tributaries. This journal does not identify the "Salt Village", but, that the "Mehetan" were associated with these and today thought to be "

Mohawk) on the Riviere de la Ronceverte. The "Kanawha Madonna
" may date from this period or earlier. Where the New River breaks through Peters' Mountain, near Pearisburg Virginia the 1671 journal mentions the "Moketans had formerly lived".

According to a number of early 17th century maps, the Messawomeake or "Mincquas" (Dutch) occupied the northern Allegheny Mountains. The "Shatteras" (an ancient Tutelo) occupied the Ouasioto Mountains and the earliest term

Canaraguy (Kanawhans otherwise Canawest[15]
) on the 1671 French map occupied the southerly Alleghenies. They were associated with the Allegheny "Cherokee" and Eastern Siouan as trade-movers and canoe transporters. The Calicuas, an ancient most northern Cherokee, migrated or was pushed from the Central Ohio Valley onto the north eastern slopes of the Alleghenies of the ancient Messawomeake, Iroquois tradesmen to 1630s Kent Island, by 1710 maps. Sometime before 1712, the Canawest ("Kanawhans"-"Canallaway"-"Canaragay") had moved to the upper Potomac and made a Treaty with the newly established trading post of Fort Conolloway which would become a part of western Maryland during the 1740s.

Trading posts and other settlements

Prior to European exploration and settlement,

warfare.[16] Western Virginia "Cherokee" were reported at Cherokee Falls, today's Valley Falls of the Tygart Valley.[17]
Indian trader Charles Poke's trading post dates from 1731 with the Calicuas of Cherokee Falls still in the region from the previous century.

The "London Scribes" (The Crown's taxation records) vaguely mentions the colonial Alleghenian location of only a few other early colonial trading locations. A general knowledge of these few outposts are more of traditional telling of some local people. However, an example is the "Van Metre" trading house mentioned in an earlier edition of the "Wonderful West Virginia Magazine" being on the South Branches of the upper reaches of the Potomac. Another very early trading house appears on a lower Greenbrier Valley map during the earlier decades of the 18th century.

As early as 1719, new arrivals from Europe began to cross the lower Susquehanna River and settle illegally in defiance of the Board of Property in Pennsylvania, on un-warranted land of the northeastern drainage rivers of the Allegheny Mountains. Several Indian Nations requested the removal of "Maryland Intruders".[18] Some of these moved onward as territory opened up beyond the Alleghenies.

The first permanent European settlers west of the Alleghenies have traditionally been considered to have been two New Englanders: Jacob Marlin and Stephen Sewell, who arrived in the

Greenbrier Valley in 1749. They built a cabin together at what would become Marlinton, West Virginia, but after disputing over religion, Sewell moved into a nearby hollowed-out sycamore tree. In 1751, surveyor John Lewis (father of Andrew Lewis) discovered the pair. Sewell eventually settled on the eastern side of Sewell Mountain, near present-day Rainelle, West Virginia.[19]
They may well have been the first to settle what was then called the "western waters"—i.e., in the regions where streams flowed westward to the Gulf of Mexico rather than eastward to the Atlantic.

First surveys

Fry-Jefferson Map
(1751) prominently features "The Allagany Ridge of Mountains".

Among the first whites to penetrate into the Allegheny Mountains were surveyors attempting to settle a dispute over the extent of lands belonging to either

squatters by the Quit-rent Law. Some had preceded the official surveyors using a "hack on the tree and field of corn" marking land ownership approved by the Virginia Colonial Governor who had to be replaced with Governor John Murray, 4th Earl of Dunmore
.

First roads

A 1775 map of the Allegheny Plateau and Mountain Range.

Trans-Allegheny travel had been facilitated when a military trail—

Braddock expedition four years later.[22]

In addition to the war, hunting and trading with Indians were primary motivations for white movement across the mountains. Permanent white settlement of the northern Alleghenies was facilitated by the explorations and stories of such noted Marylanders as the Indian fighter and trader

British stock.[24]

The Braddock Road was superseded by the

toll houses
placed at regular intervals.

