By Jody Brumage
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For over a century, West Virginia’s sport fishing industry has been supported by federal and state administered hatcheries. We detailed the history of some of these hatcheries in a blog from June 2015. In this week’s Post from the Archives, we are examining the effort to save one of the state’s largest hatcheries in the mid-1990s. 

Bowden Fish Hatchery is located along the Shavers Fork River in Randolph County, just a few miles outside of the city of Elkins. Established in 1958 by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the hatchery was built in the early 1960s. Senator Byrd visited the site shortly after construction was completed. At the time, Bowden was the third federal hatchery built in the state after White Sulphur Springs in Greenbrier County and Leetown in Jefferson County. 

In our last Post from the Archives, we examined the short-lived West Virginian rail line operated by Amtrak in West Virginia’s north-central region from 1971 to 1973. This week, we will explore two additional rail lines championed by Senator Robert C. Byrd in the attempt to save passenger rail access in West Virginia.
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Just one year after Amtrak announced that it would suspend service on the West Virginian line, West Virginia’s congressional delegation turned their attention to preserving passenger rail service in the southern region of the state. The mountainous terrain of this region made it even more isolated than northern or eastern West Virginia, strengthening the case for maintaining access to passenger service via the railroad lines which had bisected this area for over a century. Two main lines historically served this region: the Chesapeake and Ohio to the north and the Norfolk and Western to the south.

In 1971, the National Railroad Passenger Corporation, better known by its operational name, Amtrak, was created to use federal funding to aid declining passenger rail service throughout the United States. For West Virginia, one of the railroad lines incorporated into the new Amtrak system was the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad which traversed the eastern panhandle and northern regions of the state. However, when Amtrak’s operation of this line began in the spring of 1971, service west of Martinsburg (located in the eastern panhandle of the state) was discontinued.