By Gary Lee Stuber
Elkhurst residents across the Elkhurst Bridge from the end of Blue Knob Road have had an access problem since the old wood-decked suspension bridge was closed on March 5, 2005. This closure forced residents either up across Beechy Road and down into Indore at Osborne Fork, or to drive down the railroad access to Hartland. The track had been pulled up but many railroad ties were still embedded in the right-of-way and a brave driver was as liable to get a flat from a railroad spike as he was a rusty nail or stone.
In the summer of 2008, in a lease deal between the DOH and Bright of America, the DOH obtained a two-year lease while they built a new bridge. They paved that road all the way into Elkhurst, put up guard rail, and ditched the banks. But after the new bridge was not built, the DOH gave up the lease and residents were pretty much on their own after that. No maintenance meant the road developed potholes pretty quickly but the flood of 2106 got FEMA involved in making repairs to area slips. But with Governor Jim Justice’s State Park plan in 2019 to turn the Elk River Railroad right-of-way from Burnsville to near Charleston into a state park, all bets were off. Some residents including Chris Cash and Mike Schoonover in 2022 and 2023 tried to fill in all the emerging pot holes with gravel, two rough winters turned the surface of the 3.2 miles of road into the surface of the moon.
This changed this year when Rocky Boggs, a resident of Beechy Road who often uses Hartland Road to get out of the holler, wrote a letter to the editor of this newspaper. It asked residents to call on the governor to encourage him to fix the access road in to Elkhurst. This precipitated a meeting between the Governor, the heads of the DOH, and Frank Jorgensen who represented Bright of America, to sit down in a meeting and work out a deal. One that would benefit the emerging state park, residents of Elkhurst, the DOH and residents of this county.
Jake Bumgarner, P.E., Chief Engineer of Special Programs, provided the following statement, “WVDOH reclaimed Hartland Road near Elkhurst. The road previously had broken and rough asphalt. District 1 crews used an asphalt zipper that grinded the asphalt and made it into a workable, gravel road type surface. The work was allowed to occur following WVDOH and Elk River Railroad agreeing to give the right of way of the rail bed from where Clay County Route 16/25 ends within the rail bed to where Clay County Route 22 crosses the rail bed. That allowed WVDOH to extend Clay County Route 16/25 approximately two miles, allowing for shared use of the right of way for public travel by vehicle and use by those utilizing the rest of the trail system on the old rail bed.”
Chad Boggs, a Clay County resident and District One DOH loader operator on the site as the work was being done, said, “I was called into a meeting and the next thing I knew we were moving equipment to this location.”
Dave Ramsey operated the “grinder” that lifts, and grinds one lane at a time. And Jack Shafstall used a heavy roller to mash it back down. An unidentified DOH dump truck operator brought loads of gravel, smoothed down by Chad and rolled down by Jack, and within three days the road was like new again. After finishing this road, they started at the end of the railroad bridge at Amandaland Lane and completed the grinding on the original state road portion of the road, another mile out to Route 16.
When he understood that photos of him might be printed in the Free Press, Jack pulled off his glove and showed me a hand with three finger tips that had been cut off some years earlier. “Years ago I worked at the Free Press on a small printer. I saw the ink building up on my roller and thought I could keep it from rolling over on the paper and I made a mistake.” He is from Clay County too. Small world.
The action places the section of old railroad right-of-way clearly in the possession of the state of West Virginia. “It can NEVER go back to being a railroad,” Frank Jorgenson confirmed. As part of the State Department of Highways property, they have the legal right to use it for dual access, allowing hikers, bikers, horses and residents all to share the road. There will have to be speed limit signs put up, for travel no faster than 20 MPH, for the safety of bikers, hikers and horses sharing space with vehicles. There are no blind spots in the roadway, no hard and fast curves that people and animals cannot be seen from a good distance allowing for speeds no greater than 20 MPH.
Now, if we could just make a deal to spare the historic Elkhurst Bridge before it is too late.
