How Hard Could It Be? Preservation Bath, Allegheny Mountain Radio, and Forty-Five Years on the Air

How Hard Could It Be? Preservation Bath, Allegheny Mountain Radio, and Forty-Five Years on the Air

By Danny Cardwell · Allegheny Mountain Radio

It rained most of Sunday, a cold, steady October rain. Later that afternoon someone would point out that it was the same kind of weather that started all of this.

None of it kept people home. Preservation Bath’s 2026 Annual Lecture and Awards drew a full house to the Holstein Barn at the Old Dairy in Warm Springs on Sunday, October 11. I spent the afternoon rubbing shoulders with architects, historians, preservationists, and archaeologists. At one point I even bumped into literary greatness when Margo Oxendine and I had an impromptu meeting.

A couple of weeks earlier, Preservation Bath’s president, Peter Fowler, sat down with me in the WCHG studio. He told me that a county with no traffic signals now had three historic districts, and he said it with real pride. On Sunday, he corrected himself upward.

The number, it turns out, is six. Warm Springs and West Warm Springs, Bacova, and Hot Springs carry most of the attention. Douthat State Park, Camp Alkulana, and Camp Mont Shenandoah qualify as well. Add to that 22 individually listed historic properties.

“For a county that has no traffic signals, that has the second-lowest population in the state, to have six historic districts and this many significant properties is a big feather in our cap,” Peter said. “We should be really, really proud of that.”

For full disclosure, I served two three-year terms on the Preservation Bath board. And as you’ll read, I ended up a little closer to this story than I usually get.

Peter walked through what the organization has been doing. Preservation Bath funded the survey of the original terminal at Ingalls Field, a small building from 1932 that had been swallowed by growth for years. It turned out to be in remarkably good shape, and the survey helped get the airfield nominated as a historic site. The organization has also produced a set of prints called the Windows of Bath County, in the spirit of the famous doors of Williamsburg. Each one carries GPS coordinates on the back so you can make a driving tour of it.

There is more coming. Preservation Bath wants historic markers for Hot Springs and for the airport. It plans another round of interpretive panels like the ones already standing in Warm Springs and West Warm Springs. It wants to support the John Wesley Church in West Warm Springs as it becomes a museum. There is talk of an architecture book on Bath County and of restoring old historic trails. And there is the first Ghost Walk through Warm Springs Village, on October 24.

Peter also put in a word for the new overlook trail out to Pinnacle Rock near the airport, with its spring wildflowers and its old Civilian Conservation Corps stonework. Tom Richardson, another Preservation Bath member, spoke up from the audience to add one practical point: you reach the overlook from the Bear Loop Trail, not by walking across the runway. Please don’t walk across the runway.

The lecture itself was introduced by Julie Langan, one of Preservation Bath’s newest board members. Julie is the former director of the Virginia Department of Historic Resources and the organization’s 2024 activist award winner. She started by taking on the fear that comes up every time the words “historic district” get said out loud around here.

Register districts, she explained, do not impose restrictions or obligations on property owners. They are honorific. Districts that do restrict what owners can do are created by local governments, and Bath County has never chosen to do that. What a listing does do is preserve a record.

“Historic districts aren’t anything to fear or be afraid of,” Julie said. “They’re actually powerful educational tools.”

Then she handed the afternoon to the two women who have done most of that recording in Bath County. Debra McClane is an architectural historian who has run her own consulting firm since 2003. Laura Purvis is the principal of Purvis Historic Preservation. Their lecture was called Traces on Spaces: Examining Our Historic Districts’ Hidden Stories. They had been asked to skip what people already knew and share what had surprised them.

Debra started with Warm Springs, the first of the districts, completed in 2018. It covers about 720 acres and 178 contributing resources, and its rambling boundary follows the land. Warm Springs Mountain sits on one side and Little Mountain on the other, with Route 220 and Route 39 running through. What struck her, she said, was that Warm Springs was never planned as a single town. There was once a plan for a town called Bathville, and it never happened. The village grew up in pieces instead: the baths, the residential and commercial stretch along Old Germantown Road, and the mill.

What pulled those pieces into one place was the courthouse. In 1907 the county court moved from its spot across from the bathhouses down to where it sits today. The bank, the school, the post office, and the stores followed. The heart of Warm Springs moved with the court.

