West Virginia Map 1935 Pictorial Print - Charleston, Appalachian Mountains, Huntington

Rugged, mountainous terrain and the coal industry define West Virginia's page in Our U.S.A. A Gay Geography, with miners and mining scenes spread across the map alongside Charleston drawn as the state's urban center, its buildings and industrial activity marking it out from the surrounding hills. Little, Brown and Company of Boston published this 1935 pictorial atlas with text by Frank J. Taylor and illustrations by Ruth Taylor White, who trained at the Pratt Institute of Art and the Art Students League and gave each state one crowded illustrated page. West Virginia sits within the central Appalachian Mountains, and in 1935 its economy depended almost entirely on coal mining and farming, industries that had been hit hard by falling demand during the Depression, leaving many of its mountain counties among the hardest pressed in the entire atlas.

Charleston is illustrated with buildings and industrial scenes that mark it as the state's principal city, set against the exaggerated mountain topography drawn across the rest of the page. Coal mining dominates the map's imagery, with miners and mining equipment placed throughout to reflect the industry's central role in the state's economy. Agriculture appears in smaller scenes alongside crops and livestock, a quieter counterpart to the coalfields. Town names and geographic regions are labeled with small accompanying drawings that add local detail, giving even the state's smaller hollows and valleys a place on the page. The page itself was produced by lithography, the process behind the atlas's crisp color blocks. Overall it reads as a portrait of a mountain state built on coal.

Family roots in the coalfields or the Appalachian hill towns make the case for this one, and so does having left Charleston or the mountains while still calling the state home, or working as a collector through this 1935 series one state at a time. Its illustrated, period style gives West Virginia's rugged landscape and mining history real decorative character, distinct from the plainer survey maps of the same era and a fitting complement to a print of a neighboring Appalachian state. It is available unframed in a range of sizes, from a small study print to a larger piece for an office or den wall.