West Virginia is one of those states that tends to fly under most people’s radar. It’s kind of like the Appalachian version of Nebraska. Like most states across Middle America, it has a vibrant culture, great food, world-class outdoor activities, and a complex history. But going back to the 1960s, whenever someone needed to capture images of extreme rural poverty, they always seemed to end-up in the coalfields of West Virginia. Things are changing though. Today, West Virginia is transforming into something dramatically different than what it’s been, and in the process, it’s rediscovering pride. It still has a way to go, particularly with young people. But there’s a lot to build on.
Historically, it can be argued that West Virginia is the only state in the entire country that owes its very existence to the opposition of slavery. Formed in 1863 during the Civil War, settlers who lived west of the Appalachian Mountains and east of the Ohio River empathized with anyone who was kept in servitude. During the colonial period, immigrants to this region were poor indentured servants whose only opportunity for cheap land and a better life lay hundreds of miles away from the Virginia plantations on the coast. The slave-owning tidewater elites there viewed the early Appalachian settlers as undesirable. But the contempt flowed both ways. So, when the Civil War broke out in 1861 and mountaineers had to choose between staying with Virginia or forming a new state, “Western Virginians” chose to break away, stay in the Union, and fight to end slavery.
Later, the Industrial Revolution came to America and coal became an essential commodity that powered America’s rapid expansion. Mines opened, speculators moved in, and small towns across the state were flush with big money. But for the miners themselves, it was almost like a return of indentured servitude. Wages were low and the work was unbelievably dangerous. This gave rise to labor unions and ultimately the “Coal Wars” of the 1920s where thousands of armed miners periodically fought against law enforcement, the National Guard, the Army, and private security companies hired by coal companies.
In 1921, over 10,000 miners fought a nine-day battle against 30,000 police, military, and security personnel at Blair Mountain in Logan County. During the fighting, West Virginia gained the dubious distinction of being the only state in the country whose citizens have been bombed by U.S. government aircraft.[1] When the battle was over, roughly 130 people were dead, with hundreds wounded on both sides. Nine-hundred and eighty-five miners went to jail. Most were paroled by 1925.
The Coal Wars and labor strife created a deep distrust for “outsiders” within the state, and this was used by opportunists in a way that stalled growth and, some would say, instilled a pervasive mediocrity in the culture. Whenever someone wanted to maintain power – whether it benefitted coal companies, politicians, or the unions – they only had to accuse their political opponents of being loyal to ideas and interests from “out of state.” This went on for decades and as coal’s economic power declined, the politics of, “West Virginia versus the out-of-staters” created economic stagnation that led to population decline and a sense that it was okay in life to just get by. In many communities, pride and self-reliance gave way to complete dependency on drugs, anti-poverty programs, and public assistance. No matter how bad things were, the thinking went, they could be worse, so the best option was to always keep your head down and not take chances on a better life.
That was life in West Virginia for much of the last fifty years. People were okay with just treading water. But in 2014, after the federal government implemented draconian environmental regulations, the bottom fell out of an already depressed coal industry. Facing complete economic collapse, the state’s politics and culture started to change.
In 2016, political dynasties that had existed for 80-years were smashed and “expats” who had moved away started coming back to help transform their hometowns. For the first time in a long time, West Virginians in rural communities began reaching for something more, and this trend has grown. Today, many young people here have started to believe there’s a future in these mountains, and business creation is on the rise. As the saying goes, where opportunities are few, sometimes it’s better to create a job than find a job.
The most compelling stories about West Virginia aren’t political or economic. Family ties, optimism, and a sense of opportunity paint a more fundamental picture. That’s where the best Averagist stories are found.
A Simpler Life of Pizza, Beer, and Gourmet Sandwiches
David Bailey was born and raised on Long Island, New York. His step-father owned a pizzeria, and he spent his teenage years working there daydreaming about opening his own place one day. A restaurant-lifer, and in search of adventure, David moved to Utah to work at Solitude Resort where he met his future business partner, Kim Shingledecker. After listening to Kim tell him all about this quaint little town called Fayetteville that had amazing whitewater, no crowds, and was undeveloped compared to other outdoor destinations, he packed up and headed to West Virginia sight unseen.