First railroads and canals

Construction on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad began at Baltimore in 1828; the B&O traversed the Alleghenies, changing the economy and society of the Mountains forever. The B&O had reached Martinsburg, (West) Virginia by May 1842, Hancock, (West) Virginia, by June, Cumberland, Maryland, on November 5, 1842, Piedmont, (West) Virginia on July 21, 1851, and Fairmont, (West) Virginia on June 22, 1852. (It finally reached its Ohio River terminus at Wheeling, (West) Virginia on January 1, 1853.)[citation needed]

The Chesapeake and Ohio Canal—also begun in 1828, but at Georgetown—was also a public work of enormous economic and social significance for the Alleghenies. It approached Hancock, Maryland, by 1839. From the beginning, the B&O Railroad and the C&O Canal operated in bitter legal and commercial competition with one another as they vied for rights to the narrow strips of land along the Potomac.[25] When the Canal finally reached Cumberland in 1850, the Railroad had already arrived eight years before.[26] Debt-ridden, the Canal company dropped its plan to continue construction of the next 180 miles (290 km) of the Canal into the Ohio Valley.[27] The company had long realized—especially with the difficult experience of digging the Paw Paw Tunnel—that the original plan of construction over the mountains and all the way down the Youghiogheny River to Pittsburgh was "wildly unrealistic".[28]

Public works financed at the state level were not lacking during this period. The Main Line of Public Works was a railroad and canal system across southern Pennsylvania between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. Built between 1826 and 1834 by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, it included the Philadelphia and Columbia Railroad, the Allegheny Portage Railroad and the Pennsylvania Canal system.

Actual and proposed routes of the C&O Canal through the Alleghenies.

Civil War

Lying astride the border separating the

guerrilla
in nature.

Coal and timber industries

With the further spread of the railroad networks in the 1890s and early 1900s, many new towns developed and thrived in the Alleghenies. The lumbering and coal industries that boomed in the wake of the railroads brought a measure of prosperity to the region, but most of the revenues flowed out of the mountains to the cities of the

captains of industry were headquartered. This inequity created a bitter legacy that would last for generations and form the foundation of the mountaineers' poverty and the area's immense environmental degradation
.

The most momentous disaster to afflict the people of the Alleghenies was the

fault-based regime to strict liability
.

20th century

In the 1920s and '30s, Allegheny highways were extensively paved to provide access for automobiles.

From the 1950s to 1992, the United States government maintained a top secret continuity program known as Project Greek Island at The Greenbrier hotel in the Alleghenies of southern West Virginia.

In August 1963, at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. referenced the Alleghenies—among several in an evocative list of mountains—in his famous "I Have a Dream" speech, when he said "Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania!"[32]

21st century

The Flight 93 National Memorial is located at the site of the crash of United Airlines Flight 93—which was hijacked in the September 11 attacks—in Stonycreek Township, Pennsylvania, about 2 miles (3.2 km) north of Shanksville. The memorial honors the passengers and crew of Flight 93, who stopped Al-Qaeda terrorists from reaching their intended target.

Photo gallery

See also

Notes

  1. ^ Colloquially the Alleghenies encompass what is classified as the Kanawa Province in the USGS physiographical definitions.

