12-14-05 - North America — United States, West Virginia
Most Endangered Historic Places list created to secure dozens of sites
"
Weathered as gray as the leafless trees that surround it, the ghostly, 21/2-story frame of St. John’s Baptist Church rises from the steep hillside at the south end of the mostly abandoned former coal community of Stotesbury Camp.
The church was built in 1918 by the E.E. White Coal Co. A large segment of the black population in the Raleigh County coalfields surrounding Stotesbury once passed through its doors and gathered under the shade trees surrounding it.
Many former parishioners are buried in a cemetery behind the church, their names, birth dates, and dates of death chiseled on mossy, locally quarried sandstone markers. These days, the church’s only visitors are wind, rain, snow and the occasional vandal. St. John’s was abandoned in the early 1980s, when area coal mines played out and most of the church’s congregation moved to Beckley.
It is in danger of going the way of Mark Twain High School, located less than a mile up the hollow, where Robert C. Byrd was valedictorian of the Class of 1934. Today, only a staircase leading to the vacant site of the former school remains. "
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Directory of cultural resource and historic preservation firms.
William Self Associates, Inc. WSA is a 20-year old full-service CRM firm working in the Far West, Southwest, Intermountain West and adjoining states with offices in San Francisco area and Tucson, Arizona.
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SWCA SWCA is one of the largest environmental consulting companies with a focus solely on environmental consulting. Our employee-owned company of cultural and natural resource experts, and planners works for clients in both the public and private sectors.
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11-21-07
Daly & Associates Qualified Architectural Historian with Master of Science degree in Historic Preservation.
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