With a population of just 2,900 people, Fayetteville, West Virginia has been listed as one of the “Top 10 Coolest Small Towns in America.” Adjacent to the New River Gorge, it’s a popular destination for people looking to experience rugged whitewater rafting, rock climbing, hiking, and mountain biking without having to travel out west. Twenty-two percent of the entire population of the United States lives within a day’s drive from Fayetteville, and many who visit see it as an unspoiled example of what an adventure destination should be; small, quaint, and uncrowded. But that’s changing. In 2021, 77,000 acres around the gorge was designated as the New River Gorge National Park and Preserve. Now, Fayetteville is receiving international attention by both travelers and major publications like Conde Nast’s Traveler, the Washington Post, and Outside Magazine.
Named after the 18th century hero of the American Revolution, Marquis de Lafayette, Fayetteville is the county seat of, appropriately enough, Fayette County. It’s a normal rural area and when Bailey first moved there, the entire county had a population of a little over 47,000 people, or 69.6 people per square mile (by comparison, New York City has 27,000 per square mile). When he pulled into town, there were six restaurants, three of which were local fast-food places. Instead of viewing the town as an economic backwater, he immediately recognized that it was an untapped market.
Bailey and Shingledecker wasted no time getting going on the project. They shared a common vision and saw a great opportunity. After developing a basic business plan, they used credit cards to raise $50,000, and opened a pizza and craft beer place that targeted a more upscale experience. The concept wasn’t elitist or exclusive, but it offered unique beers, gourmet pizzas, and a nice sit-down dining experience that was unique to Fayetteville. They called it Pies & Pints. It did very well and in 2009, the team opened a second location about an hour away in Charleston, West Virginia.
As Pies was expanding, David and his now wife Tashia developed another concept for gourmet sandwiches called Secret Sandwich Society and launched it in the same historic building where Pies and Pints got its start. Just two-years later, he sold his ownership in the original Pies and Pints to Shingledecker, the Secret Sandwich Society to Lewis Rhinehart, and moved to Richmond, Virginia to open a second Secret Sandwich Society.
Things were going well in Richmond, but when the COVID pandemic hit, like every other restaurant in America, business came to a grinding halt. Bailey was able to take advantage of the SBA’s Paycheck Protection Program money, pivoted to takeout, and kept going. During the Spring of 2021 things in Richmond got, “a little hectic and uncertain.” David and his wife now had two young sons and they missed West Virginia. The Richmond restaurant was “practically” running itself, they had land that they wanted to build a home on, and the Fayetteville store had burned down the past November. It was definitely time for them to move home.
Since moving back, David has started investing in commercial real estate and is now building a house just outside town. “I really loved Pies when we started and felt the same about Secret Sandwich Society. But by 2020, I was to the point where I didn’t want to worry about whether a server was coming in, or if the produce truck was on time, payroll, lease agreements, or all the other things that consume your life when running a restaurant. I didn’t want to continue working sixty to eighty hours a week. Plus, my wife and I wanted a change of scenery from Richmond. Fayetteville was where we wanted to be. The pace of life is more sustainable. Simplicity is good.”
David Bailey isn’t alone and is part of a trend that has elevated opportunities for West Virginia to rebrand itself. In the post-COVID world, simplicity and quality of life may be the most important factors driving business and career decisions. After being forced to work from home during the lockdowns, younger professionals who spent their early careers in San Francisco, New York, Seattle, or other coastal urban areas realized that they didn’t have to pay $3800 a month for a 1400 square-foot apartment when they could purchase a house twice that size on a two-acre wooded lot in a smaller town and keep their jobs. Economic development officials in states across Middle America are fully aware of this trend and have started programs where they pay the moving expenses of remote workers who want to relocate. A program called Ascend West Virginia has found some success with this approach, particularly among expats who left the state years ago searching for brighter career prospects.