Then Debra turned to West Warm Springs. She told the audience this is the part of her job she loves most.

“I really enjoy this when I can highlight or share a part of history or share a story that maybe not everybody knows,” she said. “And then weave it into the larger story. It really gives our history so much texture and depth.”

West Warm Springs was founded in the late nineteenth century by African American families after emancipation. Many of the men and women who worked across the county built their homes there, and the John Wesley Methodist Episcopal Church was among the first buildings they raised. Just down the road, Mount Pisgah Baptist Church still stands 150 years later as a living testament to the African American community that started West Warm Springs.

Debra put a photograph on the screen of Elizabeth Bolden, a seamstress who looked after her own community. She also kept a steady clientele among guests at the Warm Springs hotel and the Homestead, making dresses and doing repairs for the resort trade. Elizabeth Bolden was the great-grandmother of Perlista Henry, a historian and preservationist in her own right.

I’d known about Perlista’s great-grandmother for years, from the oral histories I’ve heard at Piney Grove Baptist and Mount Pisgah Baptist. But it felt good to sit in that barn and hear a woman receive her flowers.

Debra found many entrepreneurs like Elizabeth Bolden in the records, along with a photographer, masons, and craftsmen. These were people whose work holds up a good deal of the county’s history whether or not anyone wrote their names down.

Laura took Bacova, which was listed on the Virginia Landmarks Register in June and on the National Register of Historic Places on October 6. Bacova was a 1920s company town built to feed the timber trade, and Laura followed the money back to Pennsylvania and the oil business. The lumber cut in these mountains went into barrels. Through the whole project she had a hunch that an architect was behind the houses, because so many of them looked too deliberate to be accidents. She couldn’t prove it. Then, near the end of her research, there was an estate sale. Plans for the houses surfaced through the historical society, drawn by a Pennsylvania architect, in variations. That’s the story behind what Peter had told me on air, that a family in Bacova might be living in Variation A, B, or C without ever knowing it.

“You have a gut sense that something is there,” Laura said, “and then you find the documentation.”

The two of them worked Hot Springs together. Its nomination was approved for the state register about a month ago and is now on its way to the National Park Service. Julie said she hoped it would be done by Christmas. Debra described the town’s growth as gradual, and then sudden. In 1891 a syndicate of investors bought the hotel and the surrounding property, and they also owned the railroad. They built a branch line right to the foot of the hotel grounds. Debra showed a photograph from 1893. In it, what would become Main Street is still a field of daisies.

The surprise in Hot Springs was small enough to step over. Walking the district, Laura kept noticing old fire hydrants. They were clearly old, and they were in places that didn’t seem to make sense. Then she found a map with literal dots on it. After the hotel burned in 1901, the owners rebuilt almost immediately. They also built a complete hydrant system, fed by gravity from reservoirs, so the people who had invested in the hotel and the cottages around it could trust that the next fire wouldn’t take everything. Most of those hydrants are still in the ground.

“This little thing, that was literally a dot on the map,” Laura said, “tells a much larger story.”

Before the awards, Peter read a tribute to two of the people who started all this. This year the awards were renamed the McWilliams/Wildasin Preservation Awards, after Janice McWilliams and Michael Wildasin. I had the pleasure of serving on the board with both of them, and I was blessed to call them friends.

The story of Janice is the one about the rain. On a cold October day in 2010, she and her friend Lee Elliott, also a founding member of Friends of the Pools, were caught by a downpour so heavy they couldn’t get out of the car for the lunch they had planned. They had just driven past the Warm Springs Pools, and for the hundredth time they talked about how badly those buildings needed saving. This time, the tribute said, they did more than talk. They decided to start an advocacy group, and Friends of the Pools was born. It would later become Preservation Bath. Janice had been a nurse, a public health worker, and an innkeeper in Vermont and then in Bath County. She is remembered for a line people in that circle still quote.

“How hard could it be?”

As it turned out, very hard indeed. Janice lived to see the Pools’ restoration committed to before she passed in 2019.