References

Citations

  1. ^ Jesuit Relations, 1632-1673
  2. ^ Norton, Major John (1816), The Journal of Major John Norton (Toronto: Champlain Society, Reprinted 1970)
  3. ^ a b Stewart, George R. (1967), Names on the Land, Boston.
  4. ^ Guyot, Arnold, "On the Appalachian Mountain System", American Journal of Science and Arts, Second Series, XXXI, (March 1861), 167-171.
  5. ^ "Physiographic divisions of the conterminous U. S." water.usgs.gov. Retrieved 2023-09-19.
  6. ^ "Big Stone Ridge". 11 October 2018.
  7. ^ Rosier, George L., Compiler, Hiking Guide to the Allegheny Trail, Second edition, West Virginia Scenic Trails Association, Kingwood, W. Va., 1990.
  8. ^ West Virginia DNR - Wildlife Resources, West Virginia Division of Wildlife. and http://lutra.dnr.state.wv.us/cwcp/appendix2.shtm Archived 2008-04-12 at the Wayback Machine
  9. ^ McMichael, WV 1968
  10. ^ Dragoo, Pa 1963
  11. ^ McMichael, Edward V., "Introduction to West Virginia Archeology", 2nd Edition, 1968, West Virginia Archeological Society
  12. ^ McMichael 1968
  13. ^ THE LATE PREHISTORIC COMPONENTS AT THE GODWIN-PORTMAN SITE, 36AL39, abstract RICHARD L. GEORGE. It had several Late Prehistoric occupations. This multicomponent site was destroyed in 1979. The Pennsylvania Archaeologist; Volume 77(1), Spring 2007
  14. ^ "Revisiting the Monongahela Linguistic/Cultural Affiliation Mystery", ABSTRACT by Richard L. George, Pennsylvania Archeology Society.
  15. ^ Council, Pennsylvania Provincial (1852). Minutes of the Provincial Council of Pennsylvania: From the Organization to the Termination of the Proprietary Government. [Mar. 10, 1683-Sept. 27, 1775]. J. Severns.
  16. Tornado, West Virginia
    : Allegheny Vistas; Illustrations by Bill Pitzer, 1982.
  17. ^ Wonderful West Virginia articles "Allegeny" and Wonderfull W. Virginia September 1973, p.30, "Valley Falls Of Old", Walter Balderson
  18. ^ "AN EARLY HISTORY OF HELLAM TOWNSHIP", Kreutz Creek Valley Preservation Society, "History". Archived from the original on October 25, 2009. Retrieved October 25, 2009. (4/28/2009). 2009-10-25.
  19. ^ "e-WV - Marlin and Sewell". www.wvencyclopedia.org. Archived from the original on 6 October 2017. Retrieved 7 May 2018.
  20. ^ Brown, Jr., Stuart E. (1965), Virginia Baron: The Story of Thomas 6th Lord Fairfax, Berryville, Virginia: Chesapeake Book Company, pp 98-99.
  21. ^ The Fairfax Line: Thomas Lewis's Journal of 1746; Footnotes and index by John Wayland, Newmarket, Virginia: The Henkel Press (1925 publication).
  22. ISBN 978-0-06-076185-1
    .
  23. ^ Browning, Meshach (1859), Forty-Four Years of the Life of a Hunter; Being Reminiscences of Meshach Browning, a Maryland Hunter; Roughly Written Down by Himself, Revised and illustrated by E. Stabler. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co.
  24. ^ Leckey, Howard Louis, The Tenmile Country and Its Pioneer Families: A Genealogical History of the Upper Monongahela Valley; Waynesburg Republican, 1950, with index 1977.
  25. ^ Lynch, John A., Justice Douglas, the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal, and Maryland Legal History, University of Baltimore Law Forum 35 (Spring 2005): 104–125
  26. ^ Mackintosh, Barry (1991), C&O Canal: The Making of A Park, Washington, D.C.: National Park Service, Department of the Interior, pg 1.
  27. ^ Hahn, Thomas F. Swiftwater (1984), The Chesapeake & Ohio Canal: Pathway to the Nation's Capital, Metuchen, New Jersey: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., pg 7.
  28. ^ Kytle, Elizabeth (1983), Home on the Canal, Cabin John, MD: Seven Locks Press, pg 61 [Note #10].
  29. ^ Sid Perkins, "Johnstown Flood matched volume of Mississippi River" Archived 2012-09-25 at the Wayback Machine, Science News, Vol.176 #11, 21 November 2009, accessed 14 October 2012
  30. ^ Gibson, Christine. "Our 10 Greatest Natural Disasters". American Heritage (August/September 2006). Archived from the original on December 5, 2010.
  31. ^ "Founder Clara Barton". The American National Red Cross. Archived from the original on 18 January 2015. Retrieved 25 January 2015.
  32. ^ King, Martin Luther Jr. (2020-08-08). "Martin Luther King Jr. | I Have a Dream | delivered 28 August 1963, at the Lincoln Memorial, Washington D.C." American Rhetoric. Retrieved 2020-09-07.

General sources

Folklore

  • McNeill, G.D. (Douglas), The Last Forest, Tales of the Allegheny Woods, n.p., 1940. (Reprinted with preface by Louise McNeill, Pocahontas Communications Cooperative Corporation, Dunmore, W. Va. and McClain Printing Company, Parsons, W. Va, 1989.)

Botany

  • Core, Earl L. (1967), "Wildflowers of the Alleghenies", J. Alleghenies, 4(l):I, 2–4.
  • Core, Earl L. (1943), "Botanizing in the Higher Alleghenies", Sci. Monthly, 57:119-125.

External links

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