West Virginia, Germany, Silicon Valley, and Taxis
Neil Jorgensen was born into a good family and raised in Summersville, West Virginia. As he grew up, he had to balance his family’s aspirational encouragement with the low expectations of teachers and school guidance counselors in his hometown. After taking one of those inane standard aptitude tests that are assigned significance in the education community, he was told he should become a taxicab driver. But Neil had at least two problems with a career as a commercial mobility facilitator in Summersville; there were no taxi companies and Neil was brilliant at math.
“I knew that I loved math and I was kind of a rebellious student in school, and after school, I would go home and be a nerd. I would learn about Fibonacci sequences, and develop artistic spirals, but that ‘math train’ stopped after high school because no one really told me that I could get a job doing math.”
Neil Jorgensen
But Neil’s family had the resources and vision to help him realize something more than what the school system expected. When he was a junior and senior in high school, they sent him to summer camps at U.C. Berkley and Stanford. He also had the opportunity to travel overseas. This exposure to the outside world showed him that he would need to leave the state after graduation if he wanted something more. He applied to an R1 institution in Germany, Jacobs University Bremen, and was accepted. But even with all his travel experience, he wasn’t prepared for the culture shock.
“The day I got there, they said I had to choose what I wanted to study. I had no idea. I had assumed that, like American universities, my first year would consist of general education courses. That doesn’t happen in Germany. I chose a double major – electrical engineering and computer science (EECS). I was thrown into all very quickly and failed horribly. It was so bad, in fact, that I came back home after the first year and enrolled in West Virginia University, but like Jacobs, I pursued an EECS program and continued to fail miserably. My GPA fell below 2.0.”
Jorgensen started asking himself why he kept going back to engineering? He figured out that what he really liked was the math. So, he pivoted to study theoretical mathematics, and was great at it. He ended up getting his bachelors and master’s degrees. But theoretical math and applied math are viewed differently by employers.
“I started applying for jobs. They all came back with these whopping rejections highlighting the need for a more applied skillset, specifically coding. I got no offers. My fall back was the Ph.D. program at WVU. So, over the next two years, I devoted myself to learning more coding and applied mathematics as I worked on my doctorate.”
In the early spring of 2016, Neil’s resume found its way into the hands of Brad Smith, another West Virginia expat, and CEO of the software company Intuit. Smith connected Neil with the Director of Data at Intuit, and he was quickly on a plane out to Mountain View, California. “It was a whole new world. Intuit is one of Silicon Valley’s most established companies. Its campus is right next to Google and Facebook. It was impossible to not be impressed. During the interview, I practically begged, it was such a great opportunity.”
The same day he landed back home in West Virginia, Neil received a call offering him a temporary internship position. He took the offer in May of 2016, and after attending a 4-month long data science bootcamp in the Bay Area, started full time with Intuit in January 2017. Once he was established in Silicon Valley, Neil viewed his Middle American background as a double-edged sword.
“Not a lot of people take bets on West Virginians. I think that we are often put in the back and have to work a little harder to get to the front of the line. Talent is equally distributed, but opportunity is not. But in rural areas, there’s not a lot of rules and structure compared to urban areas. It’s more like the wild west, and that’s not a bad thing. You have to be a little more gritty, a little more resilient, and there’s substance to that. Ultimately, being from a rural area is a positive rather than a negative.”
Jorgensen worked at Intuit for a little over three years, developed some great skills and contacts, but wanted something a little different. “I realized that I was in Silicon Valley, and I was working for a large tech company that’s been around for 35 years. As I scrolled through LinkedIn, I saw all these people doing startup things and I said to myself, wouldn’t it be great to get in on that and join a really early-stage startup? So, I decided to take that risk and it turned out to be Dote.”
Launched in 2014, Dote is a hybrid social media ecommerce app that is specifically targeted to Generation Z, mostly teenage girls. It’s basically a place where young people can buy outfits and share them with friends and followers. Jorgensen really connected with the people there and it looked like a good fit.
“I remember during the interview process, one of the interviewers was a product manager who used to be a data scientist like myself. He and I really hit it off and we’re still friends today. They ended-up hiring me and it was great. We worked out of a garage in San Francisco.”