Mike Wildasin was at the first meeting. He was a scholar of Virginia’s industrial history, the organization’s wordsmith, and the person people called when something needed thinking through. He served this county on more boards than most of us could list. He died in December. Last summer, when the board went out to see the 1932 terminal at Ingalls Field, Mike wasn’t feeling well, and the tribute noted that his enthusiasm wasn’t affected at all. When Peter finished, Pete Minetree spoke up from the crowd with something few people knew. Mike had quietly and anonymously given $20,000 toward the restoration of St. Luke’s Episcopal Church.

The 2026 Preservation Activist Award went to Mike Wildasin and was accepted on his behalf. The Legacy Preservation Award went to Timmy and Fern Plecker for River Uplands Farm. That property traces back to a 1750 crown grant from King George II and has an 1825 farmhouse at its center. It has become a gathering place for the Bath County Chamber of Commerce’s annual dinner, for a mountain music festival, and for the people on the Millboro side of the mountain.

And the 2026 Heritage Preservation Award went to Allegheny Mountain Radio.

It’s not every day I legitimately get to be part of a story I’m covering. When Preservation Bath read the citation, it named what we do: music programs, community reports, local sports, and emergency information when it counts. It noted that funding cuts have challenged us and that we’ve kept delivering anyway.

“Preservation is far more than saving old buildings,” the citation read, “and we honor AMR for preserving a local cultural and creative voice.”

I accepted the award on behalf of AMR and in honor of Gibbs Kinderman, who couldn’t make it because of the weather. And it got me thinking. I was thinking about covering the event and getting the information to our listeners. But I was also thinking about what this journey has meant, and how the 45 years since AMR’s first broadcast have shaped our region.

Barbara Elliott told the station’s origin story well in the Greenbrier Valley Quarterly. In the late 1970s, a Pocahontas County group formed with help from the West Virginia Humanities Council decided the county needed a radio station. The National Radio Quiet Zone, which protects the Green Bank Observatory, ruled out the FM station the schools had hoped for. Gibbs, who sat on the Humanities Council board, answered with a question:

“What about AM?”

WVMR was the result. By Gibbs’s own laughing admission, its first broadcast went sideways. A planned devotional failed to connect, and listeners heard a country song called “How Many Hearts Have You Broken Today” instead of a prayer. Over the years the network grew. WVLS in Monterey and WCHG here in Hot Springs signed on in 1995, followed by stations in Durbin, Hillsboro, and Marlinton. Chuck Niday’s engineering is what made it possible to work around the Quiet Zone at all.

Standing in that barn with the award in my hands, I couldn’t stop hearing the two questions side by side. “How hard could it be?” and “What about AM?” were asked more than thirty years apart, on opposite sides of the state line. They’re close cousins all the same. Both came from people who looked at something everyone else had written off and decided to try anyway. Both turned out to be harder than anyone imagined. And both are still paying this region back.

I kept coming back to the founders’ original reason for all of it, which was education. They wanted a place where the community could partner with the schools and where young people could come in and learn. For 45 years, we’ve been able to do that. Kids have come through these studios and grown into adults with children of their own. We have a radio club and youth programs, and a volunteer staff that is the reason any of this works. Norris Long has given this station 44 years of volunteer service.

I’ve been with AMR for ten years now. Long before that, I used to hang out in the studio with Jason Rowe during Big Hair Hits of the ’80s. I do somewhere between 55 and 60 interviews a year. Not all of them are with people from these mountains, but I try to make sure every one of them carries something of interest or importance to the people who live here. I served on the Preservation Bath board for six years. It wasn’t because it was popular. It was because it’s important to tell all the stories of our community.

That afternoon I heard Elizabeth Bolden get her due in a room full of people who may not have otherwise heard of her. I learned that the fire hydrants on a hillside in Hot Springs are a promise made after the fire of 1901 and I was reminded how important the station I work for is too our community.

That is what preservation looks like in a place like this. It’s buildings, yes. But it’s also the voices, and the stories, and the stubborn people who decided those things were worth keeping.

Sixteen years after Janice asked her question, the Pools have been restored. Forty-five years after Gibbs asked his, we’re still on the air. How hard could it be? Hard enough to take a community. Worth every bit of it.

I’m going to break a journalistic rule here and say thank you. Thank you to Preservation Bath for acknowledging the rich history and legacy of Allegheny Mountain Radio, and for reminding all of us that the voices of a place are worth keeping too.