Appalachia Hopes Cultural Heritage Map Boosts Region's Tourism

by Raju Chebium

Huntington Herald-Dispatch, March 15, 2005

The Appalachian Regional Commission is promoting … Appalachian sites to a worldwide audience …

The agency paid the National Geographic Society $180,000 to create the map* and a website listing 356 sites of historic, cultural or natural interest. The map is online soon was inserted in the April issue of National Geographic Traveler magazine.

The idea of the map is to introduce tourists to the historic, cultural and natural beauty of the 13-state region, and pump much-needed tourism dollars into one of the nation’s poorest areas.

The magazine, one of the most popular in the world, gets 5 million to 7 million hits on its web site each month and is read by about 4 million people…

Janet Fout, co-director of the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition in Huntington, called the partnership with National Geographic a good investment because it seeks to promote ecologically friendly businesses.

“It is unfortunate that we have invested money in extractive industries that destroy the beauty of this state,” she said, referring to the coal companies. “If you look at the numbers, tourism is the number one growing industry in the state. This is long overdue.”

* Ed. Note: A National Geographic Traveler editor, after reading her essay in The Appalachians, invited OVEC’s Vivian Stockman to write a word blurb for the map. Her submission:

“This ancient landscape tells the observant traveler its myriad stories. Gurgling trout brooks and raging whitewater boast of their role in carving hollows and plateaus from the region’s mountains, formed during three orogenies beginning 480 million years ago in the Paleozoic Era. Near the water, a Wood Thrush hidden in a Spicebush sings of the web of life. Densely tangled with over 1,000 different species of mosses, lichens, ferns, wildflowers, herbs, shrubs and trees, mountains once as tall as the Rockies rise away from the streams. This is the mixed mesophytic forest – the most biologically diverse temperate hardwood forest on Earth – shouting its fecundity in a profusion of oaks, hickories, beech, poplar, basswood and black cherry. Above 4,000 feet, the hardwoods give way to spruce and fir, whispering of forests usually found much farther north. These peaks and valleys of Appalachia helped to create a people who speak of ‘homeplaces’ because, here, home encompasses the sheltering landscape.”