Four months later, Dote was in flames.
“There was a bad press story that came out by Buzzfeed. They really took sh– apart. During the summer of 2019, Dote held an event down at [the music festival] Coachella. Long story short, they brought in a bunch of young female influencers to stay at this mansion near the festival. There was an issue with the room assignments, and some of them looked at how the rooms were situated. One of the girls was particularly unhappy and she had a large following on social media and ended up doing a post about it. Buzzfeed caught on and interviewed her. The situation got really distorted. So, after that, all these influencers got going and were like, f— Dote, let’s boycott it. That was the downfall of Dote. Overall, I think there was an oversight by the leadership team and some unfortunate post-blowup reactionary decision making that didn’t fare well for the brand.”
After the company started collapsing, Neil and most of Dote’s other employees were let go. He left with a severance and enough savings to last around four months. But he wasn’t done with the Silicon Valley startup scene. “I had the opportunity to go back to Intuit. But I said to myself that I had only had four months in the startup space. I kinda wanted to continue taking these risks. But this time I wanted a startup that was post-Series A because I wanted to make sure it had a little bit of maturity. I also wanted a startup that had more than one data scientist. I didn’t want to be the only one. I wanted one that had a good tech stack. But most importantly, I wanted one that had a business model that could not be ruined by a Buzzfeed article.”
After applying to 125 different positions, Neil landed at a supply chain startup called Skupos. Its primary business model was to analyze and improve the supply chain between consumer product companies and convenience stores. After starting in October 2019, Neil felt confident he had made the right choice. Things were great. Five months later, COVID crashed everything and he found himself at another Silicon Valley startup that was doing mass layoffs. Even though he made it past the first round of firings, things did not look good.
“The layoffs were very demoralizing. After the first round, the CEO had an all-hands and said, if we have to do this again, we’ll let people know in advance, and we’ll give everyone the option to give up a portion of their salary so that others can stay. Everyone was on board with that. Nobody wants to go through another layoff. We’d be happy to take a whatever percent cut to prevent it. That never happened, and there was a second layoff in October 2020 that impacted mostly sales and recruiting. That was a moment when people really started to say, what the hell?”
In addition to the announced mass layoffs, individually, people were still getting fired and replaced. There were questionable hires and the legacy employees wondered if the new people had even gone through an interview process. Things became very toxic.
“In early 2021, one of my close co-workers, who I had referred to the company a year prior, was unexpectedly fired. I said to myself, to hell with this, I’m out of here. I knew things weren’t getting better and recognized quickly that I was being managed out as it became clear they no longer required my skill set. In essence, I was hired prematurely at their stage of data maturity which was suddenly being re-assessed. At this point I decided to start aggressively interviewing elsewhere while continuing to finish up my projects so that I could (1) save them a severance, and (2) exit gracefully on my own terms.”
One-hundred-plus applications later, Neil soon found a position with the biggest name in early talent career services, Handshake.
“It probably sounds like I’ve had some rough experiences, but the truth is that through all this I’ve grown substantially both personally and professionally, have become more aware of what makes a company resilient, and have strengthened my network with some truly spectacular and talented people. Working in a startup is wild but rewarding. Sometimes there are really tough, people-impacting decisions to be made, and I respect those who have the unfortunate role of making them. It’s never easy for anyone. Most importantly, I think, is that coming out of all this, I’ve crystallized what it is I want, and I’ve learned what it is I don’t want, and that was the real differentiator in making this most recent career choice. I’ve been with Handshake for a year now, and the people here continually surprise me. I’ve never felt more aligned with a company’s vision (democratizing opportunity!). We make a real, positive impact here, and it shows. I’ve never felt so good about my work, my team, or my purpose.”
But even though Neil had built a successful tech career in California, he was also ready to come home to West Virginia. In early 2021, the state launched a talent attraction and retention program call Ascend West Virginia. Basically, it paid successful applicants $12,000 to relocate to specific towns and cities throughout the state. Once learning about it, Neil submitted his application in March 2021. “I began working for Handshake remotely from California in April. I found out I was accepted into the Ascend program in mid-June. We closed on our house in West Virginia June 30th, we moved back the first week of July, and that was it.”
As Neil Jorgensen’s story shows, in spite of the severe economic impact that COVID had on the U.S. economy, ultimately, it has served as a mechanism to motivate young people to come back to West Virginia and other rural states. According to recent U.S. Census data, over the last year, West Virginia has experienced its first net migration in more than a decade. Young people are coming back. Some are even choosing to never leave in the first place.
Coffee and Community
Rusty Isaacs loves coffee. As a student at West Virginia University, he became something of an expert in what constitutes a great cup of the brown, caffeine-filled elixir of the Gods (yes, I like coffee). Whenever he had the opportunity, he would travel around the country looking for the best way to start a new coffee brand in his adopted hometown of Morgantown.
Rusty Isaacs, founder of Mountaineer Roasting Company
“I started working in coffee right out of high school. I was a huge coffee nerd throughout college and got to be friends with people who shared the same interests. So, I spent a lot of time travelling to really good coffee shops in big cities, trying to take ideas from them and open a shop. I just wasn’t sure that it was going to be feasible in West Virginia.”
For his capstone project at WVU, Rusty went down to Nicaragua, stayed at a coffee farm, and created a model for employing effective development methods through the coffee industry as a direct line to some of the poorest parts of the world. It was an eye-opening experience.
After graduation and a brief stint working sales for a beer distributor in Morgantown, he eventually started working for a coffee shop as a barista and front house manager at Octane Coffee. Knowing Rusty’s passion, the owner asked if he wanted to start roasting. “I told him that was a big dream of mine. So, I started a separate company as an independent extension roastery for his clients. I got trained by his people, we bought all the equipment, and got setup.”
But just as Rusty’s company was getting underway, his one and only client, Octane, was bought by another coffee company in Birmingham, Alabama. “We were trying to figure out what we were going to do. My business partner, Doug Vanscoy, basically sat down with me and said, we have all the stuff, are you interested in creating your own brand? I said absolutely. So that’s when we created Mountaineer Roasting Company.”
Having travelled to Washington D.C., Portland, Seattle, Denver, and other places, and seeing other high-end shops, Rusty recognized how successful something like that could be in West Virginia. “We have some great coffee shops, but nothing to the caliber that’s being done in other areas. I wanted to bring some of that into the state. I was obsessed with cafes and opening one, and seeing what was being done in other cities, I thought it wasn’t being done here, so there was an opportunity to do so.”
But Rusty’s mission is much larger than a running a successful coffee shop. He wants to be a company that adds value to the people in the community. “I feel like we’re doing that. In Elkins, you see Big Timber Brewing, Short Story Brewing in Rivesville, and Kinship Goods in Charleston, where if you pulled them out of those communities, you’d feel a void there. I felt there was a void for higher-end coffee, and the community that surrounds that concept in Morgantown. As we grow, having direct relationships with our producers who grow the coffee, vendors, and other local brands, we can tie all these local elements together for the benefit of the larger community. I don’t want us to be some shiny business that plops down here just to make money. We’re here to be part of growing West Virginia. We stayed here to do that. Serving the state is one of my most passionate things.”
Averagism in West Virginia
A few years ago, author and investor J.D. Vance wrote in his book Hillbilly Elegy that no matter where people from Appalachia live, no matter where they go, and no matter how long they stay away, the word home is always associated with where they grew up. Many West Virginian’s say that’s true. For David Bailey, Neil Jorgensen, and Rusty Isaacs, coming back to West Virginia was never a forgone conclusion. Growing up, especially in Bailey’s case, they never thought they’d live and work here after college. But when an opportunity surfaced, they took it. They are perfect examples of normal people who get out of bed each day, work hard, and make their communities better places to live. They are certainly Averagist.
[1] http://expatalachians.com/biplanes-over-blair-calling-in-the-air-force-for-the-mine-wars. There is some dispute as to who operated the aircraft that dropped the bombs. Some say it was flown by the Army Air Corps. Others say it was private aircraft hired by the coal companies. Most agree it was the Army Air Corps.
